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This photo, submitted by the Lebers, caught my eye in Sightline’s photopool today. With National Park(ing) Day fresh in our minds, it’s apt to look for alternative uses of pavement we normally reserve for cars. The pictures shows a much more efficient use of space: a few dozen bikes in the space only three or four cars could fill. Have other photos of sustainable solutions in the Northwest or beyond?...

Some of the Sightline crew took a field trip today down the street to visit the folks celebrating National Park(ing) Day. Here are some snapshots. (More available on Sightline’s Flickr Photopool. Have your own pictures of Park(ing) Day or other sustainable wonders? Submit them!) Architecture firm Perkins+Will demonstrates their green roof design: More below the jump And Cascade Land Conservancy: And some were just there enjoying the weather:

A report released last year from the Livable Seattle Movement declared that Seattle’s existing zoning is more than enough—three times more—than we need to accommodate expected growth. Phew! What a relief. And here we thought the Seattle region would have to undergo some painful, politically-rending rezones in order to sop up all the new people—as many as 106,000 households—arriving in the next decade. And, by extension, it would also mean...

Ripples, and sometimes waves, of the economic tsunami continue to roil through cities across the United States. One product of the downturn is stalled real estate projects. Many shelved projects have left vacant lots, derelict buildings, or parking lots where housing or office space was planned. The need to put these spaces back into use has motivated some great thinking about how to integrate open space and farming into the...

The most common sense of the word “density” in land-use terms is simple: more people in a smaller area. Frequently the only way to accomplish this is to build taller, multi-unit buildings. High rises. But in areas with low concentrations of people, increasing density can mean something different than building up to the sky. There are ways to create more diversity and choice in single-family neighborhoods—accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can...

If you read beyond the dubious headlines today, “Think Twice About ‘Green’ Transport, Say Scientists” and “Train Can Be Worse for Climate than Plane,” you’ll find an interesting study that suggests policy makers go beyond tailpipe emissions when calculating the carbon impacts of planes, trains, buses, and cars. University of California-Berkeley researchers attempted to also account for greenhouse gases released when building the vehicles, generating fuel to run them and...

Last Friday was bike to work day and I was in Vancouver for a meeting being hosted by the Candian Centre for Policy Alternatives on climate justice. Before I got on the train for home I walked over to the Burrard Bridge. I have been reading lately about efforts to create a dedicated bike lane on the bridge. In other posts I have written about what supports increases in bike...

Urban gardening’s great. The 0.03 Mile Diet is the ultimate in eating locally and seasonally. It can provide valuable perspective for how much water, fertile land, and labor go into growing our food—after taking up gardening, I can’t toss wilted veggies without serious guilt pangs. The popularity of pea patching is growing rapidly: the number of American households tending their own produce increased  nearly 20 percent over the past year....

Here’s a great, short video on development, sprawl, and transportation that illustrates some of the concepts we here at Sightline have been talking about for a while. Created by John Paget, it’s the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. And it’s pretty cool to boot:   If the video doesn’t work, you can see it on YouTube. H/t to Stephen Rees’s blog for finding this....

Toxic chemicals plaguing Puget Sound’s fish and orcas, polluted rainwater streaming into the sea, overfishing, damaged shorelines—all of this was my bread-and-butter for news stories during my recently-ended decade at the Seattle P-I. So I was really excited this week to tune into PBS to watch Frontline, a standout of investigative journalism, as it delved into what’s ailing Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in a special called “Poisoned Waters.”...