The Green Minds
Knowledge To Get Into a Green Frame of MindArchive for USA
Cycling in New York Is No Longer an Extreme Sport
One might think that riding a bicycle through the horn-honking, taxi-swerving streets of New York City would scare away even the bravest of the spandex-clad set.
But in fact some 6,000 cyclists will mount carbon-fiber racing machines, commuting clunkers and the occasional unicycle on Sunday for the 21st annual New York City Century, a ride that has become safer than ever thanks to the cooperative efforts of advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives and the bicycle-friendly administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
About 80 percent of the 100-mile tour (there are a series of shorter options too) will be on a network of bicycle lanes and paths that continues to grow every year, making New York City a cycling mecca for commuters, exercise enthusiasts and tourists who can take in a majority of the sites without breaking a sweat — or a limb.
“Sometimes New York City’s fast-paced streets can seem intimidating, but all the new bike lanes are changing that, as are all of the new cyclists on the streets,” said Caroline Samponaro, the director of bicycling advocacy for Transportation Alternatives.
In 1997, the city developed a plan to create 1,800 miles of bicycle lanes throughout all five boroughs. The plan languished until 2007, when Bloomberg announced PlaNYC, a strategy to make New Yorkmore sustainable by 2030. Part of that plan involved speeding up the development of the bike routes.
In two years, 200 miles of bicycle lanes were added, major arteries like Times Square were closed to cars and the number of cyclists exploded. The city now plans to add 50 miles a year until all 1,800 miles are completed.
“We’ve spent a lot of time investing in our cycling infrastructure,” Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation and a bicycle commuter, told CNBC last month. “If we’re going to accommodate a million more people in New York City by 2030, we’re not going to do it by having a million more cars, so we need to engineer sustainable forms of transportation into our network.”
The current strategy includes the continued addition of bicycle paths through parks and protected bike lanes along busy streets like Broadway, where barriers separate cars from cyclists. “Protected bike lanes are a design solution for our widest and most unruly avenues,” said Transportation Alternatives’ Samponaro.
In a city where 56 percent of automobile trips are less than three miles — often three miserable, traffic-filled miles — the new infrastructure is creating new reasons for people to exchange their keys or subway passes for a two-wheeler.
In the past 10 years, daily cycling in the city has increased by 123 percent, according to Transportation Alternatives, while a study by the city found that bicycle commuting is up 79 percent since 2007. This increase has occurred as the city has seen a dramatic drop in the number of cycling accidents and fatalities.
But it’s not only working stiffs populating those new bike lanes. Tourists have also discovered the ease with which they can get from the Brooklyn Bridge, say, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — about five flat, scenic miles, and you can ride protected bike lanes most of the way.
Bicycle rental companies have sprouted around the city, especially near Central Park (which is car-free most of the day) and Riverside Park along the Hudson River. The next step, according to Transportation Alternatives, is to create a bike share program along the lines of those in Paris, Montreal and most recently London.
Offering a ride share, where people can pick up and drop off bikes at designated locations throughout the city, would provide flexibility in commuting options, as well as a way to ride in the city without having to park bikes in already tiny apartments.
“Public bike share holds the potential to only encourage this trend toward safer, saner streets for all New Yorkers,” Samponaro said.
On Sunday, people from around the world will get a snapshot of New York’s continuing transformation into one of the country’s most bikable cities. Bicycling magazine currently ranks the Big Apple ninth among cities of more than 100,000 people; Minneapolis is in first place.
The 100-mile route within the 300-square-mile city will take cyclists down car-free Broadway, along the ocean-side boardwalks of Brooklyn and through the twisting, wooded paths of Queens’ parkland. More important, it will be an opportunity for cyclists to interact with the city and show others just how much their numbers have grown.
“It is simply not as scary on the streets as it used to be,” said Ross French, who has been cycling in the city for 34 years and volunteering at the New York City Century for more than a decade. “I think drivers are more aware of the presence of bikers and are therefore less aggressive and more cooperative.”
Source: AOL
New York City’s Motto: I Heart Tap Water
NEW YORK — New York City is so proud of its tap water that the Bloomberg administration has come up with a product line to promote it as an affordable, sustainable alternative to bottled water, according to the New York Times.
The merchandise, which bears a NYC Water logo, ranges from glasses and T-shirts to coasters, decanters and water bottles and is available at CityStore, the city’s online shop for all things New York, the story stated.
