The UK’s first people-powered VW Beetle has taken to the streets of Bristol in what has been hailed as a breakthrough in the drive to encourage sustainable power.

The Bio-Bug runs on methane gas generated during the sewage treatment process.

Waste flushed down the toilets of just 70 homes in Bristol is enough to power the Bio-Bug for a year, based on an annual mileage of 10,000 miles.

With support from the South West Regional Development Agency, GENeco, a Wessex Water-owned company, imported specialist equipment to treat gas generated at Bristol sewage treatment works in Avonmouth to power the VW Beetle in a way that doesn’t affect its performance.

Mohammed Saddiq, GENeco’s general manager, said he was confident that methane from sewage sludge could be used as an alternative energy source and was an innovative way of powering company vehicles.

He said: “Our site at Avonmouth has been producing biogas for many years which we use to generate electricity to power the site and export to the National Grid.

“With the surplus gas we had available we wanted to put it to good use in a sustainable and efficient way.

“We decided to power a vehicle on the gas offering a sustainable alternative to using fossil fuels which we so heavily rely on in the UK.

“If you were to drive the car you wouldn’t know it was powered by biogas as it performs just like any conventional car. It is probably the most sustainable car around.”

Countries including India and China use compressed natural gas (CNG) to power vehicles and a number of companies in the UK are now using CNG mainly to fuel buses and commercial vehicles. In Sweden, more than 11,500 vehicles already run on biomethane produced from sewage plants.

But using biogas from sewage sludge is yet to take off in the UK despite a significant amount being produced everyday at sewage plants around the country.

To use biogas as vehicle fuel without affecting vehicle performance or reliability the gas needs to be treated – a process called biogas upgrading. It involves carbon dioxide being separated from the biogas using specialist equipment.

If all the biogas produced at Avonmouth was converted to run cars it would avoid around 19,000 tonnes of CO₂.

GENeco believes that more gas will be produced at its Avonmouth site when the company embarks on its latest green venture to recycle food waste.

Mr Saddiq said: “Waste flushed down the toilets in homes in the city provides power for the Bio-Bug, but it won’t be long before further energy is produced when food waste is recycled at our sewage works.

“It will mean that both human waste and food waste will be put to good use in a sustainable way that diverts waste from going to landfill.”

Around 18 million cubic metres of biogas is produced at Bristol sewage treatment works a year.

It is generated through anaerobic digestion – a process in which bugs in the absence of oxygen break down biodegradable material to produce methane.

Bath-based Greenfuel Company converted the Beetle so it could run on biogas while bosses from GENeco ran a workshop at a University of Bath event for teenagers from schools in Bath and North East Somerset to come up with ideas for the car’s design.

Mr Saddiq added: “The choice of car was inspired by students who took part in a workshop. They thought it would be appropriate that the poo-powered car should be the classic VW Beetle Bug because bugs naturally breakdown waste at sewage works to start the treatment process which goes on to produce the energy.”

The Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association (ADBA) said the launch of the Bio-Bug proved that biomethane from sewage sludge could be used as an alternative fuel for vehicles.

ADBA chairman Lord Rupert Redesdale said: “This is a very exciting and forward-thinking project demonstrating the myriad benefits of anaerobic digestion (AD).

“Biomethane cars could be just as important as electric cars, and the water regulator Ofwat should promote the generation of as much biogas as possible through sewage works in the fight against climate change.”

ADBA chief executive Charlotte Morton added: “We are delighted to see such ingenuity and commitment to maximising the potential of AD from the water industry.”

GENeco said if the trial involving the Bio-Bug proved successful it would look to convert some of the company’s fleet of vehicles to run on biogas.

Claire Gibson, director of sustainable resources at the South West RDA, said: “I am really pleased that we have been able to support GENeco to demonstrate this alternative transport fuel.

“We have invested in a range of emerging low carbon technologies and renewable energy fuel types such as this to ensure the South West is well positioned to take advantage of this growing market.

“It is vital that the knowledge from initiatives such as this biogas project is shared so we can move more quickly towards a low carbon, resource efficient economy. I look forward to continuing to work with GENeco to achieve this."

Bio-Bug is a modified Volkswagen Beetle that runs on human waste and is the UK’s first car to be powered by sewage byproducts. The car was made by Wessex Water, a sewage utility company based in Bristol, that used excess methane gas produced in one of its treatment plants as fuel for the car. The company claims that the Bio-Bug is extremely efficient and needs waste from just 70 local homes to keep it running for a year.

The Solar Roadways project is working to pave roads with solar panels that you can drive on. Co-founder Scott Brusaw has made some major steps forward since our first visit back in 2007, so we visited him again earlier this year for an exclusive update on the project, including the first ever video recorded of the Solar Roadways prototype! For more information visit http://www.solarroadways.com . This Solar Roadway project will be featured in the upcoming feature film by YERT - Your Environmental Road Trip. To learn more about YERT, visit http://yert.com .

