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The Planetizen News Brief - 12/20/07

20 December 2007 - 7:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript
You probably can tell when you’re in a walkable area; there’s lots of shops, safe sidewalking space, and, well, people walking. But besides simply having those evident characteristics, what really makes a city walkable? Streetsblog recently reported an analysis of census data that sheds some light on the walkability of places. Using a database put together by a bike delivery service in Iowa called Bikes At Work, Incorporated, Streetsblog looked at the places with the highest percentages of people who walk to work. What they found was that almost all of the places that ranked the highest were centered around some sort of an institution, like a university or military site. These places tend to have high populations of residents living near the institutions. So it could be argued that having a college or a military academy makes a place walkable, technically. But it also should be argued that urban design plays a comparable, if not more important role in getting feet on the street.

Meanwhile, more and more cities across the U.S. are instituting programs that essentially kill two birds with one stone. Or maybe more appropriately, plant two seeds with one shovel by creating environmental cleanup and activism jobs that do the double duty of greening the city and fueling the economy by providing jobs. USA Today reports that cities like Richmond, California, Chicago, Illinois, and the Bronx in New York have created programs that train unemployed people to perform tasks such as solar panel installation, ecological restoration and hazardous waste cleanup. These cities have been able to create these opportunities by forming partnerships with employers and non-profits, and are receiving extra support from two recently passed Congressional bills that earmark more than $2 billion for city greening efforts like these job training programs. As more cities pick up on the trend, they are rapidly creating a new niche in the nation’s workforce that has been dubbed the green collar job.

And finally, plans to convert a sizable section of Pennsylvania’s Interstate 80 into a toll road were dealt a serious setback recently from the Federal Highway Administration. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Administration returned the state’s application to convert the 311-mile section of highway to a toll road, and questioning why the state thinks the conversion is even necessary. Pennsylvania was applying to be one of three states allowed to place tolls on interstate highways as a way to boost the state’s transportation coffers. They wanted to use the revenues to fund road building, bridge repairs and improvements to public transportation systems. The Federal Highway Administration, however, requires that all funds generated by tolls be used to fund improvements to the road being tolled. With this setback, many politicians are suggesting the state revisit the option of leasing the road, leaving the task of dealing with the governmental red tape in the hands of a private firm.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

The Determining Factor of Walkable Places

The Rise of The 'Green Collar' Job

Pennsylvania Toll Road Plan Hits Wall

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