NewsWatch: Sustainable Communities -- New Yorkers Select Turkish Cabs

Turkish Cab Company Gets Nod From New Yorkers

The Taxi and Limousine Commission of New York had been polling New Yorkers to find a new cab for the city that’s environmentally-friendly, safe, and complied with Americans with Disabilities Act. Car manufacturers from around the world sent in their options, and New Yorkers overwhelming picked a cab from the Turkish company Karsan. Alttransport

City Is Looking at Sewage Treatment as a Source of Energy

New York City’s sewage presents a daunting and costly challenge: it creates foul odors and often contaminates waterways. But the city is now casting its sewage treatment plants and the vast amounts of sludge, methane gas and other byproducts of the wastewater produced by New Yorkers, as an asset -- specifically, as potential sources of renewable energy. New York Times

10 Best Cities for Public Transportation

President Obama is calling for $8 billion to go towards high-speed rail, as part of a six-year, $53-billion plan. The administration is hoping that the program will create jobs and boost American competitiveness in the long run. But on a smaller scale, an effective public transportation system can simply increase the quality of life in a city. US News

Toxic Town Torn Down

In 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Picher, Okla., to be at the center of a 40-square-mile Superfund site, one of the most toxic places in America, initially because of the mine waste contaminating the water. Los Angeles Times

U.S.' Least, Most Educated Most Likely to Find Jobs

The unemployment rate of 5.8 percent among college grads is much lower than the 10.9 percent among those with some college. And unemployment among college grads improved slightly over the past year, while staying flat among those with some college. Gallup

Planners Back Development Demolition and Rebuild

San Francisco's Planning Commission voted to demolish the 1940s design for the car-centric Parkmerced in favor of transforming it to a dense, $1.2 billion transit-first community, which proponents call a model for future development in California. San Francisco Chronicle

Water: A Mega-Regional Challenge

When it comes to water policy, most cities and regions face one or more of four critical problems: scarcity, quality, flooding, and system performance. For notoriously thirsty places such as Atlanta and Las Vegas, water is never too far from the front pages. In other regions, quality concerns rear their head when a surprise contaminant emerges, or when flooding rolls in and out with the weather. citiwire.net

Chicago Population Sinks to 1920 Level

A larger-than-expected exodus over the past 10 years reduced the population of Chicago to a level not seen in nearly a century. The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that during the decade ended in 2010, Chicago's population fell 6.9 percent to 2,695,598 people, fewer than the 2.7 million reported back in 1920. Wall Street Journal

Why Not a Negative Income Tax?

What kind of program could help protect every citizen from destitution without granting excessive power to bureaucrats, creating disincentives to work, and clogging up the free-market economy, as the modern welfare state has done? Friedman’s answer was the negative income tax, or NIT. City Journal

Largest Cities No Longer Homes of Upward Mobility

A great city, wrote René Descartes in the 17th century, was “an inventory of the possible,” a place where people could lift their families out of poverty and create new futures. In his time, Amsterdam was that city, not just for ambitious Dutch peasants and artisans but for people from all over Europe. Today, many of the world’s largest cities, in both the developed and the developing world, are failing to serve this aspirational function. New Geography