Cycling city Kigali sprints to promote smart and green mobility

After decades of planning and development, Sacramento’s R Street corridor went from an area full of abandoned warehouses to a flourishing, walkable neighborhood. The city planners’ prioritization of building high-density housing, bringing in new businesses, ensuring access to a light rail transit line, and safe, pedestrian-friendly streets helped this project succeed.

Getting to public transportation can be difficult for commuters. Microtransit is easing that burden and reducing emissions by replacing individual car trips. Partnerships between cities and companies ensure shared, on-demand scooters, bikes, or vehicles are available to help people reach public transportation.

The Open Streets program encourages students to walk and bike to school in an effort to get people out of their cars. Opting for a form of “active transport,” like walking and biking, helps get people moving, offers more social connection and is better for the environment.

Evie Community Carshare is an electric-vehicle service in areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, with high poverty and pollution rates. Users can pick up a car and leave it anywhere within the service area.

A building material made of hemp fibers, water, and clay or lime is a sustainable alternative to other options like concrete. Dubbed hempcrete, the product has many benefits including a very low carbon footprint, active sequestration of carbon dioxide, and using a sustainable, fast-growing crop as its base.

Denver offers rebates up to $1,700 for residents purchasing electric bikes to encourage their adoption, increase accessibility for low-income residents, and help reduce air pollution.

Cars are Europe’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the leading killer of children. In recent years, Paris has implemented an array of measures to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and transit while reducing car use. As a result, car use has dropped about 45% since 1990, the use of public transit has risen by 30% and the share of cyclists has increased tenfold.

Germany’s three-month experiment with €9 tickets for a month of unlimited travel on public transportation saved about 1.8 metric tons of CO2 emissions. The experiment was launched in an effort to cut fuel consumption and relieve a cost of living crisis and sold about 52 million tickets.

A European city banned cars from most of the city in 1999 and has not had a single road-related death in over a decade and approximately 15,000 people have moved to the area. And, in response to the growing climate crisis, air pollution has decreased by 67% and neighboring cities and countries are looking to adopt the practice, too.

In the heart of one of Europe’s fastest growing capitals, cars are rapidly disappearing. To reduce pollution and build a people-first city center, Oslo has promised to ban all cars in downtown by 2019. The multi-pronged effort includes making public transportation services more efficient, building 60 kilometers of new bike lanes, and transforming parking spaces into pedestrian-friendly areas.