Further to yesterday’s post: To understand how much Vancouver’s downtown has grown as a residential neighborhood, look at the before-and-after panoramas on this page.
Anyone know of similar photos of other Cascadian cities and towns?
5/3 Update: Rachel Severson sent in this link for a downtown Seattle comparison. It shows 1907 (!) and 2002.
The federal government in Washington, D.C., has a worrisome new plan to save the mighty swimmers that are Cascadia’s totem: redefine extinction. According to this reasoning, if salmon survive in hatcheries, we don’t need many of them spawning in our rivers. Local salmon scientists aren’t pleased.
Air pollution in cities in the Northwest is covered by a report released today by the American Lung Association, using government data. The upshot: we’ve got bad air days here and there, but most of breathe clean air—at least compared with other Americans.
Eugene-Springfield, Oregon, is the fifth worst in the United States for short-term pollution with small particles of soot that lodge deep in the lungs. These “particulates” are the most perilous of the major types of air pollutants, shortening the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of northwesterners each year. The metropolitan area surrounding Puget Sound from Everett south to Olympia ranks twenty-second worst in the nation and Medford, Oregon, is twenty-fifth worst. In Medford, winter wood stove use is the biggest problem. (The rankings are here.)
In the bid to create walkable, exciting, live-work-play downtowns, Vancouver’s enormous lead over Seattle and Portland just keeps growing. New developments in the heart of Vancouver – which already has four times as many residents as the geographically larger downtown of Seattle – continue to sprout at a phenomenal rate.
The city core has added between 1,500 and 2,500 new housing units each year for the last decade, with 3,000 expected this year and possibly 4,000 next.
In February, some 150 buyers camped out overnight to get first crack at the condos in a new building. The developer sold almost 500 units the next day alone. Oh, and the towers that will hold those units won’t be completed until 2006.
Last week, Larry Beasley, the city’s planning director, gave a speech sketching what to expect next. (Thanks to Gordon Price for the link. Gordon has added photos to the speech in his Price Tags newsletter. Request it from him at pricetags@shaw.ca)
(This post is part of a series.)
It appears that a growing number of Seattle residents are questioning whether the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the elevated highway that hugs the Seattle waterfront through downtown—ought to be torn down and replaced with…well…nothing at all. There has been a lot written about this in the past few years—especially recently.
This is not nearly as radical an idea as it might seem. Portland removed a waterfront freeway in the 1970s. San Francisco tore down its Embarcadero Freeway after it was damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and city residents liked the results so much that they just tore down another stretch of elevated highway through downtown. Vancouver, BC, never built an urban freeway; after a vigorous citizens movement that grew alarmed by what I-5 did to Seattle neighborhoods, the city killed an extensive freeway plan in the 1960s. That leaves Seattle as the only major city north of Los Angeles that still reveres the urban highway.
Of course, every city is different, and has unique transportation needs. Although much of the traffic once carried by the Embarcadero simply vanished once it was torn down, that highway didn’t serve the same function in its city’s transportation scheme as does the Viaduct.
The most startling and hopeful thinking on the world’s energy future consistently comes from Amory Lovins, a physicist based at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. His latest paper describes the potential to utterly transform the world’s energy economy, starting with vehicle technology. In fact, it details an SUV design that gets the equivalent of 100 miles to the gallon. In Amory’s view, a safer, cleaner, more prosperous, more efficient, climate-friendly hydrogen economy is not decades but years away, and each of the steps that can take us to it are profitable in the short term. A paper he wrote last year to debunk myths about hydrogen provides a more introductory exposition of similar themes.
Happy birthday, solar power! I had no idea that the first solar cells were invented by scientists from Oregon’s sunny Willamette Valley.
Even though solar panels are now 50 years old, the technology is still in its infancy. As Seattle-based power engineer and amateur historian Larry Clifton recently explained to me, power generation has taken myriad forms over the millenia, but there are still only 3 core power technologies: muscle power (both animals and people); fluids (including wind, water, and steam); and now, solar. The first two have their origins in antiquity: even the modern nuclear plant is simply a variant of combustion-powered steam turbines, which themselves derive from windmills and water mills used for at least three thousand years.
The history of power technology suggests that shifts between different technologies can be surprisingly rapid, given a sound technology and favorable economics. Small windmills proliferated throughout Europe in the late middle ages, once the technology proved profitable and reliable. The same could be true of solar: once the cost comes down just a bit more (it’s already dropped from $1,700 per watt to $3)—or, in the alternative, once other fuels become more costly—we could reach a tipping point where solar power and other alternative energy sources, from wind to conservation, really start to take off. And given the Northwest’s high rate of energy consumption, it’s not a moment too soon.
The governments in and around Boise, Idaho, are finally making some progress on planning for smart growth. They’ve agreed to a process to create a single growth blueprint. It’s a welcome step for the metropolitan area that has earned the dubious distinction of most sprawling in Cascadia.
President Bush’s mission to mars has slashed about $1 billion from NASA’s earth science budget over the next four years. That budget supports some of the most important research in the world: monitoring the global climate, keeping tabs on marine and terrestrial ecosystems.
John Holtzclaw, a transportation researcher from the Bay Area of California, has an interesting website that shows the relationships between residential density and driving. It includes photos of different San Francisco neighborhoods and data on their density, fuel use, and air pollution rates. One point: high density doesn’t necessarily mean high rise.
You can also use his calculator to check your own neighborhood’s (projected) fuel consumption. But you’ll have to estimate how many households live on each “residential acre” near you. Residential acres exclude streets, sidewalks, stores, and offices. An acre is about the size of a football field.
