livagreen » Feature: Matt in Europe

German Marshall Fund of the U.S. Comparative Domestic Policy program

Matt — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:41:26 +0000

The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) grants a number of fellowships each year through the Comparative Domestic Policy (CDP) program.

CDP fellowships, jointly supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Bank of America Foundation with additional support provided by the Ford Foundation, are intended to provide opportunities for practitioners and policy-makers working on economic and social issues at the urban and regional policy levels to meet with their counterparts across the Atlantic and discuss policies and measures that have been implemented. Fellows can then return from their time overseas equipped with the ideas and insights necessary to effect significant and lasting positive change in their own communities.

**The Spring 2010 Call for Applications is now open. Further information can befound here.**

About – Matt Nichols

Matt — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:38:26 +0000

Matt Nichols is Principal Transportation Planner for the City of Berkeley, California, where he supervises the city’s efforts in mobility management/TDM, carsharing, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, and transit planning. He is a contributing author of Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan, and helped obtain financing for the Ed Roberts Campus, a universally accessible transit-oriented development at Berkeley’s Ashby BART Station.

Matt earned a Master’s in Urban Planning from UCLA. He has worked for ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the Bay Area Air Quality Managemetnt District, and has served on the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s “Parking Policy for Smart Growth” technical advisory committee. Matt also served as a founding member of the Board of Directors of City CarShare, the car sharing non-profit for the Bay Area.

From February-May 2010, Matt will be based in Torino, Italy as the Comparative Domestic Policy Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where he is investigating European cities that have made recent significant transit investments to compare approaches to station area planning and multi-modal accessibility.

He is married to Margi Clarke, is the father of two boys, Kiernan and Eli. They have been living without owning a car for 6 years.

Greening Suburbia

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:19:02 +0000

In the SF Bay Area over the past few weeks we’ve seen the FTA take a very tough stance on transit in favor of smart growth with two projects: 1) potentially removing funds from the Oakland Airport Connector; and 2) not allowing AC Transit to backfill operational budgets with money intended for Bus Rapid Transit. It seems the fed is taking on a proactive land use perspective which leads me to a recent thought-provoking article from the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute. It frames Obama-Admin policies as being hostile to suburbia and proposes that:

Given these realities, it seems more practical not to work against such aspirations (of greening suburbia) but instead to evolve intelligent policies that would reconcile them with our long-term environmental needs. Suburbanites like their suburbs but would also like to find a way to make them greener as well as more economically and socially viable. Right now neither party has developed such an agenda, and so the suburbs, now clearly leaning right, remain up to grabs. To win suburbanites over, politicians first have to respect the basic preferences while offering a realistic program for improvement. This remains a key to building a sustainable electoral majority, not just for the next election, but for the decades to come.

So what is your opinion? Are we not working enough to retrofit and green suburban communities? How we might work with the suburban landscape to make it greener? Suggestions?

One Less Car

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:43:10 +0000

Someone forwarded this info on a One Less Car challenge happening at University of Florida. Nice tie to their carpool matching program (powerpoint). Always interesting to see creative ways institutions are dealing with climate and transportation footprint ~ especially along the behavioral front! Check it out at: http://www.sustainability.ufl.edu/onelesscar/

Instant Green Wall

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:59:40 +0000

Flora Grubb has has some great examples of individuals using succulents to make green walls. Her and her partner Kevin redid a house on Ames Alley in San Francisco and the results were breathtaking, especially in the outdoor bathing area picture on Flora’s Blog. Now they take it to a new level with a way to green interior environments within hours using a ‘wall pocket’.