Minimalism is good.
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Thanks to Delaney!
Month: April 2016
Pedestrians In Paris To Get 50% Of Street Space
Paris has had decades of extremely bad traffic and there’s no obvious solution: other than get rid the traffic. Infrastructure that encourages car use makes traffic worse while also debilitating cities as a whole. So Paris is doing what most places are afraid to try: giving the streets back to people.
“Parisians are finding out that what were once admirable squares of theirs are now just intersections,” says Jean Macheras, the Paris delegate of the French Transportation Users Assocation.
The shift started with the Place de la République—until 2013, it was also a busy road, but now it’s a pedestrian plaza planted with trees, lined with benches, and filled with people. The transformation was so popular that the city decided to keep going.
Each of the new designs give pedestrians at least 50% of the space in the square, taking away lanes of traffic even though each of the streets is a major route in the city. At the Place de la Bastille, the square will reconnect with a curb on one side, creating a new green space for people to sit. At the Place de la Madeleine, trees will mark off more pedestrian space and a new weekly market will be added.
Underwater Art Gallery
Art galleries are great cultural institutions and seeing one underwater is magnificent. With each installation to the underwater gallery it gets better to explore and better for life. One of the key aspects of this gallery is that it is home to a whole ecosystem.
For sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, the ocean is more than a muse — it’s an exhibition space and museum. Taylor creates sculptures of human forms and mundane life on land and sinks them to the ocean floor, where they are subsumed by the sea and transformed from lifeless stone into vibrant habitats for corals, crustaceans and other creatures. The result: Enigmatic, haunting and colorful commentaries about our transient existence, the sacredness of the ocean and its breathtaking power of regeneration.
Change The City, Not Your Fashion
Toronto runs ad campaigns that blame victims for being hit by car drivers, the campaign is so bizarre because it says it comes to pedestrian fashion choice. You’d think the city would learn that blaming victims because of what they wear is a bad idea (see Slut Walk for a previous example of this). To be clear, drivers are at fault in the vast majority of collisions.
Blaming the victims never works because they aren’t the people causing problems. So what Toronto should do is change the actual layout of the city. The Vision Zero Initiative is all about ways cities can modify policy and infrastructure to ensure that pedestrian deaths equal zero every year. And it works. The graph above is from Stockholm’s success and now other cities are using Vision Zero to reduce the number of people needlessly murdered by car drivers.
[S]everal studies have proven that so-called high-visibility clothing does not, in fact, help drivers pay attention to pedestrians and cyclists. A 2014 study by the University of Bath tested the impact on a wide range of cyclist outfits—including one that said POLICE—on driver behavior for 5,690 passing vehicles.
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In fact, the only thing that is proven to make pedestrians safer is better street design.
It’s Time To Divest
The use of coal to generate electricity is coming to an end, and one of the many reasons coal’s time is up is thanks to divestment. Divestment of fossil fuels has been argued on university campuses for years and started largely as a moral argument that we shouldn’t profit off the reckless destruction of the panel. Since then the movement has evolved to the world of large investment companies because it also makes economic sense.
As global consciousness of the threat of climate change increases there is more and more reason to not invest in the fossil fuel industry. What’s more is that the low price of oil and the successes of renewable energy sources has made the case for divestment stronger.
The divestment movement shares a name and even a bit of the same emotional urgency as the campaign decades ago to get business to pull out of South Africa to press for change in the country’s apartheid system.
“I think that divestment can play the role of accelerating the development that we really need — we really need as fast as possible to get the carbon out of the energy system and divestment is one tool of doing it,†Reverend Henrik Grape of the Church of Sweden said on the sidelines of a conference in the European Parliament. The Church of Sweden decided in 2008 to get rid of its fossil fuel assets.
The movement today can count heavyweight investors like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, insurance giants Axa and Allianz, major European universities, cities and churches among its supporters. All have made some form of commitment to pull cash from coal assets and, in some cases, other fossil fuels too.
Thanks to Delaney!