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Deric Gruen, intern extraordinaire, is the newest addition to Sightline’s research team. He’s already hard at work on Cascadia Scorecard 2007. Bicycling is my primary way to get around town, and that’s how I like it. It liberates me from the stress of traffic congestion, saves me a ton of money, and feels great… about 90 percent of the time. I’m not saying I haven’t had my share of flat...

When we started our family experiment in car-lessness seven months ago, David Sucher at City Comforts blog commented All I ask is that they [us Durnings, that is] don’t pull punches. Don’t make their recounting of the experience a political tract about how much happier they are and how the world is so much better because they don’t have a car. In other words, tell the truth. Tell us the...

One of the most interesting transportation programs around these days is TravelSmart. It’s not interesting because of what it does but simply because it works. You see, in theory, TravelSmart should be a dismal failure. That it performs minor miracles is proof of the flaws of economic theory. And understanding those flaws sheds light on a fascinating paradox of car-less living. It also hints at a massive opportunity to help...

At 21, in a sweating, dirt-floor shack on an island in a Nicaraguan lake, I ate a lunch of coarse tortillas and salted beans. My crooked-toothed host, who invited me for the meal when he saw me standing disappointed outside of the sole restaurant in the hamlet (it was closed), peppered me with questions about life in the United States. Soon, he broached the subject that most intrigued him, “Tu...

In addition to proposing a small sales tax increase to expand bus service, King County is also proposing to raise bus fares by an average of 75 cents over the next decade. That got me scratching my head about the bizarre way that we price bus rides. The incentives are precisely the reverse of what they should be. Leaving aside discounts for children, seniors, and the disabled, the fare structure...

Individuals and institutions can take simple steps to create compact, complete communities that enable residents to get around without a car and encourage physical activity and connections among neighbors.

When Seattle Weekly editor-in-chief Knute Berger called my family  “moochers” for not owning a car, it got me thinking. On the face of it, “moochers” is a ridiculous thing to call us. We pay for our transportation, just like everybody else. And because my family now drives about 7 percent as much as is typical for a family like ours, we’re no longer mooching off of future generations—burning their oil...

The Tyee is running an interview with University of British Columbia professor and sustainability guru John Robinson, with some sage advice on how to coax us out of cars: “We should stop guilt-tripping people, stop telling them that they are putting three tons of carbon a month into the air with their cars when they live 40 kilometers from work and there is no transit. That actually makes them more...

A typical American family like mine—with three kids, three drivers, and a middle-class income—drives their three vehicles a total of about 100 miles a day. That’s 36,000 miles a year. (This is a higher number than I would have believed but it’s from a giant dataset maintained by the US Department of Transportation, so I’ll trust it for now.) Before my family started its experiment in car-less living in February,...

This is week ten of the car-less in Seattle experiment (go here) and I want to talk about one of the greatest fears car-lessness unleashes for parents. But first, some big news: My wife Amy and I decided—with the support of all three of our children—to remain without a car for at least a full year. That’s right: family of five; busy schedule of work, school, and extracurricular activities; and...