Category: linkstream

A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.

Portland Retailers Love Bike Corrals

On street bike parking (bike corrals) have become very popular with local street-level businesses in Portland, Oregon.  I think it’s time for Boulder to regularize our bike corral program.  We need to get some decent non-diagonal racks in there with higher capacity, like the Portland racks, and also create a process through which businesses can request the racks, and get them.  Portland has nearly 100, by population, Boulder ought to have something like 16.

A Profile of Freiburg, Germany

A good short profile of the city of Freiburg, Germany, and their many sustainability initiatives.  Freiburg is a little more than double Boulder’s size — both in population and area, so it has a similar average population density.  It’s also a university town with a strong tech sector locally.  The whole city was re-built post WWII, but they chose to build it along the same lines as the old city, with a dense core, and well defined boundaries.  Today about half of daily trips are done by foot or on bike, with another 20% on public transit.  They have a local energy efficiency finance program, on top of the national one administered by KfW, and higher building efficiency standards than Germany as a whole.  Half their electricity comes from combined heat and power facilities that also provide district heating and hot water.  It seems like they’d be a good model city to compare Boulder to, and learn from.

Communicating sustainability: lessons from public health

Some lessons from public health for sustainability and climate campaigners.  Our choices are largely not our own — context and norms are far more powerful forces for behavioral change than abstract attitudes.  Most people just stick with the default settings.  We need to change the default settings.

Someone Else’s Blank Slate

The Long Now has a good post on their blog summarizing the fate of Paul Romer’s Charter City initiative in Honduras.  In short, it’s gone down in flames.  Especially with the ideas and capital coming from N. America, this really shouldn’t surprise anyone.  There’s a good core idea in Romer’s Charter City pitch, but it has to be more like an organic autonomous region and less like a maquiladora or a colonial outpost.

An ultra-low energy neighborhood in Germany

The German university town of Heidelberg is developing a near zero energy neighborhood, housing 5000 people and providing jobs for 7000.  All the buildings will meet the ultra strict Passivhaus energy efficiency standard.  It’s in the center of town, and will be extremely well served by transit, with easy bike and pedestrian access to the rest of the city.  This would be a great thing to see in, say… the Diagonal Plaza.  More info on the development here.  93% of the unites are already sold…

Depaving Rural America

Rural counties across middle America are turning paved roads back into gravel.  The WSJ article is from 2010, and I wonder to what extent this trend has continued.  I can’t say that it seems like much of a loss.  I suspect that much of the rural pavement was laid down without a good understanding of how much O&M it was committing the local governments to paying for.  As state and federal budgets shrink, and counties are left to pay for their own infrastructure, they realize that maybe cheaper gravel and lower speeds are actually a better value proposition.

Steamships, Landlines, and the Decline of the Private Car

A fun little musing from the Atlantic Cities on the difficulty of envisioning a very different world, even when we all know that big changes do take place over time.  Old technologies slowly decay, and fade into the background, as a new normalcy takes over.  We will see Jane Jacobs’ attrition of cars by cities eventually.