• Pollute the Rich

    Feeling guilty about driving your car? If you’ve been ranting at too many of Clark’srecentposts, then I’ve got a sales pitch for you… For the low, low price of $160 you can turn your Hummer H2 into a zero emissions vehicle. It’s easy. All you need is a TerraPass. Now here’s the fine print: it won’t actually reduce the emissions from your tailpipe, or turn your gas-guzzler into a sipper....
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  • Buy A Diesel?

    A concerned reader is in the market for a used car, and wants to know what we’d recommend: a fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle (like a Prius), or one that can run on veggie-oil-based biodiesel (like a Volkswagen Jetta)? A while back I posted on a similar question—whether to buy a new Prius or an old Accord.  There, the price differences were so wide that the Accord seemed the better buy—provided that...
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  • Portland Power Goes Green

    A good article in today’s Oregonian about some aggressive conservation measures that Portland General Electric is pursuing. PGE is already a national leader in customers who purchase green power, but the utility is looking to further boost its renewable energy portfolio. The basic idea is simple: for a few extra dollars a month, utility customers can sign up for a program that buys renewable energy—wind, geothermal, and low-impact hydro. The...
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  • Every Road Has its Price

    More from the impossible-is-catching-on-department. San Francisco is studying the idea of charging motorists fees—often called congestion pricing–for driving on some of its most-congested roads at peak hours.  The city has been inspired in part by London’s successful example, which mayor Ken Livingstone, in town for World Environment Day, has been talking up: Congestion has decreased some 30 percent—or 50,000 cars—in central London since pricing was implemented two years ago. (Many...
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  • No Taste for Accounting

    I’ve written a coupletimes about ways that drivers can offset their global warming emissions by buying carbon credits—usually by paying for renewable electricity projects.  For folks who can’t afford a Prius (and even for folks who can) this seems to me to be a pretty good way to reduce some of the pollution impacts of your driving habits. Alert reader Dave Manelski from Earth Share of Washington pointed out this...
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  • Burnt CAFE

    It’s a rare treat to read a dry, technical report and—almost by accident—learn something surprising, counterintuitive, useful and (at least to me) genuinely new.  Which is exactly what happened when I read this paper (beware, pdf) by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute.  The upshot:  raising vehicle fuel-economy standards, which always seemed to me like a good idea, may actually be counterproductive, even if they’re truly successful at...
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  • HOT Lanes, Black Boxes, and Fairy Wings

    The golden boy of Northwest news reporters, Timothy Egan, ventures to southern California to compose an excellent overview of the US trend toward high-occupant/toll (HOT) lanes in today’s New York Times. (Money quote: The Gubernator says, "Californians can’t get from place to place on little fairy wings.") All across the United States, variable tolls-congestion pricing-are becoming the new conventional wisdom about how to do road expansions. In a few places,...
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  • Lessons on Sprawl and Transit…from Los Angeles?

    Well, from the LA Times, at least.  The paper’s had a series of guest editorials about traffic, transit and urban planning—specifically, how sprawling, congested LA can get itself out of the fix it’s put itself into over the last 60 years or so.  The LA area is surprisingly dense, but the population is spread out fairly uniformly over a large area—which makes it very hard to service the region cost-effectively...
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  • Flight of the Condo

    I’m a little late picking this up, but both the New York Times and the Seattle Timeshave now run stories on what’s supposedly a hot new trend in Seattle:  adding luxury condo units to downtown hotels.  Condo-owners get the benefits of hotel amenities, such as room service, room cleaners, valet parking, and a concierge. Plus, at least one of the proposed hotel/condo plans would be bundled with a mix of...
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  • A Tunnel of Money

      (This post is part of a series.) For a couple years now I’ve been obsessed, on and off, with the fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct:  its history (Seattle’s first major urban highway), its present (a seismically unstable eyesore that cuts off development options on Seattle’s downtown waterfront), and its future (still a conundrum—the city and the state want to replace it with a $4 billion tunnel, but nobody...
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