Search Results
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Will Federal Tax Policy Favor Car Commuting?
If you have commuting costs for parking, transit, or biking, you could be eligible for a federal tax subsidy. The IRS allows companies or employees to contribute up to $230 per commuter for monthly parking or transit commuting costs, a benefit that some 3 million people nationwide take advantage of. For the last two years, the pre-tax limits have been the same for parking and transit. But it wasn’t always...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 12/2/11
Clark: Now this is a true catastrophe: a craft brewer is worried that climate change is making beer more expensive! Gahh! Valuable tips for the holidays: 4 ways to hack your brain to avoid impulse purchases! Physicists with lasers and very big brains are trying to figure out if reality is actually just a hologram. “More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t...Read more » -
A Call to Waterlogged Northwesterners
Stormwater has been kicking the Northwest’s butt. Armed with back-to-back deluges, the region’s polluted runoff has shown no mercy. For weeks it has soaked us to our socks with deceptively deep and oily puddles. It’s sent icy trickles of rain snaking off awnings and splatting our cheeks and foreheads. It has forced us to leap, not always so nimbly, its muddy mini rapids just to reach the safety of the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 11/11/11
Eric dP: It was with a sort of grim satisfaction that I read the Washington Post’s excellent feature, “Wall Street’s resurgence frustrates its claims, and Obama’s.” It’s a close look at recent bank profits, bonuses, and growth and it gives lie to the complaints from the finance sector that the Obama administration is treating it punitively. It also, of course, gives lie to the idea that the Obama administration is...Read more » -
Farm Workers and Pesticides in Northwest Orchards
Editor’s note: This post was written by John Abbotts, a former Sightline research consultant and a long-time friend of Sightline. It’s been almost 50 years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, sparking public concern about the dangerous side-effects of chemical pesticides. In the book, she flagged organophosphate pesticides, which are neurotoxins derived from nerve agents developed during WWII. Yet despite their well-known dangers, organophosphate insecticides are still used in the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 10/21/11
Eric dP: Probably the best thing I read this week was Elisabeth Rosenthal’s Sunday NYT piece about what ever happened to global warming as a live political issue. I like these images of turning dollar bills into infographics as a way to illustrate economic inequality. Writing for the Atlantic, I thought Matthew Yglesias did a good job of capturing what’s wrong with municipally-owned parking garages: But municipal provision of subsidized...Read more » -
Do Vehicle License Fees Make Driving Unaffordable?
Do vehicle license fees harm the poor? Even if car fees actually are regressive—and I think the answer is far from clear—it’s wrong-headed to think that voting down a fee will somehow make driving affordable. Even a cursory look at history shows turning driving into a necessity is what really harms the poor. In the early part of 2005, a driver in Seattle could fill up at less than $2 per gallon, but by 2011...Read more » -
Portland, the City of Sedums?
The City of Roses is being transformed into the City of Sedums as nearly 300 Portland rooftops are now blanketed in the drought-tolerant succulents. And as rooftops in Oregon are going green, some of the businesses that design, build, and landscape ecoroofs are having an economic mini boom. News headlines cheer sales numbers that have tripled in the past year for one Portland company. Another is doing cutting-edge ecosystem research...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 8/19/11
Clark: A 13-year old uses math (hooray for the Golden Ratio) to figure out a new and more efficient arrangement for solar panels. The trick: mimic trees! For extra credit, here's more on why so many plants have spiral patterns related to the Golden Ratio. An urbanist's paean to on-street parking. I'm not sure I agree with every piece of the argument, and I certainly don't think that we should presume that drivers have an inherent right to use public right of way to store their vehicles. But compared with many of the alternatives---especially surface parking lots or monolithic garages at street level---street parking seems like a pretty good option for pedestrian-friendly design. Anna:
Clark: A 13-year old uses math (hooray for the Golden Ratio) to figure out a new and more efficient arrangement for solar panels. The trick: mimic trees! For extra credit, here’s more on why so many plants have spiral patterns related to the Golden Ratio. An urbanist’s paean to on-street parking. I’m not sure I agree with every piece of the argument, and I certainly don’t think that we should...Read more » -
Unchain Bike Sharing
Imagine for a moment that cities around the world are rolling out fleets of magic carpets and that those carpets are having truly wizardly effects: improved public health and safety, reduced traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and reduced dependence on foreign oil. City dwellers can check them out or drop them off at stations everywhere, and they are free to use for up to 30 minutes. After that, they cost...Read more »
