Tea Party fights to protect sprawl in Fresno, CA.

Fresno City Council Slams the Brakes on BRT | Streetsblog Capitol Hill: "But Barker said the system had become a target of local sprawl developers who allied themselves with Tea Party activists. The real target of the opposition, she says, wasn’t BRT but a general plan adopted by the city in 2012 that called for dramatically limiting sprawl and promoting walkable development in urban areas. Beefing up transit was critical to the proposal, and last night some elected leaders indicated they thought the two-year-old plan needed to be overhauled."

Humans are not "in charge" of the biosphere

Pro-growth agents promote the idea that humans always succeed and will solve climate change. The implication is that there is no need for activism, someone will take care of it.

Resource Insights: Is "the environment" now obsolete?: "But, we humans are not "in charge" of the biosphere. We are only competing and cooperating with various parts of it in a struggle to survive and thrive. Isn't it obvious by now that the biosphere does not always do what we want it to do and only what we want it to do? It's as if the law of unintended consequences has never occurred to Ellis.

Given that we know now that all organisms try to remake the biosphere to their liking, this should make us far less confident that we can make everything turn out just fine for humans. Keep in mind that we face a bewildering and essentially incalculable array of actors with whom we are forced sometimes to fight and sometimes to cooperate. In fact, we cannot even know what all of them are and probably are only familiar with a small sliver of all that lives. Our knowledge of the biosphere and the Earth is not just imperfect, it is wildly imperfect. If we're so smart, why didn't we avoid changing the climate, devastating the fisheries, degrading the soil through rapid erosion, and lacing the air, water and soil with toxic chemicals in the first place?"

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Cars are major contributors to green house gases

High Country News: "As one might expect, most of the extra suburban emissions come from transportation. America’s suburbs, especially those in the West, were designed and built with the automobile in mind, making residents prisoners of their cars. Walking or biking from one’s cul-de-sac to work in the urban core can be a harrowing experience, and in some places virtually impossible. Even when progressive metros like Denver expand the public transit web out into the ‘burbs, it’s not always easy to get from home to the bus stop without driving, and if you’re driving to the bus stop, why not just keep going all the way to work?"



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Not much snow in Tahoe as drought continues

Sunny Sierra raises chilling drought fears - SFGate: "The state's frozen water supply, as snow is known to water-resources officials, is 19 percent of normal for this time of year, according to electronic measurements taken across the Sierra. This is the water that is going to be used to irrigate millions of acres of farmland and quench the thirst of many of California's 38 million people when it melts in the spring."

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Tech money being used to create #publictransit apartheid in San Francisco

Dystopia by the Bay - NYTimes.com: "Here, transportation segregation is on the rise because you can’t rely on the public system. And when you put the working poor and middle class out of sight, you put them out of mind. The sleek fleet of Google-bound buses and black über-taxis is a market response to a costly, unreliable, unpleasant transit system."

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Free parking isn't free, it's #autosprawlsubsidy

Streetsblog San Francisco: "Don’t get me wrong — the fact that private shuttles are illegally using Muni stops without paying anything for it is unjust and unsustainable, as Monday’s protestors rightly called out. But those specific problems can be addressed by devoting more curb space to transit — both public and private — the vast majority of which is currently devoted to free, subsidized personal car storage. The SFMTA’s plans to convert car parking to shuttle stops and establish a private shuttle fee system are a step in the right direction."

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Car columnist sees the need for public transit

San Jose Mercury News: "More and more car makers are equipping their cars with more electronic gadgets and gizmos than I have in my home. One recently bragged about their "5G" connectivity and how it will allow people to basically turn their car into their living room/office/entertainment room. Is this really a good thing? I don't think it is.

...All of the technology in a modern car seems to be dumbing down drivers in my opinion. We really don't need safer vehicles; we need safer drivers. I doubt that we as a society will be able to put the lid back on the Pandora's Box of technological advances, or force people who are used to texting, eating, reading, doing their hair and shaving, etc. to stop these activities on the go. So maybe, just maybe the answer is to make public, mass transit more appealing."