Here’s a provocative essay by one of the Northwest’s greatest living writers Jonathan Raban. It argues that Seattle’s beautiful setting and self-concept as a back-to-nature capital have crippled its city building, actually causing its failure to grow more urbane, more dense, less sprawling. The argument is contradicted by many counterexamples. (Vancouver and Portland have similarly stunning settings and outdoorsy cultures but more successful architecture and city planning. The differences are in policy, which stems from different histories.) But the writing is top drawer.
Air Test
Good news for Northwest counties. A new EPA listing of counties that fail to meet new (if 1997 can be called new), stricter air quality rules for ground-level ozone (a health threat and precursor to smog, not the stuff of the stratospheric ozone layer) omits all of the counties in Cascadia except for part of Sonoma County, California. Sonoma is the southernmost tip of the temperate rainforest belt and the northern suburbs of the Bay Area megalopolis. A different air pollutant called “small particulates” are a bigger menace to health than ground-level ozone, especially in the Northwest, but still, good for us!
TV Guide
The PBS show NOVA is running an Earth Day program about population trends. The producer, Linda Harrar, does excellent work, so I expect it’ll be interesting. Already worth a few minutes’ review is the set of global maps on the program’s website. Unlike most such maps, this set includes some results at the subnational scale. Notice that, though the Northwest’s total population density is not high on a global scale, the rate of population increase in some parts of the region are astronomical.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
Today’s Science magazine holds an article (summarized here) by Northwest researchers about circumpolar winds and oceanic currents. These huge gyres of cold air and water help to maintain the global climate within the bounds that have proved conducive to human civilization. (A Cascadia example: our thick winter snowpacks and the resulting abundance of year-round freshwater.) One paradoxical conclusion: “global warming” can trigger “ice ages” in some places and heating and drying elsewhere.
The Price Isn't Right Yet
Consumers are far more aware of gas prices than they are of practically any other commodity. Gas prices fluctuate frequently, and widely; and they’re plastered on signs along highways and major intersections.
So it’s no surprise that high gas prices are getting so much attention. Gasoline prices in the Northwest have doubled in the last 5 years, both local and national politicians have started to get exercised about them.
There are a few things worth noting about this.
Hail to the Geek
As this week’s New Yorker points out, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Simon Kuznets, a relatively obscure number-cruncher who invented the gross domestic product, along with many of the other accounting tools we still use to understand the national economy.
Kuznets also is known for a hypothesis about economic inequality—that, as an economy industrialized, inequality would first rise (as the benefits of industrialization benefited a relative handful), and then fall (as more workers joined high-productivity sectors of the economy).
This hypothesis did a pretty good job of describing inequality patterns in the US from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. A new paper by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the share of income commanded by the top decile peaked in the 1930s at about 46 percent, then fell to about a 33 percent by the late 1940s, where it remained for nearly 3 decades.
But income inequality began rising steadily in the late 1970s, and is now at levels not seen since the beginning of World War II.
Ted Stevens, meet Stan Stephens
An inspiring story from Prince William Sound, the extreme north of Cascadia: A Seattle P-Icolumn described an effort by Stan Stephens, two-time president of a citizen watchdog group set up after the Exxon Valdez disaster, to enforce a pollution law long flouted by the oil industry.
And he is doing it in his off hours: his day job is running a small business that depends on the beauty and natural abundance of the Sound, the northernmost of many rainforest fjords on our jagged coast.
Alaska’s politics are through-the-looking-glass peculiar: a state in the thrall of oil and the revenue it yields, and a state more dependent on the federal government than almost any other in the nation. (Indeed, among Northwest jurisdictions, there’s an inverse relationship between dependence on the federal treasury and belief in the virtues of the federal government.
Idaho and Alaska, rock ribbed in their ideological opposition to big government, get far more money from Washington, DC, than they pay in taxes. Oregon and Washington, with their liberal big cities and moderate statewide electorates, get far less, in terms of lucre, from American federalism.)
Alaska, which has fewer voters per US Senator than any state in the nation save Wyoming, is famous for its conservative voters and its gold-plated white elephants. Alaskan senator Ted Stevens rules the appropriations committee on one side of Capitol Hill; representative Don Young chairs the transportation committee (read: highway spending) on the other side. Between them, they’ve built a veritable cash pipeline from the Potomac to the 49th state. Seattle-based reporter Tim Egan writes today in the New York Times about the latest example: a monumental freeway bridge to connect Ketchikan to its tiny airport. Congressman Young is so proud of his pork-barrel successes that he recently crowed to the press: “I stuffed it [the transportation appropriations bill] like a turkey.”
In time, Alaska’s leadership will pass to a new generation. Let’s hope it’s more Stan, less Ted.
Good Tolls and Bad Tolls
One of the great missed opportunities of recent years is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge expansion. It’s the first major tolled road built anywhere in Cascadia in more than a decade, yet it won’t be tolled in conformance with internationally accepted congestion pricing practices. The tolls won’t vary with traffic volume. They’ll be a flat rate day and night: the effect will be to slow traffic and give tolls a bad name.
Getting Railroaded
The typical “green” position is to favor transit, especially rail transit, in all circumstances. But Cascadia’s long-term prospects depend on spending public dollars as efficiently as possible, which means supporting judicious, cost-effective investments in public transit. One worrisome example of ill-guided spending on transit is Sounder’s north commuter line, which connects Seattle with Everett. The full taxpayer cost per rider is in the hundreds of dollars per trip-money that would be better spent on making compact neighborhoods more livable through improved parks, schools, and police protection; enhanced express bus service; painting HOV lanes on arterials; expanded pedestrian infrastructure; or even subsidizing bicycle commuters, vanpoolers, and carpoolers. A similar example of rail not always being the answer is from Vancouver, B.C., where regional authorities are rushing forward to build a train from downtown to the airport. The project is even opposed by Vancouver’s leading sustainable transport advocacy organization.
Feeling HOT, HOT, HOT
The best kept secret among transportation planners is that the best—and perhaps only—way to control highway congestion is to make people pay to use roads, especially during peak driving periods.
At one point, instituting road tolls seemed politcally beyond the pale, something that a populace long accustomed to freeways would never accept. But with congestion growing in every major urban area in the country, the idea of toll roads and toll lanes, using high-tech “phantom tollboth” technology that automatically deducts tolls from passing cars, seems to be catching on, not just with highway officials but with drivers.
The most compelling criticism of congestion pricing is that it charges people who have no alternative but to drive, a burden that can fall particularly hard on the poor. That’s the argument that AAA makes. But according to USA Today, the popularity of the lanes where they’ve been implemented is surprisingly high:
Seventy-one percent of drivers polled about California’s State Route 91 said tolls were fair. Support was highest among lower-income groups.
HOV lanes have already been coverted to HOT lanes in four states, and six new HOT lane projects are underway, including one on Highway 217 in Portland. This is definitely a development to watch, because it has the potential to spread quickly.
