Green Options » mass

This Bus Bike Rack Rap Rocks

Rhonda Winter — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:11:36 +0000

My happy transportation moment of the week came when I stumbled across this most excellent song on the Muni Diaries. The rap was created for the Transit Authority of River City in Louisville, Kentucky to explain how to use the bike racks on their buses. The infectious chorus has been stuck in my head all week: “Bring it down, pull the bar, put it on, put it on, take it off, put it up when you’re done, then you’re done…”

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Riding on the Bus

Rhonda Winter — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:31:48 +0000

Streetfilms recently created a poignant and inspiring profile of Seattle PI blogger Carla Saulter, also known as “Bus Chick“. Carla writes about her transit experiences riding everywhere on the bus with her daughter Rosa (named after Rosa Parks) and her husband, Adam; Carla actually met her husband while they were both riding on the same bus together. This short film by Clarence Eckerson Jr. shows just how easy and enjoyable it can be to live without a car, and the many added benefits of riding on mass transit.

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An Ode to the 38 Geary Bus

My other favorite transportation item this week is “Sometimes on the 38″, a great song by San Francisco musician, Shane Papatolicas; the lyrics chronicle his varied experiences riding on the 38 Geary bus in San Francisco. Here is a link to the catchy music on another local transit blog that is also worth reading, the Muni Diaries.

Car-Free Market Street Is Closer to Reality

Rhonda Winter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:12:55 +0000

My long held fantasy of a car-free Market Street became just a little closer to reality today. A transit improvement report was just approved by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that encourages travel by bus, foot and bicycle along this busy thoroughfare. District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, who requested the report, expressed his support for the positive changes being implemented that will limit car traffic on Market. “It will feel pretty good to see some progress, albeit incremental progress on Market Street,” he said.

A glorious car-free Market Street in June of 2008 after the queer pride parade.

I could not agree more, and am eagerly anticipating the upcoming changes; they can’t come quickly enough. Cars make us fat. The more we can increase walking, biking and mass transit use, the healthier our citizens will be, and the more livable and sustainable both our city and world will become.

What Is a Good City?

Rhonda Winter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:51:14 +0000

That was one of the many probing questions that the visionary former mayor of Bogotá Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa, asked a packed auditorium in San Francisco last night. How do we define what makes a good city, what is our criteria? What makes an urban environment desirable and livable, and how do we judge the quality of life? What is socially and environmentally sustainable?

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Major Studies Reveal State of the Poles

Michael Ricciardi — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:00:18 +0000

This month, as the results of data analyses come in, climate scientists are getting a more detailed, far clearer picture of the ‘State of the Poles’ and the effects of warming and climate change in these most extreme regions of our planet. Although this project is actually the culmination of two years work (encompassing 160 separate studies and costing 1.2 billion dollars) it has been officially deemed the ‘International Polar Year’ (IPY).

One of the most important findings of this project is a confirmation of what many climate scientists have suspected for a couple of years now–that the impact of climate change on our environment is happening at a much faster rate than previous computer models predicted. This is true even for the four major reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the last of which was released in 2007).

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Public Transit Ridership Skyrockets

Rhonda Winter — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:05:44 +0000

Bustling passengers on Muni’s T line streetcar in the Bayview District of San Francisco.

More people than ever are now using mass transit in the United States. Ridership on trains, buses, ferries and subways is at record levels, according to a survey just released by the American Public Transportation Association. Their study reports that, “despite falling gas prices and an economic recession, increasing numbers of Americans took 10.7 billion trips on public transportation in 2008, the highest level of ridership in 52 years and a modern ridership record“, and a 4% increase from 2007.

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More Than 15,000 People Protest Against Indian Tiger Reserve

Andrew Williams — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:41:40 +0000

More than fifteen thousand people have taken part in a mass protest in southern India, against the extension of a new reserve to protect tigers facing a very real threat of extinction.

The last count revealed that the number of Indian tigers has plummeted from around 40,000 at the beginning of last century to an all time low of just 1,411, largely due to dwindling habitats and the activities of poachers. Despite these depressing statistics, residents of India’s Chennai region are firmly against any further safeguards, fearing that they will lose their homes if an extension to the Mudumalai Wildlife sanctuary is given the green light.

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