For all its merits, London isn't one of United Kingdom's best cities for cycling. A recent poll ranked it 17th. But Mayor Boris Johnson is trying to change that. This morning he announced the opening of two new "cycle superhighways" in the city. Each is five feet wide, has two lanes so as to accommodate traffic in both directions, and is painted bright blue to "represent freedom." One stretches 8.5 miles from the southern suburb of Merton to the city center. The other runs into town from Barking, in eastern London. Eventually, 12 of these commuter routes will radiate out from the center of London like spokes.

London's cyclists are mostly happy with the new routes, though there are already reports that cars and trucks are encroaching on them, or simply driving in them. But Johnson hopes that his comprehensive plan to support cycling which, along with the superhighways, includes a hew bike-sharing program and a new bike police unit, will spur a city-wide "cycling revolution."

See a full-size map of London's "cycling superhighways"

If you didn’t already know it, biking and walking are really good for you. Thanks to a new study released by the Alliance for Biking and Walking (and funded by the CDC) we now have the data to prove it. There is a lot of great information in the study and I recommend you check it out. But for those of you on the fly, a few highlights:

-Less than 10% of all trips are made by bike or foot

-From 2000-2007 the number of commuters who bike to work increased by 42%

-States with the highest levels of cycling and walking have the lowest levels of adults with hypertension, obesity, and diabetes

-New Yorkers (not a big surprise) make more of their trips by foot or bike than any other state- almost 19% of their trips

-North Dakota, South Carolina, Delaware and Mississippi tied for last place– only about 5% of trips are made by foot or bike

One quandary (and a reason many people stay in their cars) is that study also shows cyclists and pedestrians are at a disproportionate risk of being killed. Not a big surprise when you consider that less than 2% of the federal transportation budget is allocated towards walking and biking. Savvy policy makers might consider the public health benefits (and corresponding impact on health care budgets) when divvying up the monies next time around.

Earlier this week, we took another big step forward in the Obama Administration’s efforts to encourage more sustainable development as we announced $100 million for our new Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant program to encourage regions to integrate economic development, land use, and transportation investments – which will help to tie the quality and location of housing to broader opportunities such as access to good jobs, quality schools, and safe streets. 

For all the implications of “sprawl”—from job loss, economic decline and segregation, to obesity, asthma rates, to climate change and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil—all of them share by one fundamental problem: the mismatch between where we live and where we work. Whatever else we do to address these problems, America must find a way to connect housing to jobs.

 And Americans are demanding it.  Today, the average household spends more than half of its budget on housing and transportation.  They have become American families’ two single biggest expenses.

During the housing boom, real estate agents suggested to families that couldn’t afford to live near job centers that they could find a more affordable home by living farther away.  Lenders bought into the “Drive to Qualify” myth as well – giving easy credit to homebuyers without accounting for how much it might cost families to live in these areas or the risk they could pose to the market.

And then, an odd thing happened when these families moved in – they found themselves driving dozens of miles to work, to school, to the movies, to the grocery store, spending hours in traffic and spending nearly as much to fill their gas tank as they were to pay their mortgage...and in some places, more.  In addition to adding to families’ budgets and time, it is also contributing to increased carbon emissions and pollution.  

In all, in the last century, transportation costs as a share of household expenditures have increased by a thousand percent.

In February, HUD launched our new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities – allowing us to work directly with communities to support innovative planning and practice at the local level and helping to coordinate our investments with other agencies at the federal level.

In particular, HUD formed a Sustainability Partnership with the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.  When it comes to housing, environmental and transportation policy, the Federal government must speak with one voice. This is an example of how we’re changing the way we do business across the Administration – working not at cross purposes in our silos, but together, in common purpose
 
Of course, as critical as regional planning is, the hard work of implementing plans happens at the local level.

That’s why our $40 million Sustainable Communities Challenge Planning Grant program is targeted to cities and towns.  I announced this program earlier this week in conjunction with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a joint grant program that includes up to $35 million for its “TIGER II” planning grant program. 

Where the Transportation program will fund planning activities that relate directly to a future transportation capital investment, HUD’s program will fund land-use related planning activities and affordable housing strategies that will be linked to that investment. This funding will make it possible for communities to hire staff with the expertise needed to remove barriers communities face to sustainable development. 

The goal of each of these efforts—at the regional level, at the community level and at the neighborhood level—is the same: to advance our shared priorities and values as Americans for the decades to come.

Priorities like jobs for the 21st century – located closer to where we live, so businesses spend less money moving goods and services and people can spend less time commuting and more time with family.

Values like healthier, more inclusive communities – with neighborhoods where kids can play outside and breathe clean air. 

Communities where opportunities for people of all ages, incomes, races and ethnicities are never determined by their zip code.

