London

Robin Chase is the co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar and the founder and CEO of GoLoco, a ride-sharing service that uses social networks like Facebook to connect people who want to carpool. A Harvard University Loeb Fellow, Chase is an authority on the use of wireless and mesh network technology as it applies to transportation. She'll be giving a talk at Baruch College, 151 E. 25th St., Room 759, at 9:30am on October 19th. There she'll discuss some of the ways wireless technology can facilitate near-term reduction of CO2 emissions. What follows are some excerpts from a telephone conversation last week with Sarah Goodyear.

It wasn't your typical congestion pricing forum, but last night about 50 people got to hear the pros and cons of the Bloomberg plan debated in a relaxed, informal setting, with instructions from the moderators to keep drinking.

The City of Westminster is one of 32 London boroughs, just west of the city center.

The Urbanist Musketeers: Alex Garvin, Jan Gehl and Fred Kent in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sept. 30, 2006.

David Haskell, executive director of the Forum for Urban Design, and organizer of last week's New York Bike-Share Project demonstration in Soho, says it's time for New York City to ditch the London model and take a closer look at the traffic-reduction techniques Paris has implemented without congestion pricing. An op/ed in today's New York Times focuses on one aspect of the Paris approach, bike-sharing:

Transport for London is out today with its fifth annual Congestion Charging Impacts Monitoring Report. If you've never seen any of the previous reports, it's worth a look. The 279-page document -- you can download the whole thing here -- provides a remarkably detailed assessment of the overall performance of London's surface transportation system (Compare it to the DOT section of Mayor's Management Report here in New York City and you will understand how much catching up we have to do).

Jacobs Babtie, one of the UK's leading consultants in sustainable transport, is banning its own employees from commuting on bicycles or motorbikes after declaring them too dangerous. On the company website, where there is actually a picure of a young boy signaling a right turn on his bicycle, Jacobs boasts that it has an "impressive track record in the rapidly growing field of sustainable transport." This is surely a weak point in that track record. The Times of London reports (via TreeHugger):

A Thermoplastic bike stencil is the star of this short public service advertisement produced for London city government's transportation agency.