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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...

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...

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...

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...

Tax Increment Financing is an important tool for accommodating new growth in Washington, but it certainly won’t address all of Washington State’s growth challenges. Let’s consider some of the arguments against TIF (if you need to get more basics on TIF start here). The central criticism of TIF—the one that is most likely to give fodder to opponents—is that what began as an effort to rescue cities from blight, TIF...

A big challenge to getting folks to care about the damage caused by polluted stormwater runoff is helping them understand what the heck it is and where it goes in the first place. And it appears there’s a lot of work to be done on that front. An informal survey by Eric Eckl at Water Words That Work, a Virginia company that works on water-related communications, sought some answers about...

One of the privileges of working at a sustainability think tank is being able to read about (and share!) ideas and research tidbits that I find genuinely interesting.  For me, the most valuable ideas are those that run to counter common sense, or that buck the conventional wisdom:  solid research that challenges my gut instincts is what’s most likely to open my mind to new ways of thinking about the...

We face sustainability choices every day: paper or plastic? Drive or take the bus? Fresh or frozen fish? It seems like one week a new study comes out claiming X is better than Y, and a week later Y is better than X. How are we to know what to believe? And more importantly, which choices are the ones that really matter? For years, Sightline has sought to clear the...

Bummer. My quixotic endeavor to lure free marketeers into rational parking policy has hit another bump in the road. Here’s Michel Ennis over at Washington Policy Center’s blog: Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn’s war on cars proposes to significantly increase the price of public parking. He claims that higher prices will free up supply. And Seattle Councilman Tim Burgess has a similar plan, just applied in a more sophisticated way. They...

Puyallup, once a fertile farm town and now a suburb of Tacoma, is likely not the first Northwest city that’s brought to mind when you think of progressive, green-focused innovation. But in the area of stormwater solutions, Puyallup is just that. Since August 2009, the city has helped residents install 20 rain gardens in three different neighborhoods. Now it’s lining up funding for even bolder improvements, including paving alleys with...