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After around two decades of government support, China now boasts the world's largest market for e-buses, making up more than 95% of global stock. At the end of 2022, China's Ministry of Transport announced that more than three-quarters (77% or 542,600) of all urban buses in the country were "new energy vehicles", a term used by the Chinese government to include pure electric, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell vehicles powered by alternative fuels such as hydrogen and methanol. In 2022, around 84% of the new energy bus fleet was pure electric.

. In 2015, 78% of Chinese urban buses still used diesel or gas, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). The NGO now estimates that if China follows through on its stated decarbonisation policies, its road transport emissions will peak before 2030.

China is also home to some of the world's biggest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, which has been raking up orders across China, Europe and Latin America.

When retired Harvard professor Nathan Glazer died Jan. 19 at 95, descriptive sociology lost its last great practitioner. Best known for “Beyond the Melting Pot,” his landmark study written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Glazer also collaborated with David Riesman on a rare best-seller of 20th-century sociology, “The Lonely Crowd.

He was a descriptive sociologist in the sense that his books and articles aimed at a truthful depiction of social reality.

As a 93-year-old retired professor of sociology, I can remember the era when sociologists unanimously agreed with Glazer that our primary task was to describe as accurately as possible how societies worked

At 8:30 on weekday mornings, there is now enough space in the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal for travelers to walk at least six feet apart. Most move at a stroll rather than the New York City speedwalk. Early last year, about 160,000 people passed through the station each weekday. Ridership is now less than a quarter of that.

Keeping the city’s buses and subways moving has been crucial for transporting medical and essential workers, but, with fewer riders, the city’s public transit organization is facing its worst budget crisis in history.

Neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are home to more people of color and families with lower annual income than most parts of Manhattan, are also home to many of the city’s essential workers — and have retained more of their subway riders. Those subway stations report closer to 40 percent of their pre-pandemic ridership.

Missing Mexican Students Suffered a Night of ‘Terror,’ Investigators Say

With a military intelligence official looking on and state and federal police officers in the immediate vicinity, witnesses said, the students were put into police vehicles and taken away.

Despite apparent stonewalling by the Mexican government in recent months, the panel’s two reports on the case, the most recent of which was released on Sunday, provide the fullest accounting of the events surrounding the students’ disappearance, which also left six other people dead, including three students, and scores wounded.

Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

as tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks. Atwater's point that the policies of the Southern Strategy hurt blacks more than whites is well taken. But some whites were hurt too. This is different than the explicit racism of slavery and segregation. During slavery white Southerners never worried about disenfranchising blacks. After slavery they needed poll taxes and the force of white terrorism. After white terrorism was routed and the poll tax outlawed, they targeted the voting process itself. But at each level what you see is more non-black people being swept into the pool of victims and the pool expanding.

You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?

More Americans used buses, trains and subways in 2013 than in any year since 1956 as service improved, local economies grew and travelers increasingly sought alternatives to the automobile for trips within metropolitan areas, the American Public Transportation Association said in a report released on Monday.

“Now gas is averaging well under $4 a gallon, the economy is coming back and people are riding transit in record numbers,” Mr. Melaniphy said in an interview. “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how people are moving about their communities.”

From 1995 to 2013, transit ridership rose 37 percent, well ahead of a 20 percent growth in population and a 23 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled,

Greece buses 2,000 refugees from border camp to Athens

Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans, but people of other nationalities, who make up roughly 10% of the total number, have been stopped at the border since early November. Instead of returning to Athens, many of them set up camp for several weeks – and several sewed shut their mouths – leading to Wednesday’s dispersal.

In northern Greece, an activist and an aid worker said hundreds of Greek police arrived in the morning to disperse the camp, which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco. The vast majority went without protest, though some Iranians held a short demonstration at around midday, before being bussed back to Athens in a convoy of around 50 coaches.

A city is a place where many people live close together. The problem of urban transportation is a problem of sharing space.

When you drive alone (or take Uber alone) in a gridlocked street or freeway, you are taking more than your fair share of the limited space. When stuck in traffic, you are blocking others from moving freely.

