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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...

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...

  (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...

Earlier this week I grumped that this Seattle Times editorial misled readers about the finances behind a four-cent per gallon statewide gas tax.  Among other problems, the editorial overstates how much a four-cent per gallon gas tax could accomplish.  Over 30 years, it would finance less than $2 billion in infrastructure projects, which would only begin to pay for the highway projects—such as rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct (expected to...

The City of Seattle is proposing another positive step: lowering requirements for off-street parking that drive up the cost of housing in close-in neighborhoods. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the story. Unfortunately, reporter Vanessa Ho seems intent on fomenting controversy. She writes: As bad as it is now, parking on Capitol Hill—Seattle’s densest neighborhood—may get even worse under a proposal by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. The mayor wants to reduce the...

Thomas Friedman’s usuallypitch-perfect commentary on energy and security hit some high notes yesterday, but it also went off key twice, in disappointing ways. First, the sweetest passage from his New York Times column: By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax...

 (This post is part of a series.) The Seattle Times editorializes today in favor of a four cent per gallon hike in the Washington state gas tax. Now, I’m typically in favor of higher gas taxes, on the grounds that the fuel’s massive externalities—ranging from overseas defense costs, to government subsidies to oil companies, to infrastructure costs for roads and highways, to global warming and air pollution—aren’t reflected in the...

Via Worldchanging:  Check out this handy gas savings calculator for hybrid vehicles.  It’s simple, but nifty—and good for minutes of uninterrupted fun! The take home message—high-mileage hybrids can, in theory, save you a bundle.  But just how much money depends not only on how much gas costs, but also on how much driving you do, and what your other alternatives are. So let’s say you expect to drive 2,000 miles...

Prices influence billions of decisions every day. But they often ignore social and environmental effects, yielding prices that are sometimes too high and sometimes too low. To correct these flawed economics, we can tax “bads” rather than goods such as paychecks; make the polluter pay through fees and permits; and align markets with public goods.

According to the Seattle P-I, Washington State legislators have introduced a bill that would raise taxes on vehicles to help pay for streets and highways. Now, part of me likes this idea. As it currently stands, cars and trucks don’t pay their own way.  The state gas tax doesn’t even cover the cost of building, maintaining, and operating the state’s road network. To break even, the state department of transportation...