Located in the SOMA district of San Francisco, the Good Hotel bills itself as the first hotel with a conscious. In addition to being close to many of the major San Francisco attractions, guests will be able to enjoy:

• Rooms decorated with sustainable furnishings
• Easy access to many points of interest and public transportation
• An on-site pizza restaurant that uses only the finest local ingredients
• Free parking for hybrids
• Free Internet and an iPod docking station

Good Hotel website

As we reported back in August, a bus company in Ontario, Canada was taking PickupPal to court in order to have them shut down. The offense? Facilitating carpooling between people headed to the same location. The nerve!

Anyway, the courts have ruled in favor of the bus company and PickupPal was ordered to pay an $11,000 fine. According to this article, the only way you can legally ride with someone is if you meet ALL of these criteria.

• You must travel from home to work only – (Not Home to School, or Home to the Hospital or the Airport)
• You cannot cross municipal boundaries – (Live outside the city and drive in – sorry you cannot share the ride with your neighbour)
• You must ride with the same driver each day – (Want to mix it up go with one person one day and another person another day – no sorry cannot do that – must be same person each day)
• You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly – (Neighbour drives you to work better not pay her right away just in case she drives you later on in the week)

Read the entire article at Save PickupPal

The beauty of the middle of California is that it is dead flat, undeveloped, and visually uninspiring. Perfect for high speed rail. On election night California residents approved Proposition 1A to fund a high-speed electric rail system connecting the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

The trip from San Jose to Los Angeles is projected to take just over two hours, cost about half the price of a plane ticket, and save 288 lbs of CO2 per trip.

California High-Speed Rail website

Flights to Hawaii have gone through the roof and the economy has more people partaking in “staycations” than vacations. These factors have clearly played a roll in the fact that the marketing folks at the Four Seasons in Hawaii are trying to pitch their new wedding package as “sustainable”. Hmmm, lets have all of our friends and family take 3,000 mile flights to watch us get married. Sounds like fun, but to call it sustainable is certainly a bit disingenuous.

Anyway, if you are interested in the Sustainable Nuptials package, you will get to have the wedding at your location of choice, teak chairs for 25, carbon credits, 2,000 orchids sprinkled at the location (is this really eco?), and the other wedding basics.

Press release at Hotel Executive

There are countless travel websites but Whole Travel hopes to distance itself from the pack by focusing exclusively on those travelers looking for “green” accommodations. Visitors to the site are presented with everything you would expect from a travel site, with the added benefit of a green rating system knows as the Whole Ranking.

The Whole Ranking system is designed to give visitors a feel for the resort and includes scores for the Environment, Economic, Social & Cultural, and Customer.

Whole Travel website

If you’ve ever taken the stomach-turning road to Hana, you know that the secluded side of Maui is incredible. And, incredibly remote. The area is pristine and the sellers of a 4,500 acre parcel of land hope that the new owners will continue the practice of not developing the area.

The ownership group includes Gavin Newsome (Mayor of San Francisco), the Getty Trust, and other rich folks who are looking to cash out after having acquired the land for the meager price of $25,000,000 just eight years ago.

Story from Luxist

Kawasaki is developing a new high-speed train for Japan that will hit speeds of 350 km per hour (217 MPH)! At that rate, you could travel from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in under two hours or from Phoenix to LA in under three. This could be an incredible breakthrough for travel in the U.S., reducing airline emissions and airport hassles.

Story from CrunchGear

Following the lead of New York and San Francisco, Boston has issued new requirements that will mandate that all taxis operating in the city be hybrids by 2015. In addition, cab operators are being required to install credit card machines, stop talking on mobile phones, and keep their rides nice and clean.

The switch to hybrids is expected to save drivers $1,000 per month on gas and cut emissions by 50%.

Story from the Boston Globe

The rental car companies have been making lots of noise about greening their fleets as of late, but for those customers actually looking to rent one of these cars, the premium doesn’t always make economic sense. This is especially true on shorter trips where the amount of gas used simply isn’t enough to offset the increased rental fee.

The laws of supply and demand are beautiful, but in the commodity business of rental cars, trying to squeeze customers for a couple of extra bucks seems like a strategy that can backfire.

The best bet is still to reserve a similar non-hybrid online and then make the upgrade at the counter. I’ve done this twice (Prius and Altima Hybrid) and it’s worked out both times.

Story from The New York Times

PickupPal, the online matchmaking service for carpoolers that we covered earlier in the year, is getting a bit of heat from a local bus company that is threatened by the fact that non-licensed people are providing rides to strangers. Trentway-Wagar is dragging out a local law that prevents such practices and has been on the books since 2000.

Clearly this law is meant to deter unscrupulous operators, not carpoolers looking to save a few bucks or the environment. Let’s hope common sense prevails up north.

Story from the Toronto Star