Posted on Thursday October 22nd by Alex Lessard-Pilon | 116
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- Jay Walder, New York’s transit chief, suggests in an interview that Gotham should experiment with off-peak subway fares. An economist runs some hypothetical numbers and finds that off-hours discounts might reduce the average price of a subway ride by 23%. (Streetsblog)
- Pilot programs are underway in California to provide electricity consumers with “comparative home energy information”–that is, ratings that show how their consumption stacks up against their neighbors’. Funny thing though–peer pressure really works. A software maker claims that nationwide implementation could be the equivalent of taking six million cars off the road. (LA Times)
- Environmentalists are challenging a Chicago firm building a wind farm in the Appalachians on the grounds that it poses a danger to the Indiana bat, an endangered species. Apparently, the turbines cause barotrauma, which “creates low-pressure zones that cause the bats’ tiny lungs to hemorrhage.” Bat experts will decide. (WaPo)
- Cities like Portland, Austin, and Denver might be lauded for their transit systems, art scenes and bicycle cultures, but the urban policies that foster those climates might depend on populations being homogeneous. The author summarizes it as “White Flight writ large.” (New Geography)
- Don’t know the difference between light and heavy rail? This primer on the rail continuum will help. Of course, this nomenclature is for American trains. When you talk European trains, some things inevitably get lost in translation. (Greater Greater Washington)
- Peak hydro? As glaciers melt, hydroelectric power–the world’s most widely-used source of renewable energy–might become even more productive in the short term, but the long-term risks are extreme. A few decades from now, hydro plants and agricultural communities alike will be feeling the strain of depleted water sources. (Reuters)
- A 61-year-old man, 8 or 9 beers deep, took off from Proctor, MN’s Keyboard Lounge in his motorized La-Z-Boy and crashed it into a parked car. Cops described the chair, which can travel 15-20 miles per hour, as “quite decked out.” (Star Tribune)
- In the future, our architecture will all be insane–at least, according to this image gallery which includes vertical farm shaped like a dragonfly’s wing, a skyscraper with floors that rotate at the owner’s command, a “Cybertecture Egg,” a “Cobra Tower” and an underwater luxury hotel. (HuffPost)
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:45 pm
In most of Connecticut, you can look out across Long Island Sound about twenty miles and see Long Island. And not just see, it, but make out buildings, beaches, houses, etc. What would this thing look like off the coast of California? Four stories high, and then probably with terminal buildings on top of that? This has as much a chance of getting past NIMBY-ism as would the same project getting built off the coast of Long Island. No shot.
Though the desalinization and electricity generation aspects of this plan seem like a decent enough idea to help cities with overtaxed resources in certain areas of the world, the airport is pretty worthless.