Groningen would be number one on this list if we were looking at percentage of residents who bicycle for transportation purposes. About 57% of travel in Groningen is by bicycle!

The city has been named the world’s best bicycle city a couple of times (1993 and 2006). It is a university city which is part of the reason why it has so many people bicycling, but it has done amazing things to make the city more bicycle friendly as well. The bicycle facilities you can see on the following pages will probably blow your mind away.

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Disturbing information suggests that the wording of a Chinese forestry administration document is ambiguous enough to allow trade in products derived from critically endangered tigers.

According to The Times UK, wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC has sounded the alarm about a document issued by the Chinese State Forestry Administration, warning that the wording is “loose” enough to encourage China’s deplorable tiger farmers to begin processing tiger-derived products.

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Current laws in Thailand make it easy for live elephants - including infant elephants stolen from their mothers in the wild - to be traded unscrupulously for “entertainment” purposes.

For many people, thoughts of Thailand conjure up romantic notions of being transported to various tourist attractions on the back of an elephant. But tragically, many of the captive elephants used for the Thai tourist trade, and as zoo and circus exports, are the victims of an insidious, illegal market that threatens the survival of endangered Asian elephants, and is responsible for widespread exploitation and abuse of these intelligent and sensitive mammals.

Thankfully, a recent report published by TRAFFIC Southeast Asia exposes the loopholes and reporting inaccuracies that have been providing a smokescreen for Thailand’s illegal trade in endangered, wild-caught Asian elephants (Elephas maximus).

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Sitting in traffic sucks.  You know it, I know it, and so does the planet.  Although driving isn’t the cleanest means of transportation, minimizing your time on the road is just plain healthy.  Here are 5 emerging technologies that can help you not play, “How many state license plates can I count?”

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As shown year after year, public transit is a key factor keeping our planet from warming much further than it already is! It is also one of our best bets for slowing and eventually stopping global warming in the future. Beyond that, public transit helps the environment, the economy, and you in many other ways as well.

An organization working for you to increase and improve public transportation and to fight global warming, smog, excessive traffic congestion, water pollution, hours lost from home, stress, road rage, and your car becoming your home needs your help now.

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Pangolins - scaly, toothless anteaters - are being poached incessantly from their native Southeast Asia habitats. TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, announced that the rising demand for Pangolin meat and scales, mostly from mainland China, is driving the disappearance of these shy animals.

The sheer size of recent Pangolin seizures is alarming:

They include 24 tonnes of frozen pangolins from Sumatra, Indonesia, seized in Viet Nam and 14 tonnes of frozen animals seized in Sumatra in 2008.

(Note: 1 metric ton = 2,204.6 pounds)

Earlier this year, 45 Pangolins were found in the possession of Thai smugglers.

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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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Manchester, Tennessee- The first day of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, a day which has traditionally been a day of travel and arrival for most festival attendees, greeted an estimated crowd of seventy-five thousand music fans from around the world with some good old fashioned southern rainshowers. And this wasn’t a light rain, by any definition. The rain, which began shortly after the four-day festival’s first performances, didn’t dampen the mood of the smiling festivarians, but it didn’t help the speed with which people were able to enter the festival grounds and set up their encampments.

The elements may have slowed the entrance for many, but delays were nothing like those in years past. In 2002, for example, at the inaugural Bonnaroo, it took this author about 18 hours to cover the last 45 miles!

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Bicycle & Pedestrian Bridges

Normally, bikes can go over the main bridge with cars — notice the colored roadway signifying that cars need to watch out for bicyclists and let them take the road as they enter from their lanes. However, when the bridge is up due to boats passing underneath, there are higher bridges on both sides for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Image Credits 1 & 2: Zachary Shahan

Bike Intersections

Bike Boxes

There are colored boxes at several intersections for bicyclists, giving them priority, keeping them safe, and giving them greater prestige — 1st class.

Roundabouts

The Netherlands has A LOT of roundabouts, and in Gronigen they also contain lanes for bicyclists.

