Monday, September 12, 2011

Ingeniería de caminos rurales: Guía de campo para las mejores prácticas de gestión de caminos rurales

Gordon Keller & James Sherar
US Forest Service International Programs -Brochure-
Enero 2008

Imagen de la publicación

El objetivo fundamental de esta guía es poder ayudar a ingenieros, planificadores, especialistas ambientales y administradores de caminos a tomar buenas decisiones, proteger el ambiente, y construir buenos caminos de bajo volumen. Los aspectos claves que deberían tomarse en cuenta durante la planificación de un proyecto de camino son los cambios o los impactos negativos que pueden inducirse en una cierta región por la presencia del camino, los cuales pueden resultar importantes a la vez que irreversibles o que pueden ser difíciles de mitigar. Por lo tanto, habrá necesidad de analizar la rentabilidad a largo plazo de un proyecto de camino, en lo que se refiere a costos en los aspectos sociales, ambientales y fiscales.

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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Recapturing global leadership in Bus Rapid Transit: A survey of select U.S. cities

Annie Weinstock, Walter Hook, Michael Replogle, and Ramon Cruz
ITDP
May 2011


Bus Rapid Transit was first implemented in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974, and has become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Major new BRT projects have opened since the turn of the century in Africa, Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, several cities in Europe, and dozens of cities in Latin America.

BRT holds great promise for the United States. In 2008, transit ridership in the United States reached its highest level since the mid-1950s and ridership grew faster than population and vehicle miles travelled between 1995 and 2008 [APTA 2010 Fact Book]. The flexibility and cost effectiveness of Bus Rapid Transit make it an excellent choice for cities and transit agencies facing both increasing demand for transit and increasingly constrained budgets.

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Fact sheet

Press release

Guangzhou, China Bus Rapid Transit: Emissions Impact Analysis

Colin Hughes
ITDP
May 2011


The first phase of the Guangzhou Bus Rapid Transit (GZ BRT) opened in February of 2010, and it has already become an important demonstration of the efficacy and efficiency of high-capacity, full-featured BRT in Asia. In recent years over a dozen lowvolume bus rapid transit systems have sprung up throughout Asia. GZ BRT breaks this trend, with the first BRT system outside of South America with a daily volume comparable to, and in many cases in excess of, an urban metro-rail. Before GZ BRT, Zhongshan Avenue’s traffic speeds were plummeting and hundreds of buses blocked
traffic while struggling to pick up passengers on crowded curbs. Today, travel speeds are up 29% for buses and 20% for mixed traffic, and bus riders wait in safety and comfort in new high-quality center-median stations.

The analysis of GZ BRT presented here, after just one year of operation, examines aspects of the system design, performance, cost-recovery, and emissions reduction of Asia’s first metro-scale BRT.

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Landscape fragmentation in Europe

European Environment Agency
September 2011

Image from the publication

There is an increasing need and interest in including indicators of landscape fragmentation in monitoring systems of sustainable development, biodiversity, and landscape quality. We recommend that the results presented in this report be used for this purpose and be updated on a regular basis to detect trends in the development of landscape fragmentation.

Therefore, this report discusses the use of fragmentation analysis presented in this report as a tool for performance review in transportation planning and regional planning and recommends a set of measures to control landscape fragmentation, such as more effective protection of remaining unfragmented areas and wildlife corridors, the setting of targets and limits and a European defragmentation strategy. This study provides for the first time an accurate measurement of landscape fragmentation for most of the European continent, which supports managers and policymakers in allocating resources towards the protection and restoration of biodiversity and landscape quality. The report also identifies future research needs.

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