These are the kinds of communities we all want our children to grow up in. 

If, in this new century, we grow our communities and our economies out of this fundamental principle, then I have no doubt our America and our children’s America will be a strong, prosperous America infused with the same sense of purpose, opportunity and resolve that have always defined us.  

Shaun Donovan is the Secrecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development

Good morning. And the sun is rising on a wave of new bike-sharing programs in America as well. Minneapolis just launched Nice Ride, the nation's largest bike-sharing system to date:

Minneapolis is joining Denver in a new wave of cities in car-crazy America trying to cut down on obesity, traffic jams and air pollution with bike-sharing programs. It was debuting Nice Ride Minnesota on Thursday with 700 bicycles and 65 kiosks where riders can swipe a keycard, pick up a bike and go — making it one of the largest urban bike-sharing programs in the U.S.

Minnesota's 700-bike Nice Ride program was put together by Public Bike System Co., the same folks who are responsible for Montreal's high-tech Bixi bike-share system. (Denver's program is by a competitor, B-Cycle.) Blue Cross was the lead sponsor for the system, and used money from its tobacco settlements to make it happen.

About a dozen other cities, including New York, Chicago, and Boston are also exploring new bike-sharing programs.

The inventor Gary Lauder unveiled this new idea at the TED conference: A traffic sign that instructs drivers to "take turns" at an intersection. The TED blog explains:

Half a stop and half a yield, the sign gives each driver a clear indication of how to behave. Below the red "Take Turns" shield is a small sign reading, "If Cars Are Waiting, Please Stop and Alternate." And if there are no cars waiting, just blow on through. (No more stopping at red lights at 4am, on a country road, when there's no one around for miles.)

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) is seeking to use stimulus spending to support livable communities, says Beth Osborne, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy. DOT has $1.5 billion in multimodal discretionary funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Osborne said in a November 9 Internet conference sponsored by the Center for Transportation and the Environment at North Carolina State University. The multimodal funds are also known as TIGER grants.

“When we put together the criteria by which we would evaluate projects, we put livability at the top,” said Osborne. “It’s up there with safety and economic competitiveness. We could not have made a stronger indication about what our priorities are.”

What does DOT mean by livability? Osborne’s description focused on mixed use, walkable neighborhoods, and pedestrian access to transit, jobs, stores, schools, and other public buildings. The following is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s definition, according to Osborne: “Livability means a community where you can take kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, go to the grocery store, have dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get into a car.”

A “major priority” at DOT will be to focus the discretionary funds on communities that seek to improve livability, Osborne said. “There’s a real bottom line need to reward those communities that make those connections,” she said.

The subject of the web conference was the Partnership for Sustainable Communities that was formed earlier this year in collaboration involving DOT, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Also speaking were Shelley Poticha, senior adviser for sustainable housing and communities at HUD, John Frece, smart growth program director at EPA, and Elizabeth Wilkins, White House policy assistant for urban affairs and mobility and opportunity.

HUD’s 2010 budget calls for $100 million for sustainable communities planning grants, Poticha noted. The budget also requests $40 million for community challenge grants that could be used for zoning reform and other implementation tools for smart growth. Both programs could be authorized by the end of 2009 or early in 2010, Poticha said. After that, detailed criteria for these grants will be announced.

Foreclosures higher in suburbs

Poticha added that HUD research shows that foreclosures have been highest in neighborhoods that lack key aspects of livability. “Our research has shown a remarkable alignment between the neighborhoods that Beth described as places where every trip has to be made by car and the concentration of the greatest number of foreclosures in the housing markets,” she said. “That might be a coincidence but we are not so sure — because we have looked at almost every metro region in the country and found this same pattern.”

Consequently, she said, “We see the sustainable communities partnership as key to getting communities back on their feet after the economic collapse.”

Other highlights:

• Frece estimated that if the US shifted just 10 percent of new housing starts to smarter growth development over the next 10 years, Americans would save about 5 billion gallons of gasoline and about $220 billion in household transportation expenses.

• Osborne reported that Envision Utah, a smart growth regional plan led by Calthorpe Associates, reduced infrastructure costs by $4.5 billion over a 10-year period in the Salt Lake City area while cutting traffic congestion.

via: http://www.newurbannews.com/livablecommunitiesdot.html

California residents living in sprawling suburban developments could save billions of dollars every year if they lived in denser, urban zones and along transit corridors, according to a study released today by smart growth and transit advocates TransForm. Analyzing four metropolitan areas--Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento--Windfall for All found that shifting populations in those regions to denser development along transit corridors would save save $31 billion per year, or $3,850 on average per household [Report Summary PDF].

