The Ultimate Questions - courtesy of Old Spice

Garden-sharing! There's an app for that, too :)

Originally posted to the CEP blog, Fruit from the Tree.

I know how many of you CEPsters secretly (or not all secretly!) want to get your hands dirty with your very own little plot of urban garden. I can taste the organic tomatoes already! Many of you may even have done, or will do, your Senior Projects about urban gardening.

One of the major stumbling blocks for tapping into the public's desire for urban gardening is the lack of available space; most P-Patch gardens in Seattle, like the one near where I live in Eastlake, for instance, have a year-long waiting list. By this time, for many aspiring gardeners, the initial passion is gone and the effort is wasted.

Thanks to the efforts of some smart web developers, however, we now have Craigslist-like interactive directories of available garden space for the taking in Seattle and many other cities.


For instance,  a simple search on We Patch reveals at least a dozen available plots within two miles of the UW campus. In addition to listing available spaces, it creates a powerful and easy-to-use community of fellow gardeners, connecting landowners who have extra yardspace to eager gardeners ready to plant. Other sites like Urban Gardenshare allow you to create a Facebook-like profile to narrow down your preferences and find the exact right plot for you.

Portland's Yardshare does the same thing in CEP's sister city. Even the City of Santa Monica has recognized the long wait-times for new gardeners to its programs and created a garden-sharing registry for gardeners to sidestep the bureaucracy and get established in their plots on their own.

For those of you still looking for Senior Projects, or really anyone interested in urban food systems, I would highly recommend reaching out to these organizations that could be real assets to CEP!

Institutional Car-Sharing Takes Off!

What do the New York City Dept. of Transportation and the BMW headquarters have in common?

Both are on the cutting edge of institutions that use car-sharing, in which drivers reserve a shared fleet of vehicles for a flat administrative fee, to save both budget $ and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Car-sharing differs from traditional rental car agencies and carpooling in several ways:

• Carsharing is not limited by office hours
• Reservation, pickup, and return is all self-service
• Vehicles can be rented by the minute, by the hour, as well as by the day
• Users are members and have been pre-approved to drive (background driving checks have been performed and a payment mechanism has been established)
• Vehicle locations are distributed throughout the service area, and often located for access by public transport.
• Insurance and fuel costs are included in the rates.
• Vehicles are not serviced (cleaning fueling) after each use, although certain programs such as Car2Go continuously clean and fuel their fleet

In short, car-sharing is a low-cost, low-maintenance, and low-emissions of way of getting access to cars to people only when they need it. In most cases, car-sharing has thrived in dense urban areas where access to walking, transit, and biking is widespread. For urban residents who need just the occasional one-off car trip, there is a huge cost-savings versus car ownership and the high insurance, maintenance, and purchase cost it entails.

In the US, the most successful car-sharing company has been ZipCar, which claims to remove 15-20 personal vehicles from the roads for every car-sharing vehicle it puts out and reduce an average of 5,500 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for the average user. 

While individual drivers are the fuel that powers companies like ZipCar, institutions with larger user bases and even greater potential cost savings have started to catch on. This change from personal to institutional use could be the catalyst for ZipCar to become an economic engine in its own right, with a political influence to rival a Ford or a GM.

According to GOOD, New York City's Dept. of Transportation is beginning to replace its former in-house fleet with car-sharing to cut costs in the wake of the city's budget problems. About 300 department employees will share access to 25 ZipCars for work-related trips, saving the department $500,000 annually. Nearly all of the Manhattan-based cars will be Toyota Priuses. 

New York will join Washington DC and Philadelphia, where this car-sharing program has already been successful. The project will likely spread to other NYC municipal departments, further cementing the city's newfound green reputation. Mayor Bloomberg, you're all right!

According to Inhabitat, BMW is implementing a similar car-sharing program at its own headquarters in Munich, Germany. Cars will be available to all BMW employees and the general public at costs ranging from $22-45 per hour, which is not as expensive as it sounds, considering some of the available models run $100,000. If all goes well, the program could expand to all of BMW's facilities across Europe. A car-sharing platform that can rent out ANY model of Beamer any time, day or night? I could sign up for that.

What are the wider implications of institutional car-sharing? What we have long known as "the company car" may be soon obsolete, replaced with a more efficient, publicly available, and sustainable alternative.

