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Seek Transit

Here’s yet another way of looking at the health benefits of reducing sprawl: denser cities with more transit ridership tend to have fewer traffic deaths. Take a look:

Fatalities (on the vertical axis) include deaths among pedestrians, transit riders, and automobile drivers and passengers.

The upshot is that U.S. cities with high levels of transit ridership—especially those with large rail systems—also tend to have low traffic fatalities. But cities that are more sprawling (and which tend to have bus-only transit systems) tend to have higher rates of traffic deaths.

(This graph was taken from Todd Litman’s paper, "Comprehensive Evaluation of Rail Transit Benefits" available on the Victoria Transport Policy Institue website.)

Safe at Home?

One out of five older Americans can’t drive. And most of these non-driving senior citizens stay home on most days. This leads to obvious health risks: sedentary lifestyles and social isolation are both associated with higher rates of disease and earlier death.

The interesting thing, though, is that in denser areas—cities and suburbs with at least 15 people per acre—most senior citizens get out of the house every day, even those who can’t drive. That suggests that, as the population ages, creating dense, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that give seniors greater mobility may be a significant public health priority. (Neil Peirce wrote a good column on this issue in the wake of last summer’s elderly driver crashes.)

Update: According to the report linked above (which was co-released by the Surface Transportation Policy Project and the American Association of Retired Persons), there are about 44,300 residents of greater Portland, and 77,600 residents of greater Seattle, who are over 65 and are unable to drive.

The Price of the Next Trip

Gasoline prices are at their highest in recent memory and they appear likely to stay high for months. Is this a dream come true for climate defenders and transportation reformers? Far from it.

Short-term price spikes, such as the one we’re enduring now, have surprisingly little impact on driver behavior. But they constitute a massive drain on the economies of fuel-importing regions such as ours. And they enrich oil companies, strengthening their capacity to resist reform. The only silver lining on this storm cloud is that we might learn something about how much how northwesterners really pay to drive.

The truth is that we pay a lot not only in “external” environmental and social costs but also in cold, hard cash. But the trouble is, we pay most of it in large, fixed costs. And those costs do not vary appreciably in the short term with miles or minutes driven. The result is that drivers know their cars are expensive but perceive their next trip to be virtually free.

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Smarter Gas Taxes

The technology for charging drivers for their use of the roads based on the miles they actually drive keeps getting closer to maturity. This article describes some pioneering research at Oregon State University.

Hybrid engines may before long create a crisis for state highway maintenance funding. By-the-mile fees may then replace by-the-gallon taxes. Along the way, the fees could be fine tuned to reflect things like vehicle size (and the danger it poses to other vehicles and pedestrians), emissions, and rush-hour driving.

The Kindness of Human Milk

I was going to prepare a post on a couple of new studies on breastfeeding that came out the past couple of weeks—one showing breastfeeding lowers the risk of infant mortality by 20 percent, the other showing that breastfeeding in infancy helps prevent obesity later in life.

But when I went to Google News to find some press accounts of the studies, it turned out I missed a couple. Another study found that breast feeding can reduce the risk of heart disease later in life. And yet another found that breast milk can reduce infections in premature babies.

That’s a lot of great news about breast feeding in a short time. Of course, these studies are just the latest in a long line of peer reviewed research showing that breast feeding is a major contributor to human health throughout life. All the more reason to keep breast milk as pure as possible.

Interest in Inflation

The cost of living may be rising more quickly in Cascadia than the consumer price index reveals, according to this article. The consumer price index is among the most widely quoted of economic indicators. Most people think they know what it is: an indicator of the cost of living for ordinary folks. Yet it does only a mediocre job of measuring that.

The problem may be unavoidable, because CPI is circular. It seeks to measure the changing costs not of a constant set of necessities, but of whatever average people spend their money on. It tracks a continually varying basket of goods and services. And, of course, average people adjust their spending—put different things in their baskets—in response to shifting prices.

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A Perfect Storm?

Gasoline prices are, obviously, soaring (see these nifty graphs for examples from around the region). But I’m not sure we’ve seen the worst of our energy woes for the year. In fact, several trends are converging right now that may augur a repeat of the energy crunch of the summer of 2001.

First, there’s the region’s dwindling mountain snowpack. Snowmelt from the high Cascadian summits powers the region’s hydroelectric dams through the summer. There was decent snowfall this past winter—a little below normal in places, but nowhere near as bad as during the exceptionally dry winter of 2000-2001. But a hot, dry spring has led to an early peak in the snowpack, followed by rapid melting. Today, the snowpack that feeds Seattle City Light’s dams is barely ahead of where it was at this time in 2001. Take a look:

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Relieving Congestion

The city of London, which now imposes a xACxA35 fee on cars entering the center city, has enjoyed an unexpectedly rapid fall in air pollution. Particulates (the ultra-fine soot that issues from car and truck tailpipes), carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide are all down by 12 to 20 percent since the congestion fee was imposed. The fee, originally intended to reduce the crippling traffic congestion in downtown London, may be lightening the burden on Londoners’ lungs as well as their streets.

FalconWatch

Web Diversion: Check out these “Falco-cams” of nesting peregrines in Seattle and Tacoma. The Seattle falcons, Bell and Stewart, have returned home to their ledge high on downtown’s Washington Mutual tower and their newly hatched chicks appear thriving, or at least hungry.

Emerald City’s peregrine population is growing, with new nesting pairs reported elsewhere in the city.

The Dearth of Growth

The annual costs of added health care and lost productivity that stem from lack of exercise (and the resulting obesity) in British Columbia are pegged at $347-$647 million by a new study.

Call it half a billion dollars a year. That’s about 0.3 percent of annual economic output. And it doesn’t count the real toll: about 6 percent of premature deaths in the province each year.

The Northwest states do worse. And the global dimensions of the obesity epidemic are just coming into focus.