In the Bay Area, where annual car ownership costs on average over $8,000 per person, individuals spend roughly $34 billion every year on personal transportation costs, compared to only $4.6 billion spent by public agencies on transit and roads combined. Households with poor access to public transit not only spend double the amount per year on transportation when compared to those with good access to transit, they produce more than double the amount of CO2, a greenhouse gas.

"The most astounding thing is that agencies pinch their pennies on transit and cut back and we feel like we can't afford not to save that service," said Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of TransForm. "We're already spending more than seven times as much as our agencies spend on public transit and roads just on buying and operating our vehicles."

What's more, the report points out that fuel costs represent a small minority of the cost of owning a car, so the craze for electric and other low-emission vehicles will not dramatically reduce the transportation costs for those living far from their jobs and far from transit. The best solution to combating climate change, the report notes, is to build walkable, vibrant communities where residences are situated close to job centers. 

Click to enlarge: household CO2 from transportation in the Bay Area.

The report highlights California's Senate Bill 375 (SB 375), which establishes a legislative framework for mandating smart growth along transit corridors, and it argues there are economic incentives for individuals, developers, cities, and regions for limiting the role of the private automobile in transportation spending.

"By reducing public and private transportation costs and increasing revenues to local governments, SB 375 can help put dollars back in the pockets of consumers and local governments," said Cohen.

Windfall for All counters the claim that SB 375 will be too costly to implement during the current economic crisis with several examples of how planning denser cities and offering alternatives to private car travel can save money.

First, in Sacramento, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) created a 2050 development blueprint that forecasts current development patterns and compared them to smart growth patterns. SACOG found that Sacramento would save $9.4 billion in public infrastructure costs (transportation, utilities, water, etc), $655 million in annual residents' fuel costs and $8.4 billion less for land purchases to offset environmental degradation from sprawl. The city would also see a 300 percent increase in public transit use if the city clustered development around transit within an urban growth boundary.

Benefits of public transportation for household costs and pollution. Image: TransForm.

Another case study from TransForm's report analyzed the promising results from the University of California San Diego's (UCSD) experiment in promoting non-automobile travel to the campus. Rather than build 10 additional parking facilities that had been planned and using parking revenue from three garages built between 2001 and 2007 at UCSD's La Jolla campus, the university invested in shuttles, expanded routes, discount and free fares on transit, as well as facilities for bicycling and pedestrians, all of which has resulted in a dramatic reduction of solo-driver trips. The alternative transportation measures and the costs savings from not building the new garages were so significant, UCSD has frozen the construction of new garages. The USCD model was successful enough to convince the  University of California system to require universities to present a business model analyzing the benefits of transit, ride sharing, and bicycle facilities before building new garages.

In the Bay Area, parking regulations are a significant impediment to dense development. In San Leandro, parking minimums of more than two parking spaces for each new home made dense development a planning impossibility. When San Leandro re-wrote its downtown plan, it rezoned to allow 3,400 new homes, more than seven times the limit under the old zoning laws. The first development in the new Downtown Transit-Oriented Development Strategy, The Alameda, designed by San Francisco Architect David Baker, saves $3.9 million by eliminating a level of parking and produces 30 more affordable units, according to the report.

Based on these and other case studies, Cohen suggested California should consider levying a climate impact fee on gasoline to generate enough money to expand public transit options and expand walkable communities while improving the economy and meeting ambitious greenhouse gas targets.

"Building our communities with the expectation that every driver in a family is going to have to own their own car is part of what is part of what is bankrupting families," said Cohen. "The infrastructure for the... roads and those patterns of growth is part of what is bankrupting our public agencies."

Windfall for All Critical Recommendations

• Integrate full economic analysis into planning. The huge dividends from efficient land use become evident once personal costs, not just public budgets, are considered. Without such analysis, we will continue to promote plans and policies that cost too much for families, businesses, and local governments.
• Provide cities and counties with an infusion of funds to engage the community in planning. The state should make funds available for updating zoning codes and parking policies to make more efficient use of land and resources. Identifying strategies to maintain and expand the number of affordable homes is also critical.
• Fund cost-effective public transportation. The state needs to provide leadership and restore funds for public transit, as well as make it easier for regions to raise new revenues with climate-impact fees. Economic analysis could determine whether such fees, if spent in ways that promote more efficient communities, can reduce our overall costs.
• Innovate, evaluate and replicate. There are dozens of innovative strategies – whether an individual program such as car-sharing, or a comprehensive rewards approach such as UC San Diego’s. MTC, the Bay Area’s transportation agency, will soon launch the first “Transportation Climate Action Program.” This program will seed, evaluate and replicate innovative programs. Other regions should follow suit.
• New development should minimize pollution from new residents – or pay to mitigate it. The San Joaquin Valley is encouraging efficient development from the start. New developments that don’t provide walkable communities with convenient transportation choices must mitigate the costs of the air pollution that will be generated by future residents. The state and regional air districts should encourage this same system for mitigating the costs of greenhouse gases.