• All You Need to Know About Stormwater Runoff

    Editor’s note: This blog is also available as a printer friendly pdf, and a similar version was published this week in Trim Tab, the publication of the Cascadia Green Building Council.  A woman drowns when the basement of her Seattle home suddenly fills with a torrent of filthy water. An overflow of 15 million gallons of sewage and stormwater fouls the shoreline of picturesque Port Angeles, putting the waterfront off limits...
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  • No Mudslinging At Stormwater Forum

    Business interests, greens, government reps, and Washington residents didn’t exactly all sing Kumbaya together at this week’s stormwater forum in Olympia, but the diverse crowd did find some common ground. As John Dodge of the Olympian described it in a great article Thursday, “…everyone attending the forum—including environmentalists and those with business ties—agreed that stormwater runoff is the biggest threat to Puget Sound’s health and will require a lot more money...
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  • Why Love Oregon?

    Ask people what’s great about Oregon and you’ll get hundreds of answers (from bamboo bikes to the Country Fair to its vote-by-mail system). At Sightline, there’s nothing we love more than policies that remove the niggling obstacles that keep people from making smart, sustainable choices. So here’s an update on a few ideas we’ve been following, and a couple of reasons to love Oregon a little more. This week, the...
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  • Technology in Transit

    A couple months back, I got a smart phone. One of the first things I downloaded was OneBusAway, an app that provides real-time information on transit stops, routes, and arrivals using data provided by King County Metro. Finally, I thought! I’d never again have to wait around for a bus that’s 20 minutes late. I’d know exactly when the next bus would arrive, shrinking my wait time at the stop....
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  • Sharing Your Car (in Oregon)

    Oregon could become the next state to pave the way for peer-to-peer car sharing companies, which allow people to rent out their personal vehicles when they’re not using them (which is usually more than 90 percent of the time). It’s a common sense and entrepreneurial idea that we’ve championed here at Sightline for a long time. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you need to rent a car for a...
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  • Turning the Corner

    Imagine a time, years ago, when Johnny and Billie Sue could take a break from jumprope, hopscotch, and tree climbing to ride their bikes down to the corner store, sit at the soda fountain, buy shoelaces, and trade comic books. Sounds like an idyllic bygone era doesn’t it? But I’m not that old and I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I lived it. Even we had a corner store....
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  • Making Asphalt a Little Less Sickening

    There are a couple of ways to tackle the problem of polluted runoff: keep the water from getting fouled in the first place, or clean it up once it’s contaminated. It doesn’t take a hydrology expert to figure out that in many cases, it’s cheaper and easier to deal with a pollutant at its source before it’s dissolved in water and spread far and wide. So goes the logic behind...
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  • A Vacation from My Car (and Kid)

    This weekend, my in-laws came to town. Which was a very happy occasion. I handed over my two-year-old daughter (and four pages of instructions) to them while my husband and I fled to a hotel in downtown Seattle for two glorious nights. We drank martinis at the Mayflower Park Hotel (among other places, but those were the best), got to see the new Coen brothers movie, slept as late as...
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  • "War On Cars": A History

    Back in October, I started noticing the accusation that Seattle is waging a “war on cars” pop up an awful lot in the Seattle-area press, and in suspicious ways. On its face, the charge that Seattle is waging a war on cars is pretty silly. After all, that the bulk of the city’s political leaders support two car-centric megaprojects—the 520 bridge and the Alaskan Way tunnel—that will cost in the...
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  • State Transportation Revenue Craters

    Michael Ennis may have batty ideas about parking policy, but he’s got a nice post today on a subject I’ve been meaning to write about: Washington state transportation revenue is in dire straits. New models show that revenue forecasts have consistently missed the mark. To illustrate the problem, check out this analysis of gasoline consumption, which is (obviously) a key driver of gas tax receipts: What it shows—if you look at the difference...
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