With the help of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Google Maps now offers biking directions on its maps. The mapping and directions functions follow the same process one would enter for walking or driving — but now users can choose biking from the drop-down menu and get the best or suggested routes.

The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions — similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible. Just like Google pioneered with driving directions, you can click-and-drag your route to customize it as you’d like. You can also access the other features in Google Maps, such as Street View, so you can tell exactly where you might need to turn on your route or preview how wide a bike lane is, and Local Search, so you know where you can take a water break or where the bike shops are along your route. Biking directions provides time estimates for routes based on an algorithm that takes into account the length of the route, the number of hills, fatigue over time, and other variables.

The new bicycling layer for Google Maps, accessible via the “More…” drop down menu at the top of the map, will display an overlay of the various bike-friendly roads and trails around town. The layer is color-coded to show three different types of paths:
- Dark green indicates a trail;
- Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
- Dotted green indicates roads without bike lanes but are more appropriate for biking, based on factors such as terrain, traffic, and intersections.

The RTC, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit working to transform abandoned rail lines into community-accessible biking and walking trails, has offered Google use of its 1,600 rail-trails, with information for more than 12,000 miles of trails. The group visited New Orleans last month to workshop the Lafitte Greenway, a three-mile linear greenspace linking Treme to Lakeview.

The only color-coded layers available to the New Orleans maps are the established trails in Audubon Park and along the River Road levee. You can, however, still get a pretty decent suggested route. For example, here’s the suggested route from Gambit to the French Quarter.

A run-down facility, leaked radioactive materials and untrustworthy executives persuaded the Vermont senate to vote to close the Vermont Yankee power plant, run by New Orleans-based Entergy Corporation.

What does this mean for Louisiana? Well, Entergy fed Vermont misinformation about known faults in the plant’s piping — or, as the Alliance for Affordable Energy states, Entergy showed “at least, profound ignorance of the design of this plant.” What does that say about Entergy Louisiana’s Waterford 3 nuclear facility in St. Charles Parish, or the Entergy Gulf States River Bend facility in St. Francisville? The Louisiana Public Service Commission’s latest renewable portfolio standard strawman proposal suggests nuclear power as a “renewable” source that utilities companies include in Louisiana’s future.

The Alliance issued a statement earlier this week before the Vermont ruling:

Entergy Corporation has shown that it cannot be trusted to safely operate these facilities or to provide honest, accurate information about the risks involved.

This disaster clearly demonstrates the risks associated with nuclear generation.  Nuclear power is not clean, not safe, and not renewable, and it has no place in policies designed to encourage renewable energy generation.  Furthermore, nuclear power is expensive.  The potential for disasters such as the one at Vermont Yankee are both a risk for communities and add to the financial burdens that nuclear projects carry, including large sums for decontaminating the sites that house these facilities.  Importantly, ratepayers are those who foot the bill for these projects, which endanger their very lives.

Subsidies and other incentives for energy generation should be reserved for clean, safe, renewable energy sources that can create jobs for Louisiana residents.  We hope that the Louisiana Public Service Commission sees the risks inherent in these plants and adopts a policy that does not include nuclear power.

If unchallenged, this will be the first time in more than 20 years the public or law closed a reactor. (The last was the 1989 closure of a Sacramento plant with faulty electronics.)

It takes some doing to kerfuffle both the readers of the Daily Kos and, say, Michelle Malkin, but Audi managed to do it during last night’s Super Bowl with its “Green Police” commercial. Here it is:

In precis: Cheap Trick sing a version of their insanely catchy “Dream Police” retitled “Green Police,” in which Americans are busted for using incandescent lights, requesting plastic bags at the grocery store, not composting orange parings and a host of other infractions. At the end, an Audi driver sails past a Green Police checkpoint while a title card appears: “Green has never felt so right.”

The problem is that in our black-and-white, liberal-and-conservative, spell-it-all-out world, no one seems to know whether Audi was making fun of the eco-conscious, or cheering for the eco-conscious — and without that spelled out plainly in Big Capital Letters, those on both sides of the issue could agree on one thing: They didn’t like it. (For similar suspicious, puzzled reactions from polar opposite ends of the eco-spectrum, go here and here. Bonus points if you can count the number of people who say some sort of variation on “I’ve got as much of a sense of humor as anyone, but…)

So what was the intent of the commercial? To get people talking about Audi, of course. And by that standard, it was a success. Did it make me want to buy one? No, but it did make me want to get a copy of Cheap Trick’s greatest hits.

Edited to add: Now CBS News is weighing in on the puzzlement:

Environmentalists weren’t sure whether to celebrate or denigrate the spot. Grist magazine’s David Roberts writes that at first blush it seemed like an appeal “to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins.”

“The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more [that] interpretation just doesn’t quite fit,” he goes on to say. “The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police — not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you’re looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that?”

Conservatives also seem to be split: While Newsbusters writes, seemingly approvingly, of the spot’s “futurist vision of environmentalism running amok,” Bob Ellis called it an “downright offensive” and “presented with too much seriousness to be taken any other way than as approval of such Gestapo tactics.”

And sometimes a car commercial is just a car commercial.

New Orleans mayoral candidates Rob Couhig, John Georges, Mitch Landrieu and James Perry have endorsed NOLA Recycles 2010’s six-point plan for curbside recycling services and waste management. District A council candidate Susan Guidry also endorsed the platform.

