Choose your Transit Modes Wisely

Amount of urban space required to transport sixty people by 1) automobile 2) bus and 3) bicycle.
via Press Office, City of Münster, Germany

Relative carbon footprint by continent. ((click for statistics))

© Mark McCormick :: via TreeHugger

San Francisco Hydro-Net

Come 2108, the built typology of San Francisco is barely recognizable. The edge of the bay has been transformed into a series of algae ponds producing hydrogen for clean fuel cell locomotion. A network of interlinked subterranean infrastructural pathways transport people, hydrogen, water and staples while freeing the surface for pedestrian comfort and disinvestment in the internal combustion engine.

Fog is harvested for drinking water and streets become permeable rainwater collectors, while natural aquifers are used as water storage tanks. The complex plate tectonic machinations underpinning the City are tapped to supply clean geothermal energy, and the Pacific ocean is utilized as the largest thermal mass on the planet.

IwamotoSctott's winning design for the history.com City of the Future contest is full of radically captivating options for the future of the City...read up! [additional eyecandy here]

Israeli Auto Industry to Plug In

Today, Ehud Olmert announced that Israel is turning to electric automobile infrastructure to solve the problems of an oil-poor nation politically and canonically separated from its oil-rich neighbors. With its geographically proximal urbanized areas (Tel Aviv <-> Jerusalem = 40 mi), high oil prices (> $6.25 / gallon of gasoline) and abundance of alternative energy sources (solar primarily, wind + tidal secondarily), Israel may very well be the ideal testing ground for state-funded electric car infrastructure.
The State of Israel will model its program on modern mobile phone usage: first, provide users with discounted hardware. This "discount" will take the form of huge tax breaks in a country where fees surpass 60% of the cost of a new car. Second, offer usage "plans" which are not directly linked to the volatile price of natural resources, with overage charges for citizen who overstep their predicted usage.

This initiative is a public-private partnership, with $200 million in public funding provided to Californian-Israeli startup Project Better Place to set up charging infrastructure and provide batteries. Batteries are to be lithium-ion chem cells providing 124 miles per charge, which in Israel is a reasonable distance; at least some of the recharging is to take place at transfer stations where discharged batteries will be removed and fresh ones inserted, eliminating the charge downtime which most frustrates current electric car users.

Vegas tiptoes towards Green?

Las Vegas is one of the least sustainable cities in the world. Its rise to the apogee of western U.S. tourist culture is riddled with environmentally damaging moves: first, found a wholly suburbanized metropolis in the center of a water-scarce desert. Then work overtime to bring residents into a region lacking fertile agricultural land within a 300 mile radius. Next, subsidize airlines to fly gamblers into an airport over 600 miles from any major carbon sink. Water losses, embedded-cost multipliers, greenhouse gas maximizing...so many threads of hubris woven into an urban web.

Now local developers are trying to green their image by funding the world's first Vertical Farm. A concept that's been pushed for years by the Vertical Farm Project, this structure stands 30 stories tall within the core of an urbanized area. The entire structure is dedicated to food production year-round and weather independent; cash crops can be produced locally by replicating their native biomes within the structure's controlled environments. All told, between 50 and 75 thousand people could be fed by a single Vertical Farm.Cash flow from produce alone would pay off the high ($200 million) construction cost within 8 years; projected tourism revenue would make the tower every bit as profitable as a casino, and add a smidge of sustainability to Nevada's largest oasis.

Midtown Hudson Rising High

Buried on the West side of Manhattan between the Lincoln Tunnel and the Chelsea Parks, there lies a rare undeveloped brownsite in the heart of New York City --- the 26-acre Hudson Rail Yards. When last I visited NYC, I walked this stretch of the West Side Highway on my way from the Upper West side to a friend's place in Chelsea (yes, avid doesn't describe my approach to walking). The streets were wide and deserted, the buildings industrial and decaying, the parking lots more numerous than anywhere else on the Island I had been before or since. I remember feeling more than a little bit afraid for my welfare.

Now the Yards, owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, are going to be redeveloped with a truly Midtown mix of uses including thousands of units of housing, millions of square feet of commerce, interstate transit and more parkland (12-16 acres) than any Downtown development could hope to provide. Five teams are to participate in the competition to design this project.


As the above rendering illustrates, this redev is meant to create a new planned focal point on the West Side of the island's Midtown to balance the affluent East Side developments (much as the World Trade Center was programmed to do for Downtown when it opened in the early 1970s).

Bounding this project to the West is the the old High Line, site of a new deconstructionist conflation of parkland and industrial viaduct to be undertaken by Diller Scofidio and Renfro. Can't wait to visit this area again in ten years...may be a pretty hot little place if it keeps going at this rate.