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Kevin Downing, a reader in Portland, got me hooked on a fascinating exercise: trying to figure out how long it takes a road expansion to pay for itself. Let’s take a look at how this might work. (But please stick around for all the caveats at the end.) Consider, for example, the Delta Park Project in north Portland. It’s a $60 million endeavor that will add one lane in each direction to a 1.2 mile-long...

Nearly three years ago, Alan announced a plan to bring Pay-As-You-Drive auto insurance to Cascadia. Today, Sightline is pleased to announce Unigard insurance is preparing to launch the pilot program in Washington state. Unigard needs 50 volunteer households to be early adopters to test the technology in their vehicles. These volunteers will be in position to be among the first households eligible for PAYD insurance policies (likely to be introduced...

Over at The Tyee this morning, you’ll find an editorial piece from me and Alan arguing that British Columbia should finally get around to adopting Pay-As-You-Drive car insurance. Maybe it sounds like a small thing, but it’s a policy with a lot of leverage. To wit: Car insurance in British Columbia is like an all-you-can eat buffet: once you’ve made the purchase, you may as well gorge. Mileage is correlated...

Now, here’s a Dutch treat:  last week, the Netherlands became the first country to adopt a tax-by-the-kilometer system to pay for roads, bridges, and other car-oriented infrastructure.  As far as I can tell, it’s not a tax increase, but rather a tax shift:  the government will reduce taxes on car sales, slashing vehicle purchase prices by about a quarter, and replace the lost revenue by charging drivers a few cents...

As a new co-editor of Sightline Daily, I’ve been pouring my coffee these last few weeks at 5 a.m. and scouring news sites big and small. After more than a decade in daily journalism, I’m thrilled to be using that experience to bring you the day’s best stories about our region’s environment, economy and communities. Both my co-editor Lisa Stiffler and I came to Sightline from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which...

Yet more confirmation that people who drive more are exposed to higher crash risks. This study from the  Transportation Research Record used data from in-car Global Positioning Systems to see if there was a relationship between driving patterns and the likelihood of being involved in a car crash. Even though the sample size was pretty small, the researchers found a clear relationship.  I’ll let them say it: [C]rash-involved drivers accumulated...

Here’s an interesting ranking. For each major US city, the list-happy editors at Men’s Health calculated the negative effects of driving. They aggregated scores on transit ridership, air pollution, fuel consumption, and driving miles. (Presumably, the data are for metropolitan areas, not city limits.) Northwest cities do exceptionally well: Seattle ranks number one, Portland ranks third, and Spokane is eighth. Men’s Health doesn’t appear to include a methodology on the web, but I’ll take a...

There’s lots of buzz about green-collarjobs these days (sort of like blue-collar jobs, but with a sustainable edge)—whether you’re listening to Obama, McCain, or Clinton; Gregoire, Kulongoski, or Schwarzenegger. You hear this kind of thing a lot: A study conducted by the RAND Corporation and the University of Tennessee found that producing 25 percent of all American energy fuel and electricity from renewables by the year 2025 would produce the...

The gist: A fair cap-and-trade system is a climate policy solution we can get excited about. Here are tips for taking cap-and-trade from meetings with fellow policy-wonks and to a broader audience without losing momentum. We also point out cap-and-trade policy essentials — the ingredients for effective, efficient, and fair policy — as well as the most common pitfalls and offer some tips for avoiding them. Cap-and-trade: Everybody’s talking about...

** New update at the end of this post. ** On Saturday, I took my car in for its mandatory emissions inspection. Seven minutes and $15 later I was on my way. All I’ve got to do now is mail in $76 and my car’s good for another year on the road. My brief visit to the testing facilitiy was hardly enough time to ponder the eternal verities, but I...