If cities want to move people faster than walking while allowing them to take up only their fair share of space, two options arise. One is to use a vehicle that’s not much bigger than the human body, such as bicycles and scooters. Those tools work well for certain people in particular circumstances, but not for everyone. The other option is to share the ride in a vehicle. If space is really scarce, that vehicle will have to carry lots of people. In most cases, riders will have to share a vehicle with strangers, people who are not traveling for the same purposes or even to the same places. That’s what public transit is.

The World Health Organization says the virus that causes COVID-19 doesn't seem to linger in the air or be capable of spreading through the air over distances more than about three feet.

But at least one expert in virus transmission said it's way too soon to know that.

"I think the WHO is being irresponsible in giving out that information. This misinformation is dangerous," says Dr. Donald Milton, an infectious disease aerobiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.

There is little evidence that public transit is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in New York or elsewhere; some cities with heavily used transit systems, including Hong Kong, were able to avoid terrible tolls from the virus.

rian paths for people to avoid intense overcrowding — transit might be no less safe than cars, in terms of the risk of the spread of disease. In all other measures of safety, transit is far safer than cars.

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries

American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.

How much do Americans typically walk in a day? A study published in 2010 rigged up 1,136 Americans with pedometers, and concluded that we walk an average of 5,117 steps every day. (No surprise: that was significantly less than in other countries studied — both Australians and the Swiss walked around 9,600 steps daily, and the Japanese 7,100.)

It’s also widely assumed that we walk far less than our forebears, but that’s tough to prove — you won’t find much in the way of pedometer studies from the 19th century. But we can draw some conclusions from other information — like how many kids walk to school today versus the past. In the 19th century, of course, everyone walked to school, since buses didn’t exist and districts were designed to accommodate walking. By 1969 more than half of all school kids still walked to school. Today, it’s about 13 percent.

That 5,000 steps we take each day translates into about two and a half miles every day, or 900 miles per year. That’s not insubstantial. But I’m pretty sure the quality of our walks has also changed — when we move by foot today — at least in my experience and what I hear from others — it always seem to involve brief, intense tromps motivated by a single purpose. We walk to the garage to get to the car. We walk from the mall parking lot to Best Buy. We walk from Gate 4 to Gate 22 in Terminal B.

In 2004, the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, his manifesto on the tumultuous future of the American identity. The growth of black and Hispanic minorities, he predicted, would provoke a backlash among whites: The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline

Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger—Donald Trump.

The presidential election of 1968 was a milestone in partisan realignment — the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties

In 2016, this half-century process of partisan realignment is all but complete. What we are seeing instead of partisan realignment is policy realignment — the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.

For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.

the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches.

What is "state building?" Throughout our country's history, government has taken on many new functions. The early 19th century American state actually didn't do very much more than national defense and customs collection. The executive branch was tiny. Over the years, the federal government took on more and more obligations, offering new protections and new services for its citizens. After the Civil War, Congress passed a series of civil rights laws, it created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, it passed an income tax, and early in the twentieth century it created a central bank. State building really took off after the New Deal, which established the modern administrative and regulatory state and added a host of labor and consumer protection regulations, investments in infrastructure, and Social Security. The National Security State was born after World War II, and the 1960s brought new civil rights laws and new social welfare programs through the Great Society. At the turn of the 21st century, the federal government expanded its national security infrastructure even further, implementing vast new surveillance programs and strategies for dealing with terrorism

Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution.

Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm the country’s unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a key role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s deposed president.

The passage of the bill comes as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.

e group’s headquarters at a downtown hotel and began negotiations. Just after dawn on Tuesday morning, members of the group, many in military fatigues and balaclavas, boarded buses and left for a “training ground” outside the city, according to local news and video reports.

if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.

“In many cities and even suburbs, it’s becoming much easier to organize your life car-free or car-lite,” said David A. King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University who studies technology and transportation. By car-lite, Dr. King means that instead of having one car for every driver, households can increasingly get by with owning just a single vehicle, thanks in part to tech-enabled services like Uber.

car-sharing services like Zipcar and bike-sharing services have already led to a significant net reduction of car ownership among users.