The state of Vermont has long been hailed as the greenest place in the United States due to the ‘consistent thinking about low-impact living.’ The state, after all, is profuse with trees, farms, and backyard compost heaps. It also has environmentally aware citizens, and no crowded expressways. In other words, Vermont is green basically because it has more spaces with less people. ‘The population of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is just under 40,000.’
But Vermont ‘sets a poor environmental example.’ Because Vermont ‘has no truly significant public transit system’ and because ‘its population is so dispersed,’ the state is heavily dependent on automobiles. ‘A typical Vermonter consumes 545 gallons of gasoline per year — almost a hundred gallons more than the national average.’
On the other hand, people-compact New York with its population density may be comparatively greener when seen in the general environmental scheme. ‘In the most significant ways, New York is a paragon of ecological responsibility. The average city resident consumes only about a quarter as much gasoline as the average Vermonter — and the average Manhattan resident consumes even less, just 90 gallons a year, a rate that the rest of the country hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s. New Yorkers also consume far less electricity — about 4,700 kilowatt hours per household per year, compared with roughly 7,100 kilowatt hours in Vermont and more than 11,000 kilowatt hours in the United States as a whole. New York City is more populous than all but 11 states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.’
Daily destinations of New Yorkers are closer together, reducing the need for automobiles, while encouraging walking or biking. Because of New York’s density, efficient public transit infrastructure has been developed.
’Metropolitan New York accounts for almost a third of all the public-transit passenger miles traveled in the United States, and it has, by far, the nation’s lowest rate of automobile ownership. (Fifty-four percent of New York City households — and 77 percent of Manhattan households — own no car at all. In Vermont and the rest of the country, the percentage of no-automobile households is close to zero.) Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattanites travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s 10 times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County, and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta.’
New York has also been made bicycle-friendly. As it is, 112,000 New Yorkers bicycle on an average day, an increase of 10% over the last decade. The local government plans to double that number by 2015, as well as add 200 miles worth of new bicycle lane between 2007 and 2009, install 37 bicycle shelters and 5,000 bike parking racks by 2011, and install 15 additional miles of protected on-street bike lanes by 2010 and 30 miles from 2011 to 2015.
Via environment360
