Taking risks on the path to becoming greener by Tony Green

Image of bicycle in the Netherlands

I attended a Green Drink networking event at the Eulipia in San Jose a few months ago. It had been a while since I had went to any networking events I figured now was as good a time as any to get out and mingle.

Councilman Sam Liccardo, Chairman of San Jose City Council's Transportation and Environment Committee spoke about the challenges of making transportation practices greener. Naturally in many respects the issue came down to receiving funding. Interestingly enough, he mentioned a trip he took to China to try and lure foreign investors to support these projects.

One of the more fascinating ideas involved using bikes to travel in the downtown area to reduce automobile use with the value of reducing emissions and decreasing the space required to park. This room could be used, for example, to build affordable housing. He recalled a visit to Holland he made a few months back to get some insight into how San Jose should go ahead with greening its transportation since the Dutch have installed infrastructure to permit travel by bicycle.

He mentioned the need of taking risks to begin to move forward with a growing sentiment to make the world a better place. This struck an accord with me. When you think about when the dot com boom was in its peak 20 years ago the excitement was in the “changes” all these technologies might make in people’s lives.    

In short, change requires doing something other than what you have done in the past. Why should the making progress on greening our transportation practices be any different?

Author Note: Thanks to Megan Fluke who I can now put a real face with other than her Facebook page and her team for organizing this event!