Cities, Transportation & Climate Impact

This is an intreresting report on the top 100 cities in the US and their position with respect to their impact on the climate.

The purpose of the data in the report, derived largely from location-based data generated from smartphones, is intended to serve as high-level information for cities aiming to explore policy directions to reduce greenhouse gases.

Reducing car use, or at least single-occupancy trips, is the most obvious path to an improved climate index score.

The top three?

• New York City, for its density of public transit, especially subways
• San Francisco, largely for dominance of bikes and pedestrians
• Madison, Wisconsin

What do we need to do? Be created and kick in a plan to marginalize single-use aspects of our transportation infrastructure, especially parking lots.

And as cities explore the many ways to eliminate car trips from their transportation footprint, they should think creatively about the transportation networks and infrastructure they already have.

“Any move away from a kind of single-use urban design strategy is a good one,” said Christopher Hawthorne, chief design officer for the city of Los Angeles, as he encouraged multiple uses for parking lots, allowing them to transition into package or food delivery staging areas.

“We no longer have the luxury of giving over territory of the city to spaces that only have one use. And certainly a parking structure, or parking lot, is part of that,” said Hawthorne.

Lots of questions, but not a lot of answers … yet.