By Harriet Blake

New York City taxi cab owners and drivers are finally closer to being on the same page in the debate over hybrid vehicles.

At a press conference Friday [Nov. 14], New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an incentive program designed to create an entirely green fleet of cabs by 2012.

Financial incentives will be awarded to taxi fleet owners who buy hybrid vehicles, and financial disincentives for those who continue to use non-hybrids. Hybrid cars work on a mixture of gasoline and electricity from batteries.

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By John DeFore

Joining the existing array of programs addressing school bus pollution this fall (the EPA’s Clean School Bus USA, for example) is a new effort bringing the Texas Parent Teacher Association together with the state’s Commission on Environmental Quality.

The project, announced earlier this month, will supply funds to the PTA for bus pollution-control improvements. In a nice “let the punishment fit the crime” twist, those funds are coming from fines assessed to polluters, and will generally be used near the site of the pollution that provoked the fine.

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By Catherine Girardeau

Let’s face it: Solo car commuters increase both traffic congestion and a city’s carbon footprint.

In San Francisco, those gas-hogging lone drivers soon will be get a clear message to switch to greener forms of transportation, such as buses, train transit and van pools. Earlier this month, the city preliminarily approved a commuter measure requiring medium- and large-size city employers to promote — or even pay for — public transit or vanpools for their commuting employees.

It’s likely that many more American cities will follow San Francisco’s lead, particularly those cities that have signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (USCPA), and pledged to reduce global warming pollution in their cities by 7 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. They will likely be scrambling to usher commuters from their cars and SUV’s and onto mass transit lines, an immediate and proven way of reducing urban smog.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was an early adopter of the USCPA and the city has an ambitious climate action plan, so it’s no surprise that on August 5, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a commuter measure that would require many city employers to promote public transit or vanpools for their commuting employees. The Commuter Benefits ordinance, introduced by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, would give San Francisco employers with more than 20 workers three options: pay for employees’ transit passes or vanpools; provide door-to-door shuttle or vanpools, or tap into the federal Commuter Checks program, which allows employees to create pretax commuter accounts.

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By John DeFore

Not long ago, a City of Austin crew spent the day installing new “No Parking” signs along the streets of my neighborhood. Two big Ford F450 trucks sat outside my home-office window for hours while the men dug holes and planted posts — and their engines ran the entire time.

Not wanting to be the block’s eco-scold, I said nothing as the trucks rumbled. But the waste of fuel nagged at me even after the noise was gone, and I eventually called the city to find out why workers would be allowed to run their engines like that. Surely the city didn’t approve of polluting the air all morning just so the truck would be pre-air-conditioned when workers took a coffee break?

After calls to three or four city departments, I found a public works supervisor with some answers. All work trucks keep their engines running, she told me, because of the LED arrow boards mounted on them which warn drivers to keep their distance. “You can’t turn the engine off and keep the arrows going, because your battery will die down,” she said.

It was easy to see how a safety-based practice might serve as an excuse to keep the cab cooled off, even when running the arrow was unnecessary: In my case, the truck was parked on a dead-end block where no traffic could approach from behind it. The woman I spoke with agreed that conserving fuel wasn’t the easiest topic to raise with work crews. “They’ve been here a while,” she said, “and when I mention this they kind of get, ‘Well, fine, what do you want us to do for safety?’”

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By Barbara Kessler

With gas prices pressuring wallets everywhere and climate change warming the planet, people are looking to the sun for some salvation. It’s paradoxical yes, but so sensible. The sun’s energy burns brightly on Earth and is capable of powering our homes and potentially our cars, if that power can be efficiently harvested.

For the current transportation crisis, it would be a dream solution: An ever-present source of energy powering vehicles with zero emissions. In 2008, however, science has yet to figure out how to make solar cars move as quickly as we’d like them to; carry heavy loads and not peter out when the sun goes down.

Fortunately for us hopeful drivers, the top engineers in the world are now focusing on these issues — as are many motivated college students and even a handful of high school kids.

We caught up with some of those aspiring younger solar engineers recently at the Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas, where they competed to see who could field a car that could successfully run 400 laps on the 1.5 mile track at Texas Motor Speedway.

The competition has been engaging students from all over the country in solar technology for 15 years, producing cars that amaze their creators with how well and how far they can ride on the sun’s energy. In even years, the teams run cars on the NASCAR track and in the odd-years, they run a cross country race. This year’s race saw them running faster cars, with better solar arrays and specially crafted frames from the latest available metals. The race left the students and the teachers buzzing about the possibilities. Watch the video report.

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By Nima Kapadia
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) have extended their partnership with Volvo another three years to develop commercial trucks with greater fuel efficiency. The partnership is an extension of a one-year agreement signed by the three groups in June 2007, with the overall objective of creating [...]

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By Harriet Blake
As a LEED-accredited engineer and leader of the sustainable design initiative for AKF Engineers, Robert Diemer is a believer in the green movement. He helps create greener buildings. He takes public transportation to work.
Recently, Diemer took his commitment to an even higher level by becoming the 50,000th member of PhillyCarShare. With the price [...]

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By John DeFore
Some time in the coming weeks, residents of our nation’s capital will be the first American customers of a service some Europeans have used for a decade, a public/private partnership that adds bicycles to the more familiar array of public transportation options like buses and trains.

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By Nima Kapadia
With consumers clearly moving — some would say stampeding — away from gas-guzzling trucks and sport utility vehicles, General Motors plans to do the same.
The world’s largest automaker announced on Tuesday it will stop production at four U.S. factories that assemble trucks and Sport Utility Vehicles, such as the BMC Sierra and [...]

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By John DeFore

The history of aviation is full of feats — transatlantic this, non-stop that — that sound like extravagant publicity stunts but foreshadow innovations with real-world impact. With any luck, the same will be true for the Solar Impulse, a planned aircraft whose development is profiled today in the European Wall Street [...]

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By Harriet Blake
In Columbus, Ohio, yesterday Mayor Michael Coleman and his staff biked from their homes to the Ohio Statehouse, jacking up their heart rates and kicking-off the city’s 20-year Bicentennial Bikeways Plan.

Photo: City of Columbus
 
Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman
In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino fought a stiff wind cycling a half mile from City [...]

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By Bill Sullivan
Charles Stone expected to encounter a skeptic or two. He had done his research, and this outside-the-box idea seemed to make good sense, but the Director of Transportation for the Mansfield (Texas) Independent School District figured he still would have some explaining to do.
“Natural gas is a little unusual,” he says. “Most people [...]

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