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New Orleans Activist Embarks on 1600-Mile Bike Ride for the Gulf
The BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico provides a fitting backdrop for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. Who better to connect the two disasters than longtime New Orleans community organizer Malik Rahim, who helped found Common Ground Relief in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophe? Rahim, who calls himself a "novice cyclist but veteran activist," is tackling the 2010 spill with a 1600-mile bike ride along the Gulf and up the eastern seaboard to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of the need to wean ourselves off fossil fuel dependence.
August 25, 2010
New York City Gets Its First “Pop-up Café,” Similar to SF’s Parklets
The narrow streets of Lower
Manhattan date back centuries and pose a set of challenges nearly unique
in New York City. With the city's first "pop-up café," DOT is testing
out a solution to one of those challenges: the lack of public space
caused by cramped sidewalks.
August 12, 2010
Landscapers Used Banned Pesticide on New Marin County Bike Path
Marin County's ribbon cutting and celebratory ride Monday in the Alameda del Prado bike lanes - a
long-missing link in the county's North-South bikeway - was followed by the revelation that landscapers used a weedkiller banned under the county's
strict pesticide law.
August 4, 2010
Bike Tour Taps San Francisco’s Water Innovations
When most San Franciscans turn on a faucet, they'll see water that's traveled as far as two hundred miles from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. But that's not the case for some locally-minded gardeners, for whom careful water stewardship is as important as selecting their crops.
July 27, 2010
More Space for Parking Than Offices at Boston-Area TOD
Another
city, another would-be transit-oriented development undermined by a
glut of parking. This time it's Newton, Massachusetts, where plans are underway
to build 420,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of
retail, and 190 units of housing at the Riverside terminus of Boston's
Green Line, the highest-ridership light rail line in the country.
July 26, 2010
Of Cable Cars and Whales
The invention of cable cars in 1873 by Andrew Hallidie is an oft-told saga, with a perhaps apocryphal point of origin on a rainy winter day in 1869 when he saw a team of horses pulling a horsecar up a steep grade on Jackson Street between Kearny and Stockton. One horse slipped, the car man slammed on his brake but it broke, and the horses and streetcar ended up at the bottom of the hill in a mangled, mutilated mess. Andrew Hallidie wrote that he wanted to construct a public transit system that would alleviate the “great cruelty and hardship to the horses engaged in that work.”
July 19, 2010