Climate Change

"People are addicted to their cars," said John Street, the Mayor of Philadelphia, at a panel on transport yesterday during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. He was identifying what he saw as the major challenge for cities striving to make their transport systems more environmentally sustainable.

Fearing that London's ever-worsening traffic congestion would drive industry to other European cities, business leaders first broached the topic of congestion charging for the British capital, according to plan architect Mayor Ken Livingstone.

A delegation of approximately 30 members of the Campaign for New York's Future are traveling to Albany today to meet with more than two dozen state legislators and other public officials. Today's trip follows a series of meetings on Monday in which key coalition leaders joined Mayor Bloomberg to call for urgent State action on the Mayor's key PlaNYC initiatives. Today's press release (care of Howard Rubenstein) lays out some of Bloomberg's key legislative goals up in Albany:

Michael Bloomberg (front row, fourth from right) with other mayors at the C40 Summit 

From a press release that just came across the Streetsblog transom:

The Financial Times reports that China's cities will participate in this year's World Car Free Day. These actions have a measureable effect. A recent study found that when Beijing ordered 800,000 cars off the roads for three days last year, local nitrogen oxide air pollution fell by 40 per cent.

Given that it was only a few months ago that Mayor Michael Bloomberg could be heard saying, "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here," his pitch for a whole new set of progressive transportation policies at last week's meeting of the Regional Plan Association was all the more remarkable:

 Beer good, ethanol bad