Europe

What if the youth of Europe are aligning more with right-wing populism than the traditional left?  read more »

The Department for Transport of the United Kingdom may be surprised to learn that the average round-trip commute in the nation is up to a quarter hour less than reflected in its reports. This revelation comes from an article in The Economist, ("Life in the Slow Lane") citing a survey indicating that the average commuter in the United Kingdom spends less than 40 minutes daily traveling to and from work in 2000.  read more »

A new international report indicates that traffic congestion in the United States is far better than in Europe. The report was released by INRIX, an international provider of traffic information in 208 metropolitan areas in the United States and six European nations.  read more »

The Eurostar, the high speed rail service that links London with Paris and Brussels remains more than 60 percent below its ridership projections as of 2010, according to recently released ridership information. This is despite a double digit (12 percent increase in ridership between 2009 and 2010.  read more »

Times are tough in the newspaper business. For example, The New York Times used to have a robust fact-checking department. Either the staff has been laid off or maybe they can't keep up with the errors, either of which could explain the op-ed piece "Europe Energized."  read more »

Everybody knows we urgently need to build more homes in Britain, but how, when and where will this happen? WORLDbytes interviewed Ian Abley, an architect and manager of Audacity at the plotlands in Dunton, Essex where from the 1920s East End working class couples built cheap homes themselves. Could we do this now?  read more »

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë has spent much of his first term in implementing measures to restrict car use. Delanoë took many lanes of road traffic away from cars and turned them into exclusive bus and taxi lanes. This had virtually no effect on public transport use, according to University of Paris researchers who also found as a result that traffic congestion worsened, greenhouse gas emissions increased and overall cost to the Paris economy of more than $1 billion annually.  read more »

Don’t worry about China taking over the US economy. Despite what all the talking heads on TV and the radio talk shows are saying, there isn’t another country out there that hasn’t been hammered at least as badly as we have by the financial meltdown. The problem with any other country attacking the US dollar, for example, is that they are all holding a lot of US dollars. You probably remember last year they were worried about the fact that we import so many goods that we have big “trade imbalances” – meaning that we buy more of their goods than they buy of ours.  read more »

While the decline in housing prices in America has been making news for some time now, less attention has been paid on this side of the Atlantic to the downturn in European housing. The housing market in Europe, much like that of the United States, "soared during the first half of this decade, rising far beyond the levels that you'd expect, based on traditional economic factors."  read more »