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Image credit: GOOD GOOD has teamed up with Pepsi to help bring positive change to communities. The Pepsi Refresh project gives away millions of dollars in grants for some really amazing ideas. One of which is helping to fund the Bikleloc project.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Imgur, via Digg Better to Laugh than to Cry Getting off oil is one of the hardest things that our petroleum-addicted society will have to do. It's a challenge of epic proportions, and it's going to be hard especially in the transportation sector where oil utterly dominates as a source of energy. We'll need to change our cities (make them more like Copenhagen), and change our vehicles (allow them to be powered by clean(er) sources, like electricity from renewables). All of this will be ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Government of Ontario Always Read the Fine Print When the rebates for plug-in hybrids and electric cars were first announced by the government of Ontario, there was no word on how many applicants would be accepted, and the size of the rebates was aid to be between $4,000 and $10,000 (depending on the capacity of the car's battery). But now that the tax measure is phasing in, the details are changing, and not for the better. Read on for details.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Wikipedia, public domain. Meeting Tesla in the Middle Nissan and Tesla have very different strategies when it comes to electric cars. Tesla has decided to start upmarket because they figured that since electric cars were going to be expensive at first, you might as well make the kind of car that people would usually pay a lot of money for (sexy sports car). Nissan went the opposite route, waiting until it had done enough in-house R&D to reduce the cost of the main components, it then... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Car Connection On the Lighter Side... Smart cars can be great little urban cars, but for some people, they aren't exciting enough. Do-it-yourself enthusiasts have fixed that by doing all kinds of things to the diminutive ForTwo, including, among others, putting in a high-revving motorcycle engine in place of the tame factory diesel and putting monster tuc... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Some cities are not only walkable and cycleable, they're skateable! Matt has noted that almost three quarters of our oil goes for transportation, and concludes that we have to create "more communities where the average person's daily needs are met on foot, on non-motorized vehicle and via public transportation." But is there proof that this actually works? Does it mean that we have to turn all of our cities into Manhattan or Copenhagen? No, we don't. We don't have to create new communities and put everybody in a passivhaus. Our existin... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: Huffington Post From Manhattan's Summer Streets to Bogota's Ciclovia, TreeHugger is a big fan of reclaiming asphalt in favor of human interaction. But I'm not sure we've ever seen anything on this scale. A town in Germany recently shut down an entire section of Autobahn—that's right, the famous German highways with no speed limit—... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Flickr, CC Female cyclists have a hard enough time - we are generally a bit more safety-conscious and reticent when it comes to getting out on city streets, and the athletic among us who do fearlessly dive into bike racing and other cycling sports do so with less support or acknowledgment from the rest of the sporting world than men cyclists get. So the last thing a female cyclist needs is a fatwa - a ruling on a point of Islamic law. However, Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image copyright: McClellanParkTMA.org. In a city where bike theft is a very good reason to make you doubt about riding somewhere, providing parking facilities is almost as important as creating new bike paths. This is the case in Buenos Aires (and many cities around the world), and the reason why it's so good to hear that the government has pushed a new law to provide several bike-parking facilities, including spaces inside pri... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Michael Graham Richard It's All About Timing I've said it many times before, and I still haven't seen evidence to make me change my mind: The transition to Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Qinetiq Update: Zephyr Solar Plane Lands After Over 2 Weeks (!!!) in the Air Breaking All Kinds of Records A couple weeks ago we wrote about the Solar Impulse, a solar airplane that flew for over 24 hours straight. That was very impressive for an aircraft with someone on board, but compared to the solar-powered Zephyr unmanned aircraft, that's chi... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Bridge closed. Image credit:Ivan Cockrum Scholars & Rogues blog has a nice overview of the crumbling US bridges issue. In a phrase, upgrades and repairs are not keeping up with wear and tear. Fixing the bad bridges is anticipated to cost "$650 billion over 50 years." Not good news for the 'less government, reduced taxes' crowd. But let's focus on the environmental dimensions. There is good news and bad.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Dusty road. Image credit:ModelAColumbus.com Until the 1950's, gravel roads were the norm outside the core developed zones of American towns and cities. Guess what? Gravel roads are back in vogue. Tax revenues are so far down and asphalt prices rising so far that State and local governments can no longer afford to repair and repave. So they are un-paving, which means changes to the modern lifestyle. Forget texting and coffee drinking on a gravel road. Gravel roads are forbidding to sleek low riders, road bikes, and convertibles. Wall Street Journal has covered the new trend in the story:Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Berlin Washington Sad but true. For decade upon decade, the uS government incentivized the development of urban sprawl -- funding highways and subsidizing suburban homes and so on and so forth. Not exactly a news flash. But yesterday, when I posted on Slate's great reader-curated video on the top 5 solutions to traffic congestion, it got me thinking about the issue all over again. And, once more, I was reminded of how deeply ingrained our inclination towards sprawl really is -- did you know Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Toyota Tom Hanks Will be Pleased A joint press release by Tesla Motors and Toyota has announced that the two companies have agreed to work together on a new electric RAV4 that will be powered by Tesla technology. The ultimate goal is to put it on the market in the United States in 2012, and in the meantime, Tesla will produce a fleet of prototypes for evaluation before the end of this year. The first prototype has already been built and is now being tested. Read on for more details.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Visiting a Lithium-Ion Battery Factory in Michigan President Obama visited the Compact Power lithium-ion battery plant in Holland, Michigan. Compact Power is a subsidiary of LG Chem, the South-Korean company that will make battery cells for both the Chevy Volt and the Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo copyright: Guillaume Malheiro. From heart-shaped frames to carnival mask handles and LED-equipped wheels, these bikes by 12 top fashion designers -- including (including François and Marithé Girbaud, Kenzo, and Agatha Ruiz de la Prada -- are not your typical two-wheeled ride. A collaboration between car manufacturer Peugeot, the Idenium press office, and La Chaine du Coeur, the Be Cycle & Fashion campaign will benefit Read the full story on TreeHugger

Storage for 150 bicycles at Bike Park. Photo: Bike Park Whenever we do a story on bike commuting there'll always be a commenter concerned about what happens when they arrive at their workplace. How do they scrub up from a sweaty or rainy ride? Where do they safely and securely store their bike? And all their cycling clobber? Fair questions, but for potential city work riders in Melbourne, Australia those excuses have been made redundant, with the opening of facilities such Bike Park. Recycled from a former nightclub, Bike Park offers room for 150 bikes to be stowed indoors. As well lockers, showers, fluffy tow... Read the full story on TreeHugger

All photos: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features We've seen a plethora of ways for securing bikes against theft, but this might be the most creative. The whole bike bends around a suitable post to become, in effect, the loop through which the bike is secure This out-of-the-box thinking was an idea of Kevin Scott, 21, a British final year Product Design student at De Montfort University. His design is, which we are ecstatic to see far beyond some Computer Aided Design (CAD) rendering, and appears to be a real life working prototype. For which he scored a Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via John Leech MP It's a topic that we've tackled more than once: The scourge of traffic congestion. With more and more of the world's population concentrated in cities, traffic congestion is worsening fast, and the trend is slated to continue. This of course leads to increased air pollution and carbon emissions. So, to say that we're always on the lookout for solutions -- especially for developing cities, where infrastructure remains to be put in place -- is something of an understatement. This Slate video highlights th... Read the full story on TreeHugger