All Bikes Go On Green

Instead of giving green lights to bicyclists and cars going in the same direction at the same time, all the bike lights are green at the same time (while all the automobile lights are red). It works quite well and I never saw a crash while I was living there (approximately 5 months).

This one below is in the center of the city center (downtown) — essentially, the main intersection in the city. Here you can see one delivery truck, about ten bicyclists and a few pedestrians, quite a normal situation. At rush hour, you really have to sit there and wait sometimes for an opening in the bike traffic. With cars instead of bikes, though, the wait would probably be ten times longer.

Bike Speed Bumps Before Dangerous Intersections & Driveways

Bike Only Entrances

Well, bikes and small scooters.

Bike Buttons to Trigger the Lights

Image Credits 1-16: Zachary Shahan

Bike Only Roads or Off-Road Paths

Out towards the suburbs.

Going under busy roads.

This one with speed bumps and a guy in a wheel chair as well (not uncommon, actually).

The path in the background of this picture used to be a road for cars, but was transformed into a bicycle/pedestrian path going through a fairly large and beautiful park. It gives a more direct connection between a main university area of the city and the city center to bicyclists and pedestrians rather than cars.

This is at the entrance to a bicycle path.

If the bike paths aren’t completely separate from the road, they are often separated by large medians, planters or parked cars.

Sometimes they are even above the level of the road.

Going through (or, actually, on the edge of) more parkland between the university and the city center.

As far as you need to go…

In the Country

There are great bike paths out into the country. Even many people living out in the country or at the edge of the city near the country use bicycles.

This is on the edge of a small bedroom community sort of out in the country. Many people still biked into the city from here, and you can see they still have the colored bike lanes!

Image Credits 1-6, 8-14, 16-19: Zachary Shahan
Image Credit 7: Janis Andins
Image Credit 15: Ladd Schiess

Bike Parking

Endless Bike Parking at the Train Station & Double-Decker Parking

You can’t capture this on camera at all because much further than you can see there are more bicycles. But here is a small glimpse.

Bike Parking or Bike Suicide?

Not sure what’s going on here. It looks like some people parked their bikes in a strange way or a cleaning person needed to move them to clean the ground or the bikes are hanging themselves.

Secure Bike Parking

Image Credits 1-2, 7-8, 10-12, 14, 16-17: Zachary Shahan
Image Credits 3-6: Janis Andins
Image Credit 9: VirtualErn via flickr under a Creative Commons license
Image Credit 13: Harry-Harms via flickr under a CC license
Image Credit 15: Harry-Harms via flickr under a CC license

Babies & Kids on Bikes

Image Credits 1-3, 6-8: Zachary Shahan
Image Credits 4-5: Jennifer Lee

Learning to Bike

There is a lot of public art in the city, and a handful of it is of bicyclists. This is a great piece of a child learning to ride a bicycle.

Image Credit: Ladd Schiess

Student City

This is not just one long line of student bicyclists going to school that I luckily caught one morning. There was line after line like this for ages during the “rush hour” to school every morning. I actually lived right above the main (only) road going between the city and the main part of the university (on a corner edge of the city) and it hit me one day that it was such a quiet road (with just the sounds of broken bikes — many are in the Netherlands — going ‘click click’ or bike bells going ‘ding ding’ as bicyclists passed each other). It was such a nice street to live on, but if that were car traffic it would be horrible because of the noise and air pollution. It made me realize the great importance of how bicycling reduces noise pollution as well as more well-known environmental pollution.

bikes may end up on the bottom of the canal after a long night at the pub

bikes may turn into birds

Image Credit 1: Zachary Shahan
Image Credit 2: Akbar Simonse via flickr under a Creative Commons license
Image Credit 3: Margriet PR via flickr under a CC license

City Center

Image Credits 1-5: Zachary Shahan

Bike Lanes Nearly as Big as the Road

Image Credit: Zachary Shahan

Freight Bicycles

Image Credit: jurjen_nl via flickr under a Creative Commons license

Bikes & Sheep

Hope you enjoyed this great bicycle city photo tour. To keep yourself updated on the next five photo tours, keep your eye on EcoWorldly or even subscribe to its feed or email list. Have something extra to add? Comment below!

