February 23rd, 2011
New York City, the nation’s best networked metro area, provides the full course of transportation options. Here you can easily hop a plane, train, bus or taxi. You can live car-free (if you don’t count that taxi) and conduct a low-carbon commute, or even reside a walk away from where you work. You can fly in, you can fly out. You can commute to Boston, if you’re dedicated.
Lincoln residents enjoy an accessible bus service.
So it’s little surprise that NYC — where households average just 9,920 miles of car travel in a year — tops a new list of 15 cities that are providing residents with greener transportation systems.
The list, the result of a study the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Smart Cities project and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, was released today.
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February 22nd, 2010
(This article, originally entitled U.S. Car Fleet Shrank by Four Million in 2009 – After a Century of Growth, U.S. Fleet Entering Era of Decline ran on the Earth Policy Institute website in January. Its author, Lester R. Brown is president of the EPI and author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.)
By Lester R. Brown
America’s century-old love affair with the automobile may be coming to an end. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline. In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.
Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020. (See data.)
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August 18th, 2008
By Barbara Kessler It’s refreshing in these days of gas and environmental calamities, not to mention lending and budget crises, to hear about something that’s chugging along in a positive direction. That’s the story of Amtrak, or nearly so, at this junction. Ridership on the American passenger rail service is up a healthy 14 percent [...]
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Barbara Kessler
Andrew Winston
Danielle Nierenberg
Anthony Swift
