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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...Read more » -
Seattle Considers Lower Car Subsidies
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...Read more » -
Information Superhighway Meets Real Superhighway
Microsoft is planning to expand its Redmond, Washington headquarters, adding between 10,000 and 20,000 new employees—plus the parking garages that will be needed to accomodate their cars. And the company is offering to pay $30 million for transportation and infrastructure improvements, including $15 million for a bridge construction project, to help compensate for the increased traffic the expansion will generate. The $30 million offer may seem like a generous gesture,...Read more » -
Make Prices Tell the Truth
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.Read more » -
Urban Planning and Smart Growth: Building Complete, Compact Communities
Building complete, compact communities—the opposite of poorly planned sprawl—yields an impressive array of benefits including: reduced reliance on imported fuel, less need for expensive road infrastructure, fosters closer relationships among neighbors, and saves people time.Read more » -
Bus Boom
According to the Vancouver Sun (subscription required), transit ridership in greater Vancouver jumped 8 percent in 2004. That’s the largest increase since 1986 and corresponds to 11 million additional transit trips. Most of the growth was on the metropolitan area’s ubiquitous buses, not on its elevated light-rail SkyTrain. High gas prices and, especially, the late-2003 U-Pass program stimulated much of the increase, which was the biggest jump among large transit...Read more » -
Tall, Skinny II
Former Vancouver city councillor (and Sightline board member) Gordon Price welcomed Seattle to the tall, skinny club with an op-ed in the P-Iabout what Vancouver’s learned in its pursuit of a compact and livable downtown. (See news about Seattle’s zoning changes here.) – High-rises, for example, should be not just tall but thin, since thin towers offer more privacy and light to residents. And stagger building heights for variety and...Read more » -
In Oil Spills, Big Is Small and Small Is Big
All but one of the five points I wrote about the Dalco Passage oil spill also applies to the Unalaska spill now unfolding in the Aleutians. (Granted, the site of the spill is not in Cascadia, but the ship was carrying a cargo—and presumably fuel oil—from the Port of Tacoma. So it’s our spill, too.) I’ll add a sixth point. 6. Catastrophic spills—ship on the rocks, black ooze in the...Read more » -
Easing Gas Pains
Petroleum prices are cooling a bit: a barrel of crude has fallen $9 over the last few weeks, though at $46 per barrel, prices are still at a level that was unthinkable a few years ago. Nevertheless, the fall in crude will probably mean that gas prices will come down over the coming months, too. Which makes it an opportune time to point out that, when it comes to the...Read more » -
A Tax's Progress
The provincial government in BC has taken another step toward a parking tax covering the entire Vancouver metropolitan area, as the Vancouver Sunreports. The parking tax is politically tied to constructing the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver light rail line and a new highway bridge. My enthusiasm for these three items are probably the inverse of public sentiment: I regard the parking tax as a terrific advance, the light-rail line as a mediocre idea,...Read more »
