Grist and Triple pundit have San Jose listed as the 9th most climate ready city in the US on the strength of it’s emerging clean-tech industry and their system of tracking. Awesome!
In case you missed his recent visit last year, here’s a good summation.
According to Men’s Health. I’m not sure what the exact methodology, but it’s all a bunch of health related stuff.
Health: 1st
Life: 62nd
Fitness: 7th
Criteria:
Downtown San Jose doesn’t have the critical mass of people and not nearly the traffic to maintain one-way streets. By the way, most research has shown that one-way streets actually cause more traffic by creating unnecessary turns around blocks.
This will create a more engaging downtown and allow pedestrians to be not overwhelmed by a mass of cars. The long suffering and some say lacking retail component will be enhanced as well by creating an environment that allows for peaceful meandering.
Is it a wonder that we’re facing an obesity crisis when we have drive thrus for everything? It’s just sad if you can’t bother to get out of your car for donuts. Drive thrus break up the continuity of a street and require a considerable amount of space that could be better used.
It used to be that kids were able to walk or bike to school all on their own, but for some reason that all changed. Mini vans and later SUVs were introduced as safer ways of transporting children around from activity to activity. In a recent paper from UC Davis, a discussion of how AYSO approached the problem of getting more kids and families to arrive to practice and games by means other than driving, namely bicycling. By all measures according to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their recent book, crime by all measures is down and we live in a world safer than ever before. Perhaps it’s the fear based world we live in propped up by 24 hour news outlets. Perhaps it’s that we live in communities so spread out that the idea of kids biking to a park is laughable. But isn’t this a simple enough proposition?
For more info: Davis AYSO
As being covered by Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters has been championing it for a lot longer (15 years!) with her Edible Schoolyard Project. There isn’t much mention of nutrition between the two, although cooking from fresh ingredients and seasonally is tied hand-in-hand. Marrying the efforts of these chefs with a nutritionist would be an excellent way to buck the trend of childhood obesity. And like recycling, it’s a trend that children can teach their parents.
Do kids really need unfettered access to all that sugar? Can’t they manage going 6 or 7 hours without a fix? Why do schools need to generate revenue off of advertising at the expense of “our most precious resource”? Truth is there is no good answer for having them, take ‘em out!
A fried is running for City Council and I’ve agreed to help manage his campaign to get it off the ground. Part of the process has been to come up with policy ideas to run on. This is merely a list of ideas, some more thought out than others.
Ban High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). I would think that it’d have to be a 3 step process where initially the ban is placed on manufacturers, then places that would serve HFCS, then from all retail. Michael Moore has already suggested it, and the evidence that HFCS leads to higher rates of obesity is substantial.
According to Men’s Health who took a rather informal method of putting this list together, we get an A and are the second most car crazed city in the nation. You’d have to be since there isn’t much choice for different modes of transportation.
