For Puget Sound folks, especially those interested in Off the Grid

Efficient Suburbs of the Future

When Where: Thursday February 16, 12:30PM, U.S. EPA's Seattle Office

Here's how to create sustainable cities and regions, using advanced transportation as a means to bring about smarter land use. Sustainable entails: 1) Accommodating large-scale population growth, 2) Meeting the Kyoto protocol, 3) Stopping excess human consumption of land, 4) Dramatically curtailing auto use, 5) Reducing residential energy/resource consumption with vibrant (but smaller) stacked housing, 6) Lowering the cost of living, 7) Providing improved job access to lower income workers. Through this simple step-by-step plan, you'll also shed pounds, meet neighbors, hang out in public spaces, and pay lower taxes. After population, the second most important sustainability concept is: human settlement patterns (land use combined with trip-making distribution).

Our current transportation policy path in the U. S. is clearly unsustainable. Traffic, its environmental impacts and its impact on quality of life continue to get worse virtually everywhere in the country. Innovative new ideas and new approaches are badly needed. We need a portfolio of innovative approaches spread across the United States, with each one pushing the envelope towards a more sustainable future transportation system. Cities21 and its Suburban Silver Bullet should be in this portfolio. It is innovative; it is forward-looking; it addresses many key transportation challenges; and the potential benefits - if widely disseminated - are large. - Steve Offutt: EPA Best Workplaces for Commuters

Event details can be found at:
[url href=http://www.cities21.org/SeattleEPAcities21.htm]http://www.cities21.org/SeattleEPAcities21.htm[/url]