Source: Mother Nature Network

By the middle of this century, there will be as many people living in cities worldwide as there are alive on the planet today. Sustainability, then, is first and foremost an urban project, and I’m always a little surprised to find that there’s a lingering divide between hardcore cleantechies and urban design geeks. You still meet renewable energy obsessives who obsess over the next generation of solar technology but have never given much thought to mixed-use development, and there remain complete-street fans and bike-lane zealots unaware that solar power’s now vering on cost-competitive with coal and nuclear. (And don’t get me started on the hardcore climate activists who don’t pay any attention to cities and how they work at all.)

Anyway, for all these reasons and more, I understood immediately why the good folks at TED decided to award their TED Prize to “The City 2.0” – the first time ever the $100,000 award has gone an innovative concept rather than an innovator. “The City 2.0,” the announcement explains, “is the city of the future . . . a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.”

We hope to see many of you at the Launch party of our Green Neighborhood Plan for Plateau East. Register by April 8th!

Several sites in the Plateau East are working to promote active transportation (walking, cycling and others) and increase the quality of life in the Plateau East.

The Green Neighborhood Plan proposes hundreds of courses of action in order to guide the district and the actors in the progressive development of the Plateau Area Green East.

Discover the upcoming changes for the neighborhood. See how our neighborhood will change!

> Project News: Read the Green Neighborhood Newsletter Plateau East. March 2011

The Green, Active, and Healthy Neighbourhoods project in the Plateau-Est, or Green Plateau-Est, aims to redesign streets and public spaces in order to prioritize walking, cycling, and other modes of active transportation. The project, launched in June 2010, involves a series of participatory activities for citizens during which design solutions for the following priority sites will be proposed and discussed.

> Mont-Royal Avenue East
> Key destinations for neighbourhood youth
> The Masson district
> The STM and Ford district

The project is made up of three phases (Understanding, Exploring, and Deciding). The Green Neighbourhood Plan for the Plateau-Est will be launched in Phase three. The launch is scheduled for mid-april 2011; the exact date will be revealed soon.

A new way of designing cities – away from the car-dependent suburban model – is urgently needed as gasoline gets more and more expensive. TOD is a fancy way of saying: build housing near public transportation hubs.

Source: Caia Hagel, Future Living, Edition 9

Transit oriented developments (TOD) is not a term in Europe (editor’s note: or North America). Small geographical areas, surplus populations, and the unique opportunity after 1945 to “rebuild a bright new world” has made vertical, multi use, mixed income, train dependent, often architecturally innovative building, a natural phenomenon. A similar phenomenon is true in Asia.

In Australia, the traditional urban organisation has followed the “American Dream” model of the 1950s. That is horizontal sprawl across a vast landscape, resulting today in either leafy suburbs featuring large houses and large cars, two or more to a family, which link them to the city via congested highways; or, more detrimentally, suburb ghettos where poverty and social problems resist growth. The British colony cities of North America, Australia and New Zealand were built around dependence on cars, gasoline and oil, and homogeneity.

But this model is proving itself obsolete. On the one side, long traffic jams and commute time, high oil prices and ecological mandates have made the cost of living of this old model both economically unviable and ecologically unsustainable. On the other, perpetuating isolated pockets of lower income and culturally specific living circumstances isolates an aspect of society that through greater integration can foster movement, interaction, safety and prosperity. So what Europeans and Asians have had to implement to survive population explosion is catching on in Australia as a future thinking model of better living.

TOD is the proposed answer to this. They are multi use, mixed income vertical buildings whose axes are a well serviced rail line and communal green spaces that encourage walking, cycling, community interaction, and diversity.

It is a frequent criticism of sustainability that it tries to make people feel guilty for moving to the suburbs. The critics point out that when people move to the suburbs, they are making a rational economic decision. After all, you can buy more house with more green space for less money in the suburbs.

However, what doesn’t get calculated in the city vs. suburbs decision is the long-term environmental cost of operating one or more cars so that you can live in the suburbs and drive to work, drive to the supermarket, drive to see your friends, etc.

If Montreal can offer residents green space that is very close to their front or back door, then the city can achieve its goal of becoming the “superior” place to live.

Source: The Canadian Press

And in Montreal’s trendy Plateau Mont-Royal borough, Mayor Luc Ferrandez is doing his best to bring a little more country into the city.

“We’re looking at streets and asking ourselves, ‘Is it really useful’,” he said in a recent interview. “We’ve identified about 20 streets that are not useful, that can be taken out and retransformed into green spaces.”

Concerns about the environment have topped opinion polls for the last five to 10 years, says Pascoal Gomes, a spokesman for Montreal’s Urban Ecology Centre.

But in ever-increasing numbers, people — and cities — are acting on those concerns.

“I think people are waking up to the fact that while we might still be OK, our children and grandchildren might not be,” said Beate Bowron, a consultant with the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Many measures probably don’t seem that radical.

Traffic calming — the rerouting of vehicles onto major arteries and away from neighbourhoods — is one. Narrowing streets to dissuade cars is another. More trees is yet another.

“Generally speaking, people have finally, from a planning point of view, started to look at a street as something beyond just moving traffic,” Bowron said.

And not just vehicle traffic but pedestrian and bicycle traffic as well.

“Everybody is thinking about streets as multi-use,” she explained.