Read more about NOLA Recycles 2010 on bestofneworleans.com, and read the six-point plan after the jump:

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Friends of Lafitte Corridor has made available its printable brochure about its ongoing greenway project. Though the city has delayed the project several times, the organization has been working since 2006 to create a vertical linear greenspace from Treme to Lakeview — from Armstrong Park, crossing Bayou St. John and extending to Canal Boulevard past City Park Avenue. Check out the corridor master plan here.

12,811,400 pounds. That’s how many toxic chemicals are choking Louisiana waterways, according to Environment America’s latest report “Wasting Our Waterways: Industrial Toxic Pollution and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Clean Water Act.” Louisiana ranks as having the fifth most toxic waterways. No state was spared — all 50 states and 1,900 waterways were found to have toxic chemicals.

The biggest culprit in Louisiana is ExxonMobil, responsible for 4,211,142 pounds of chemical waste in the Mississippi. Its facility was the largest reported polluter in 2007. And the biggest victim is the Mississippi River, ranked as the third highest polluted waterway in the nation with a total toxic discharge of 12,717,205 pounds of waste. These chemical cocktails contain lead, mercury and dioxin, among others, including chemicals links to reproductive problems, birth defects and cancer (industrial facilities dumped 87,896 pounds of cancer-linked chemicals into the Mississippi). This is the water from which we fish our fish, mind you.

Learn more about local water quality here, or look inside Gambit for a story on pollution on school grounds.

While news readers steadily lose access to investigative journalism (writers with resources, time and money for quality reporting), The New York Times‘ “Toxic Waters” series offers just that. The ongoing series exposes the dangerous shortcomings of the Safe Drinking Water Act — a dinosaur of a health provision that overlooks thousands of contaminants in municipal water supplies.

The online version includes a resource pool (with help from the Environmental Working Group) for readers to see what conditions are like where they live. Of course, Louisiana’s information isn’t present — “Louisiana did not provide recent data to The Environmental Working Group,” the site says. Neither did Colorado, Georgia, Kansas or Mississippi. Another search on the EWG site by entering a New Orleans ZIP code produces this result, showing the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals’ failure to report its 2006-2007 information. Going through the department’s Web site, you’ll find that, hey, they’ve scheduled to do a water quality test after all: Tests at the Carrollton Waterworks plant begin… February 2010.

A quick check on the Environmental Protection Agency’s link to Louisiana water boards provides a dead link to New Orleans’ recent water quality reports, while those of Jefferson Parish are readily available. Backtrack to the Sewerage & Water Board’s main page, and there you’ll find the 2008 water quality report released in June.

The report found relatively safe levels of contaminants, but found that “some homes in New Orleans have elevated levels of lead in their tap water.” The number is fairly insignificant, though the Times as well as the feds recommend a good filter.

The local nonprofit MarketUmbrella.org, parent group for the Crescent City Farmers Market, will soon take over its old pre-Katrina farmers market spot in Mid-City, thanks to some good timing and a long-running proof-of-concept effort from one dedicated local merchant.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the Crescent City Farmers Market held one of its three weekly markets in the parking lot outside the American Can apartment building (3700 Orleans Ave., map) each Thursday afternoon. While the group’s Uptown and Warehouse District markets reopened after the catastrophe, the Mid-City market was put on hold indefinitely.

Enter Jon Smith (above), proprietor of Cork & Bottle Fine Wines, which is located in the American Can building. In April 2008, he organized and launched a new market on the same site, and dubbed it the Mid-City Green Market.

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Long time no see. Let’s get down to business.

• Global Green, the U.S. Green Building Council and the American Institute of Architects present a free, monthly speaker series on sustainability. First up is John Moore who’ll discuss the City’s GreeNola: A Strategy for a Sustainable New Orleans. (Peep that link!) The event is from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 15, at the Contemporary Arts Center. EDIT: The event has been moved to Wednesday, Jan. 30. Same time and place.
• edible New Orleans makes its publishing debut Tuesday, Dec. 15. A part of the edible Communities network, the quarterly magazine highlights local food news, farmers, chefs and traditions and urges an “eat local” agenda. Find it (fo’ free!) at coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores… you know, where you’d find a certain other local.
• Those in Jeff. Parish, mark your calendars for Christmas tree recycling days. Leave your tree outside for collection the evening of Jan. 6 for pickup on Jan. 7-9. Volunteers also are needed to help place thousands of Christmas trees in pre-constructed shoreline fences along Goose Bayou every Saturday morning in January.
• More for the holidays (and As Seen on TV): Solar outdoor string lighting

‘Tis the season for that special something between your thighs. Following last month’s inaugural NOLA Bike Bash, this weekend kicks off the city’s first ever Bicycle Film Festival. DJ Musa Alves pumps out the jams for the fest’s preparty at Handsome Willy’s tonight 9 p.m. (Goldsprints, anyone?) The films screen at a long evening at the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.-ish Saturday. Read Will Coviello’s rundown of the film festival, which features two nights of documentary and feature films and shorts focused on pedal power. There’s even bicycle valet service, courtesy of the Metropolitan Bicycle Coalition. The fest concludes with a post-viewing afterparty at The Saint (961 St. Mary St.) tomorrow night. Bon voyage, you peddlin’ kids, you.