Cities and Countries

Last week, the Mayor's Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability released its newest report, "Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City" [PDF]. In a breezy 22 pages, it lays out some strategies to maximize electric vehicle purchases by so-called early adopters in the next five years. 

A little end-of-day action from the Streetsblog Flickr pool, courtesy of BeyondDC: Here's Denver's 16th Street Shuttle, also called the MallRide. Check out those three low-floor doors for easy-on, easy-off boarding and alighting.

The horrific death of a 44-year-old resident of South Miami has enraged cyclists across South Florida, igniting a debate over street safety in a region historically dominated by devil-may-care drivers.

Delhi currently has separated cycle tracks along its BRT corridors. Image: BRT_Delhi/Flickr On Monday, we reported on Delhi’s decision to install bike lanes on all its major roads — an intriguing piece of news from a developing world metropolis where private motoring appears poised to potentially overwhelm the city’s streets. We noted that it seemed … Continued

The Obama administration's warning that the Bay Area has jeopardized federal stimulus funding for its Oakland Airport Connector project -- a story Streetsblog San Francisco has been following for months -- could have national consequences for other urban transit proposals that risk harming low-income riders, civil rights and transit advocates predicted yesterday.

Delhi, home to over 12 million people and the seat of India's national government, is widely considered to have the most dangerous traffic in the world. As the Guardian wrote recently, traffic safety in Delhi basically consists of "good horns, good brakes, good luck." Nationally, crashes in India killed more than 130,000 people -- 85 percent of whom were pedestrians and cyclists -- in 2007 alone.

In case you missed it in Friday's headlines, here's a video from Copenhagenize with some inspiration for this cold spell we've been having. The video shows Copenhageners -- lots of 'em -- making their way through the January snow. 

While in Copenhagen to film the Danish capital's world-beating bike infrastructure, Streetfilms' Elizabeth Press caught up with urban planner extraordinaire Jan Gehl for a brief, canal-side chat. In this clip, Gehl explains how cycling and transit fit within the city's sustainability agenda, and why "unnecessary transportation" threatens the global climate.

Tens of thousands of people from nearly every nation on earth have descended on Copenhagen this month for the UN climate summit. As the delegates try to piece together a framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they're also absorbing lessons from one of the world's leading cities in sustainable transportation. In Copenhagen, fully 37 percent of commute trips are made by bike, and mode share among city residents alone is even higher.