“Smaller streets have a huge role to play in the neighbourhood, not as thoroughfares necessarily but as a place where people meet and where you push your baby carriage and you have your kid learn to ride a bicycle.”

The increased use of neighbourhood thoroughfares is something that’s furrowed Ferrandez’s brow for quite some time.

When he and his Projet Montreal team swept into power in the Plateau district in last fall’s municipal elections, he vowed to do something about it.

His full-court press for the environment has had its critics — including merchants who worry the repurposing of streets will deprive their customers of parking spaces, and residents who will have to walk farther from parking spaces to their destinations.

“Parking is very sensitive,” acknowledges Ferrandez, an avid cyclist who occasionally rents a car to go cross-country skiing.

But he suggests the end does justify the means.

“What we’re trying to give to the city is a quality of life that is not just on a par with the suburbs but superior,” he says.

He wants to eliminate the main excuse for moving to the suburbs — the city’s too noisy, it’s not safe and it’s not green enough.

Ferrandez says there has to be a big push in the Plateau because it has one of the highest population densities in Canada, possibly only beaten by east Vancouver because it has more high-rises.

Besides traffic-calming measures, back-alley gardens are also on the agenda and the Plateau administration is repurposing some streets into green spaces, extending parks into such places as some cul-de-sacs.

“We want every citizen to be in contact with green spaces, not just a park that they walk to,” Ferrandez says of the ultimate goal.

Montreal has long been a stronghold of Bicycle use, but it could be stronger. In Amsterdam, more citizens use bikes than cars. Nearly 30 percent of Dutch commuters always travel by bicycle, and an additional 40 percent sometimes bike to work (Source, pdf). Montrealers use bikes less than 2% of the time.

Public policies that make biking more attractive are:

1. dedicated bike paths
2. dedicated parking for bikes
3. full integration with public transportation
4. education of motorists
5. the high cost of motoring through taxes, parking fees etc.

Source: SustainaBlog

The bicycle has many attractions as a form of personal transportation. It alleviates congestion, lowers air pollution, reduces obesity, increases physical fitness, does not emit climate-disrupting carbon dioxide, and is priced within the reach of the billions of people who cannot afford a car. Bicycles increase mobility while reducing congestion and the area of land paved over. Six bicycles can typically fit into the road space used by one car. For parking, the advantage is even greater, with 20 bicycles occupying the space required to park a car.

Few methods of reducing carbon emissions are as effective as substituting a bicycle for a car on short trips. A bicycle is a marvel of engineering efficiency, one where an investment in 22 pounds of metal and rubber boosts the efficiency of individual mobility by a factor of three. On my bike I estimate that I get easily 7 miles per potato. An automobile, which requires at least a ton of material to transport one person, is extraordinarily inefficient by comparison.

The bicycle is not only a flexible means of transportation; it is ideal in restoring a balance between caloric intake and expenditure. Regular exercise of the sort provided by cycling to work reduces cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis, and it strengthens the immune system.

Montreal’s Ecolo Cycles produces bicycles with electric motors. Technically, they are called “electricity-assisted bicycles” and the company is doing well, last year selling $1.5-million worth of electricity-assisted bicycles and scooters in Quebec alone.

The company is launching a new, fully loaded $3,000 electricity and pedal-powered scooter that has a range of 100 km and zips along urban streets at 32 km/h. Next year, after testing by Transport Canada, they will introduce two sporty electric scooters that will reach speeds of 70 km/h and 90 km/h.

So, it looks like this electric bike is quickly turning into a scooter!

Via: Canada.com

Bixi, the bike sharing/rental service has finally arrived in Montreal. You can rent bikes by the hour at over 300 self-service stations in Ville-Marie, Plateau-Mont-Royal and Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. Other stations will be available in Outremont, Sud-Ouest and Villeray–Saint-Michel if the first phase of the roll-out goes well this summer. Find a Bixi station near you.

To try the service at first, you can go to any station and insert a credit card/debt card to rent a bicycle for the hour or the day – just $5 for 24 hour access. Once you’re hooked, you should subscribe to the bike sharing service at the Bixi website. One year subscriptions are just $78; or you can opt to try it for 30 days, at $28.

The BIXI system has been honoured in TIME magazine’s list of the best inventions of 2008 and received the GOLD award for best product of 2009 in the Energy & Sustainability category of the Edison Best New Products Awards.

Toronto is looking into bringing Montreal’s Bike sharing service into town. Bixi officially launches in Montreal in the Spring of 2009 and promises to offer 2,400 bikes to share at 300 different stations located throughout Montreal.

Around 10am Oct. 24, a large flatbed truck pulled up to the southeast corner of Bloor and Spadina. As it unloaded seven sleek black-and-silver bikes, matching modular locking racks and a solar-power automated kiosk onto the street, a trio of workers dressed in matching red rain-jackets began demonstrating Montreal’s popular bike sharing system to onlookers. Bixi — a combination of bicycle and taxi — had peddled its way into town to show off its fancy new hardware to an envious cycling community.

“[This demonstration] is to give Torontonians a chance to see what a made in Canada bike share program looks like,” says Yvonne Bambrick, spokesperson for the Toronto Cyclists Union, who along with the Community Bicycle Network and Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation co-sponsored the event. “It’s pretty wild that it’s not just in Paris.”

Via Eye Weekly