EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
You’re cool and environmentally conscious. You eat organic and live green, right down to your trendy hemp shoes. You probably even drive a Prius and subscribe to Mother Jones.
But if you live in a city of much size, to be deeply green you must pimp your ride with a folding bike.
Europeans have been making and riding folding bikes for years. Asia, long a bicycle-dominant part of the world, has found folding bikes ideal for their cities’ crowded streets.
City centers are often portrayed as grimy, polluted places. And they can be grimy, polluted places – the daily destination for thousands of carbon-emitting commuters and home to many smokestack industries.
Just don’t blame the people living there. Households closer to the urban action are, on average, far less polluting, according to research by the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The reason is not hard to fathom: People living in more densely developed areas drive less and are more likely to take public transportation.
People going green are turning to gasoline-electric hybrid automobiles like the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight or any number of hybrids offered by General Motors for transportation. But folks really serious about saving gasoline and money will want to consider the latest alternatives to gasoline – electric hybrids – sweat-electric hybrids.
The latest generation of electric-hybrid bicycles is arriving at a bike shop near you. Major bicycle makers Giant and Schwinn (who can forget the Stingray?) have recently introduced cutting-edge hybrid bikes that seamlessly harness battery power and pedal power, making biking to work easy as the breeze in your hair.
The new offerings from the bike big boys promise to nudge so-called e-bikes from the eddy of the eccentric into the mainstream. E-Bike sales in the US are projected to hit 220,000 units in 2009, up 83 percent from 2007 sales, according to the Electric Bikes Worldwide Report, 2008 Update. In Europe, sales this year are expected to hit 750,000 – three times 2007 sales.
“We’re seeing huge growth,” says Pantea Mavaddat, marketing director of Currie Technologies, maker of the Izip line of hybrid bikes.
Columbus, Ohio. It’s not the first place you think of when green cities come to mind. Or the second or the third.
Indeed, there’s a whole string of burgs more strongly associated with sustainability. There’s Boulder with its rock solid commitment to community gardens, organic food mecca Eugene and all wind-powered Austin. The U.S. has many traditional pockets of non-tradition paying daily homage to the green spirit.
But now here comes Columbus — and Little Rock, and Raleigh, and Sioux Falls. These regular-folks towns are getting their green groove on too. They’re setting up sustainability offices, buying biodiesel buses, hosting solar car events and designing new bike lanes.
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.