Cas Holloway, New York City’s environmental protection commissioner, said: “Our high-quality drinking water not only quenches New Yorkers’ thirst, but is the not-so-secret ingredient in the bagels, pizza and thousands of other dishes that people come from around the world to get.”
According to the story, the water is so clean that it does not require filtration and comes from highly protected watersheds in Upstate New York.
The Environmental Protection Department oversees a daily supply of more than one billion gallons of water that serves more than nine million people, the story noted.
To reduce consumption of bottled water, New York City is also providing outdoor drinking water stations this summer connected to fire hydrants at parks, public plazas and other outdoor spaces, the story added.
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Keeping Times Square Cool
The New York City Department of Transportation has announced the winner of its reNEWable Times Square design competition, aimed to temporarily “refresh and revive” the streetscape of newly pedestrianized Times Square while plans for permanent reconstruction proceed (construction is slated for 1012). Brooklyn artist Molly Dilworth‘s Cool Water, Hot Island was selected from 150 submitted designs for the pedestrian zones along Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets. The piece is a large-scale painted installation abstractly interpreting—and mitigating!—Manhattan’s heat island effect. From NYCDOT’s release:
The proposed design’s color palette of striking blues and whites reflects more sunlight and absorb less heat – improving the look of these popular pedestrian plazas while making them more comfortable to sit in. The color and patterns evoke water, suggesting a river flowing through the center of Times Square, and they also provide a compelling visual counterpoint to the reds, oranges and yellows of the area’s signature marquees and billboards.
It isn’t the artist’s first brush with large-scale installations in the City: more of her work is viewable through her flickr stream. Cool Water will be installed in July.
Source : TreeHugger
Solar Energy : New York City’s Future as a Sustainable City
While our country confronts the enviromental disaster in the Gulf Coast, we’re reminded yet again of the need totransition to clean energy sources. New York City and State is taking the lead by constructing the ‘Solar Pipeline’, which includes a Solar Map and Solar Empowerment Zones that will integrate solar energy into our nation’s largest city and most complex grid.
New York City and Sustainable CUNY have created three Solar Empowerment Zones, strategically selected areas where solar power systems are most beneficial and technically viable, and where development of solar power will be encouraged. Solar power is a reliable, renewable source of electricity for New York City that reduces demand on the City’s electrical grid.
New York City has over 1.6 billion square feet of rooftops.
The three Solar Empowerment Zones – on the East Shore of Staten Island, in Downtown Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint-Gateway section-were designed to reduce peak electricity demand and the associated pollution from dirty plants that operate when demand is at its highest, while also potentially deferring or eliminating the need for costly upgrades to the electrical system.
Solar Panel Tax Abatements & Installations
Record Number of New Yorkers Have Applied for Solar Panel Abatements in 2010. To encourage the use of sustainable technology, the City offers property tax abatements to property owners that install solar panels on their building’s rooftops.
This year, property owners will receive a property tax abatement of 35% of the eligible expenditures over four years with a maximum abatement of $62,500 per year for four years or the building’s annual tax liability, whichever is less.
Under the solar panel tax abatement program, solar panels have been installed at 25 buildings across the City, five times the number of systems approved and installed last year. Savings from these installations vary on the size and type of the building. A single-family house can save approximately $2,600 a year on energy costs. Property owners can also receive rebates from their utility company.
Interested in buying a new green (LEED) certified condo recently built or under construction in Manhattan? Go to nycnewdevelopments fill out the buyer form and write green in the comment section. I will send you email listings of green condos that match your buying criteria.
Source : ActiveRain
How Can Big Cities Adapt to Climate Change?
Regardless of whether climate change is real, man-made, or happening at an accelerated rate, there’s no harm in preparing for the worst. In Climate Change Adaptation in New York City, a new report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a motley crew of scientists, government officials and legal, risk management, and insurance experts plan out the city’s attempt to survive in the face of climate change.
The NYCPCC’s portrait of a climate change-ravaged New York City is disturbing, but not all that surprising. The report describes intense heat waves, increased blackouts, flooding in low-lying neighborhoods, severe droughts, reduced water quality, all wrapped up a climate that resembles that of Raleigh, North Carolina, or Norfolk, Virginia, today. But how can such a densely-packed city possibly prepare for this?
