Monthly archives: February, 2008

Painted Bike Lanes: More harm than good?

DPW is scheduling a public meeting to discuss the implementations of bike lanes on New York and Michigan Streets. This seems like a good thing, but are painted bike lanes safe, or do they just give bikers the illusion of safety? Frequently linked Streetsblog seems to thing the latter. Their solution is physically separated bike …

Randomly Miscellaneous

After a bit of a dry period, quite a few interesting items have come out in the last few days. Urban Times Newsletter continues to rock my world. The articles on the web are nice, but I encourage everyone to try to find the print copy available at various locations downtown. I even read the …

Local Sustainability Conference tomorrow

This blog has been a bit lax on the reporting of upcoming conferences and events. I intend to make amends. Perhaps I need to add an events feed on the right side of the blog like on Streetsblog? Please let me know if this is of interest to you and I’ll see what I can …

Amtrak Ridership is Up…

So let’s cut the funding. This video from CBS News does a good job of explaining the predicament of passenger rail in the United States. The figures near the end of the piece show some stark numbers: Amtrak receives 1.4 billion dollars per year (the same as it received in 1980), compared to 14.5 billion …

IndyGo Express Bus Exceeding Expectations

Or, “words that start with ‘ex’”. Anyways, it has to be seen as a positive sign that the Fishers-to-Indy express bus has been successful. 500 trips a day may not sound like much, but that’s 500 less cars on the road. Also, the demand will allow IndyGo to look in to expanding to other areas. …

Streetcars

A group known as “Downtown Indianapolis Streetcar Corp.” has quietly formed, and look to study possible routes. Of course, funding will be a tremendous hurdle, but at least people are looking into it. In other IBJ news, they’ve posted an article about Casa Verde. It’s good to see them get some publicity. This may be …

Thinking outside the box

The Chicago-based Where blog has an interesting and provocative post up concerning the sustainability of cities. In it, he mentions a new project in Madrid called the Air Tree. This project has to be seen to believed. This type of project can help give even hope to a long-term sustainability pessimist like yours truly. Humans …