Green Options

New York City barricaded Broadway around Times and Herald Squares on Sunday night, turning stretches of Broadway into pedestrian plazas.

[Times Square Billboards. Creative Commons photo by Matt Mendoza]

With pedestrian traffic in Times Square up over 200% from 1980, the area was as riddled with people jams as it was with traffic jams. City officials think that re-routing auto traffic to Sixth and Seventh Avenues will open the area up, ease air pollution, and help businesses.

[Image credit: Toni at Flickr under a Creative Commons license]

Cars are among this country’s greatest polluters, emitting 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gas they burn along with lead, ground-level ozone, and a slough of other greenhouse gases. More walkable neighborhoods mean fewer cars on the road, and that means less pollution. Period. So what makes a neighborhood walkable?

Part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around
the world.

A bicycle, I once read somewhere, is the most efficient form of human transport ever developed. Coupled with the fact that bicycles are relatively cheap and trouble free, and suffer few of the traffic problems that dog other forms of transport it’s no wonder that cycling has never been more popular.

But I’m starting to wonder if this popularity might start becoming a problem?