Image Credit: janGlas via flickr under a Creative Commons license

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Starting Monday, April 13, cars will be banned from metro roads one day per working week, depending on the last digit of their license plate. There will be no restriction on weekend driving.

This measure represents the most strict action taken since lifting a ban that was put in place one month prior to and during the Olympics, wherein vehicles were prohibited from driving in Beijing every other day, as officials scrambled to achieve decent air quality and clear roadways for the competing athletes and attendees.

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Yes we do call traffic lights robots in South Africa, presumably because its “A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control”. The Department of Transport’s magazine was titled Robot until 1998 but they now seem to use Traffic Light in formal documentation.

The Central Energy Fund (CEF) of South Africa has announced a drive to install solar-powered traffic lights at critical intersections in South Africa’s major cities. The CEF foresaw an investment of R 100 million and installations at 400 intersections. This was justified by “Quantified in monetary terms, productivity losses, accidents at uncontrolled intersections, and exhaust emissions from stationary motor vehicles all have an adverse effect on the economy,”

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In California, the CNG conversion qualifies Carl Tankersley to drive solo in those highly desirable diamond lanes. Yet, although he prominently displays his carpool and CNG stickers as required by law, that doesn’t seem to be enough to stop the cops from disturbing his 30 minute commute on a fairly regular basis.

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Engineers have created a new type of road capable of turning the vibration caused by cars into electricity.

The revolutionary new surface, created by engineers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, uses piezoelectric crystals embedded in the asphalt to generate up to 400 kilowatts of energy from a 1 kilometer stretch, enough to run eight electric cars.

Commenting on the innovation, a spokesman from the UK Environmental Transport Association said, “Many predict a massive shift to electric cars, and it may be the roads themselves that help provide some of the power needed.”

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Beijing will ban some 353,800 vehicles with high emissions from anywhere within the fifth ring road, which circles the city center at a radius of 10-15 km. One in ten cars and trucks in Beijing will be subject to the ban. But, say city officials, those vehicles account for 50 percent of the city’s notoriously bad auto pollution.

The vehicles on the banned list are those that do not meet the Euro I emissions standards set in Europe in the early 90’s. According to Ren Lihong of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Science, these cars are a big part of Beijing’s pollution problem.

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Have you ever wondered how many pollutants you’re breathing in while sitting in traffic sandwiched between two trucks? The Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across a Grid Environment (MESSAGE) can tell you. The system, designed by researchers at Newcastle University, produces real-time data on traffic pollutants including carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and noise.

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Two measures passed on Tuesday will lay the groundwork for improved transportation, reducing our reliance on cars. The first was State measure 1A, a bond to pay for a high-speed train from Los Angeles to Sacramento and then on to San Francisco. Is it expensive? Of course it is. Estimated costs are $19.4 billion, though it will likely be considerably more than that. But having ridden Japan’s bullet trains, I can say that once it’s finished it will be a much better mode of transport than driving or flying to SFO - with drastically reduced carbon emissions to boot!

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Logging its first miles in Delhi, the soleckshaw can be pedaled normally or powered by a 36-volt solar battery. Developed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, (CSIR) the new solar-powered taxis have hit the streets for a test drive.  The soleckshaws include FM radios and the ability to power up cell phones while driving.  The battery allows the taxi to travel 15 km per hour (9.3 mph) for up to 42 miles.

CSIR director Sinha said:  “In the age of global warming, the soleckshaw, with improvements, can be successfully developed as competition for all the petrol and diesel run small cars.”

There are about 8 million rickshaw drivers in India. It is hoped that the new, solar power rickshaws will enhance the vehicle’s image, and allow it to become an even more favorable mode of transportation.  It is thought that the new powered rickshaws will attract an entirely new middle class clientele.

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