SF Taxi Cabs the First Wave of EV Revolution in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area has been at the forefront of the electric vehicle (EV) innovation wave that has gotten major venture capitalists involved on an unprecedented scale. Back in May, I wrote about the SF-based firm Better Place and their (well-funded) project to bring $1.4 billion of investment to create a neighborhood level electric charging station network state-wide. There's also an established "electric highway" of EV charging stations on Hwy. 101 designed to service exclusively the Tesla Roadster, however limited that project may be in scope.

One of the first, and most highly visible, manifestations of the EV revolution in San Francisco will come in the form of a fully-electric fleet of taxi cabs throughout the city, funded by the US Dept. of Transportation. Over the next three years, four battery charging stations will be placed across the city. These stations will swap the taxi's batteries in as little as 45 seconds. To be practical for wide application, the charging stations must be efficient and lightning-quick; no taxi cab company in its right mind would let its vehicles sit idle for hours charging under the dominant EV charger technology in place in most cities today.

The project is a replication of an earlier system Better Place executed in Tokyo, using one of that megacity's largest taxi cab companies, Nihon Kotsu. The taxicabs in that experimental project drove over 25,000 miles using fully electric power from the Better Place charging stations.

This remarkable project implementation from Better Place is just one more reason why Inhabitat calls San Francisco "set to lead the electric vehicle revolution."

Via: Inhabitat

George Takei: To All the Douchebags of the World....

Another great short video from the Trevor Project, a national LGBT organization working to prevent suicide among gay youth.

George Takei, of Start Trek fame, takes on the now infamous anti-gay Arkansas school board member Clint McCance.

"I predict that sometime soon, you will find yourself in the headlines again...this time with a rent boy from a South American country. And when that happens, I sincerely hope you do not kill yourself, Mr. McCance, because no one should ever wish that on someone else."

The "It Gets Better Project" - BROADWAY EDITION

A more musical take on Dan Savage's groundbreaking "It Gets Better Project" to combat gay teen suicides.

Hope you enjoy!



Helen, thanks for sharing!

Great Local Press for Co-Ops and CEP!

One of my favorite aspects of CEP, the Community, Environment, and Planning program at the University of Washington, was its emphasis on project-based learning. I have told many of my friends and colleagues this before, but I will reiterate: without CEP's focus on applied learning and planning education in the field, I would not have landed the job that I have or gotten nearly as much out of my UW education. By working on Evergreen Fleets for a full year as my Senior Project, I learned how project management, networking, and interdisciplinary knowledge could be brought together in real time. But of course, Evergreen Fleets was not the only amazing project to spring forth out of CEP in 2010. Many of my fellow students created incredible works in fields as diverse as bicycle commuting, education, urban gardening, co-operative business, transportation, and student activism on campus. Today's post shines a light on one of the most successful and innovative projects to come out of CEP in many years.

Last year, it seemed like the idea of forming co-ops had swept across CEP by storm and were more popular than ever as a way of putting diverse projects into action. A piece in Crosscut, the top online local news site, by UW Communications student Shane Clyburn, focuses on the efforts of CEPsters in the growth of co-ops in the Seattle area. In particular, the intersection between CEP, co-ops, and larger institutions like HFS and UW could be the way forward in promoting environmental sustainability and social justice from the ground up. The UW Student Food Co-op, founded by CEP students Matt Steele and Michelle Harvey, is mentioned as an exemplar of what is to come!

Seattle is a vibrant place for cooperative businesses. The city is home to large and successful co-ops such as REI, PCC Natural Markets, and Group Health, plus credit unions such as BECU and SMCU. The fact that the UW, the largest organization in the city, doesn’t address this at all shows a great disconnect between the institution and the city it serves.

This past weekend was the second annual SLICE conference. Standing for Strengthening Local Independent Cooperatives Everywhere, SLICE brought many to Seattle to discuss the growing cooperative movement and what should be done to strengthen existing co-ops and incubate new ones. City Council President Richard Conlin spoke briefly about Seattle’s co-op scene and voiced his support for the movement.

Students at the UW are forming a cooperative cafe to provide healthy food at an affordable price for students. They will be working with local farmers and other co-ops in the area to supply the café. The co-op will also provide an educational opportunity for its members about cooperative business models and sustainable food systems.

The UW could get behind this movement and offer classes in cooperative economics and cooperative business. The opportunities for students to find internships and develop relationships with co-ops in Seattle is tremendous. The university should take the initiative and become a leader in fostering cooperatives in Seattle and beyond.