Plenty Magazine has a post on green social networking sites. I'm not much of a social networker, at least not actively, but I did find Tree-Nation pretty interesting. The idea is not so much social networking as to raise money to plant eight million trees in Niger against desertification. For between 10 and 75 Euros you can pay for a tree to be planted. The community side does seem to have some weight, as I gathered from looking at their Digg style eco-news pages with various stories and sprinkling of votes.
Sphere: Related ContentFriday, November 02, 2007
Ideas - Part One: Realistic, humane public transit for extreme climates
This is a musey post, you've been warned. I haven't posted much in months, mainly because I've been ridiculously busy trying to pay my bills. Now my seasonal job is ending and I ditched my office gig because it turned out sitting at a computer all day wasn't so great for me. As a result, I've had a bit more time to not only think, but also to write. Some of the things I've been thinking about will follow in separate posts. First:
I live in a cold city. I recently bought a car (part of the unhappy bill paying stressy time) because transportation to one of my jobs was entirely unavailable and a car was required as shelter, and for the other job public transportation was unreliable and would mean two hours commuting time everyday or more if the bus didn't show up as expected. I don't like to drive. I don't like having to pay several thousand dollars a year for a hunk of metal and plastic. So I thought long and irritatedly about what was lacking in my local public transporation setup. Several things come to mind. The industrial sector of my city is pathetically underserviced by buses. Two buses make their way up to that area throughout the day, and their main hub is a mall which really isn't in the industrial sector itself but somewhat east of it and across at least two major roadways from it. If the bus for the route near my office didn't show up, it would be a four km walk to that mall hub. 4km takes somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour to walk, and in winter, it's not going to work. It's unpleasant to be outdoors in below zero (Celsius) temperatures, never mind the -30 temperatures we sometimes get mid-winter. Pack on a cold North wind and plus five can feel hypothermia-inducing. Plus, walking in this area often means doing without a sidewalk and pedestrian crossings, or worse, not knowing where, if any, pedestrian crossing for a major freeway is located. After quite a bit of waiting with no bus shelter for blocks around, one would feel compelled to trudge to the bus hub, which would stretch an hour long trip into two hours or more. No, this was no system to rely on to get you to work and home again.
It annoyed me a great deal, because making the commute might almost make sense because I could cut back my work day by $450 a month, or more than 2 hours a day if I didn't have my car. The trouble was, two hours on the bus was okay if it could be counted on to only be two hours and nothing more, and if I didn't have to wait interminable minutes in the cold or heat in an isolated - especially after regular business hours - area of the city.
A couple of ideas about improvement0 came to mind. Why is there no hub in this isolated, grey, unfriendly, yet huge employment centre of the city? There should be at least one, if not two transportation hubs in that area. In fact, that entire area should be gradually converted over to more mixed uses. If the city isn't keen to build or rent space just for people to wait for the bus, they could do something more creative, like actually make a fitness centre in the area and have the hub merely attached. Maybe that's just too crazy, but I'm sure there are some people in that area who would use the fitness facilities directly after or before work and avoid one of the worst traffic times while getting in a workout. Alternately, rather than have a hub, the bus system could be changed up to guarantee more frequent and reliable coverage in the area. What I have in mind is rather than using huge, mostly empty buses to sparsely cover the area every half hour (if all goes well), smaller buses could be used to do more frequent trips that don't stretch across the city but only throughout the industrial area and starting and ending at the mall hub. The bottom line here is that it borders on the ridiculous to expect people to wait in extreme heat or cold, with no shade or shelter for an unreliable, infrequent bus to show up in one of the key employment hubs of a city. I'm wondering if there are better systems set up specifically minding cold and hot temperatures anywhere in the world, particularly in smaller cities like my own that might not have so much money for public transit.
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