The report is fairly optimistic about New York City’s climate change-combating resources, but it explains that adaptation will require cooperation between a number of different factions, including designers, the insurance industry, local government, and more. The report suggests, among other things, that NYC:
- Create a mandate for an ongoing body of experts that provides advice for the City of New York. Areas that could be addressed by experts in the future include regular updates to climate change projections, improved mapping and geographic data, and periodic assessments of climate change impacts and adaptation for New York City to inform a broad spectrum of climate change adaptation policies and programs.
- Establish a climate change monitoring program to track and analyze key climate change factors, impacts and adaptation and evolving-knowledge indicators in New York City, as well as to study relevant advances in research on related topics. This involves creating a network of monitoring systems and organizations and a region-wide indicator database for analysis.
- Include multiple layers of government and a wide range of public and private stakeholder experts to build buy-in and crucial partnerships for coordinated adaptation strategies. Take account of the private sector in these interactions.
- Conduct a review of standards and codes, to evaluate their revision to meet climate challenges, or the development of new codes and regulations that increase the city’s resilience to climate change. Develop design standards, specifications, and regulations that take climate change into account, and hence are prospective in nature rather than retrospective.
- Work with the insurance industry to facilitate the use of risk-sharing mechanisms to address climate change impacts.
Whether New York City can put such a comprehensive plan into action in time to make a difference depends on how seriously the city takes the threat of climate change. The NYCPCC’s report is a start. Now the next step is get the city’s diverse residents to work together. And if New York can do it, any city can.
Source : FastCompany
How New York is Preparing for Climate Change
New York City is establishing itself as a global leader in forming a proactive response to climate change, reveals a new report detailing the city’s plans to adapt to the challenges and opportunities the changing climate presents. The plans, revealed in the first report of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) and published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, outline the measures the city will take to proactively respond to climate change in a way that will provide both long-term environmental, and short-term economic, benefits to the city.
“Cities are at the forefront of the battle against climate change. We are the source of approximately 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And as the climate changes, densely populated urban areasparticularly coastal citieswill disproportionately feel the impacts,” said New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “Those of us in local government recognize the importance of national and international leadership on climate change. But we are not waiting for others to act first.”
Established by Mayor Bloomberg in 2008, the NPCC report outlines a powerful and original framework for deploying sophisticated risk management tools to address the city’s climate adaptation challenges, particularly the challenges posed to the city’s energy, transportation, water, and communication systems.
The NPCC brings together teams of committed scientists and experts, led by Co-chairs Cynthia Rosenzweig (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Columbia University Earth Institute, Center for Climate Systems Research) and William Solecki (City University of New York, CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities), to protect the city’s critical infrastructure from the risks of a changing climate.
Under the existing New York City comprehensive sustainability plan, PlaNYC, efforts focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with initiatives to increase building energy efficiency and retrofit ferries to use cleaner fuel. The new NPCC plan recognizes that these actions will not stop climate change alone and points to the climate risks already facing the city, such as heat waves, blackouts, flooding, and coastal storms.
In response to these challenges the NPCC calls for New York City to begin to adapt to climate change immediately and proposes the creation of flexible Adaptation Pathways, strategies that evolve through time as climate risk assessment, evaluation of adaptation strategies, and monitoring continue.
The report demonstrates how New York City has developed an effective approach to climate change adaptation by presenting the challenges of adaption as winwin opportunities for city managers. For example, cutting down on greenhouse gases has already provided economic savings to both the public and private sectors.
In addition, approaches to climate change adaptation can be incorporated into the management of the city’s infrastructure, such as recalibrating building design standards to include climate change projections, expanding the legal framework governing the design and operation of infrastructure to include the impacts of climate change, and engaging with the insurance industry so that it contributes to adaptation strategies by creating products that respond to and recognize long-term risks.
The NPCC suggests that all agencies and organizations that manage infrastructure adaptation strategies should draw from a range of responses, including adjustments in operations and management, capital investments in infrastructure, and development of policies that promote flexibility.
The NPCC proposes several recommendations for action, focusing on critical infrastructure and alignment with broader-scale actions, including the creation of a climate change monitoring program to track and analyze key climate change factors, impacts, and adaptation indicators across the city, as well as studying relevant advances in research on related topics.
“Planning for climate change today is less expensive then rebuilding an entire network after a catastrophe. We simply can’t wait to plan for the effects of climate change” concludes Mayor Bloomberg. “The NPCC. . . will help ensure that we create a greener, greater New York for future generations.”
Source : BioscienceTechnology
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