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The Road Worrier

Just as you might expect, highways cause air pollution.

Or, to be more precise: all else being equal, places with more highway miles per capita tend to produce higher levels of air pollution from vehicles, because people drive more.

Among the 66 large cities ranked in terms of miles of highway lane per capita, Seattle and Portland were 44th and 45th, respectively. Not bad, but the highway miles per capita in the Northwest were double the amount in New York City (that Ecotopia on the Hudson).

And among 106 smaller U.S. cities, Eugene ranked 32nd, Spokane 41st, and Boise 66th in highway lane miles per capita.

The good news is that, mile for mile, today’s vehicles produce from 80 to 99 percent less pollution than did vehicles in the 1960s. The bad news is that there are lots more vehicles, and we drive them much more. In many ways, our air is cleaner than it used to be—but it could be far, far cleaner still.

Fish Sense

This recent Vancouver Sun article reported what could turn out to be an important step in British Columbia: reforming the commercial salmon fishery. In this fishery, as in most of the world’s fisheries, the harvest is regulated by the length of the season—a crude system that ensures over-investment in gear, massive waste of resources, temporary gluts in the marketplace, and great risks to fishers forced to go to sea despite storms.

The best managed fisheries in the world are typically operated under a system in which individual fishers (or, in some cases, tribes or communities) own tradeable permits to harvest a share of the total catch. The North Pacific halibut fishery is an example of a fishery in which boat owners can decide when in the year they want to catch their share, based on markets, weather, and what’s most efficient for them. It also helps the fish: because fishers are guaranteed a share, they want the fishery to grow. So all paricipants have an incentive to lobby for sustainable management and to report cheaters. (Read about it in Sightline’s 2001 volume.) The Sun article suggests a similar system may be considered for the province’s salmon runs.

Trim Waists, Build Up

Roger Valdez of the Washington State Public Health Association today argues in the Seattle Times for concentrating more development in downtown Seattle, not to save farmland, but to save lives. Density boosts walking and cuts fat. It’s not a new message, but it is a new and welcome messenger.

It's a Sprawl World After All

Discouraging, but far from unexpected.

In an excellent post, blogger Kevin Drum summarizes the dilemma of making transit work in sparsely populated suburbs, using data from Joel Garreau’s Edge City.

According to Garreau, the “floor-to-area” ratio (or FAR)—the ratio of the floor space of buildings to the land on which they sit—is highly predictive of transportation conditions. At an average ratio of 1.0 (that is, where the total floorspace of buildings, including multi-story buildings, is equal to the total land area), traffic jams become a major political issue. As a result, in sprawling suburbs and “edge cities” at the fringes of a metro area, the FAR rarely exceeds 1.5.

The problem is that transit doesn’t start to become cost effective until the FAR reaches 2.0.

So there’s a big gap between the density where local traffic gets backed up, and the density where alternatives to the car become economically feasible.

This suggests that the best way to create viable alternatives to the car isn’t to try to gradually increase densities in sparsely populated suburbs. Residents who depend on their cars will start to complain of the traffic, and create political pressure to halt new development. Instead, the best strategy may be to concentrate development—both jobs and houses—in downtown areas, where the FAR already typically exceeds 5.0, and where transit and walking are already viable means of tranportation.

Garreau (via Drum) also cites an interesting statistic: for every $1 in tax receipts from a residential subdivision, as much as $1.22 goes out to pay for schools and other infrastructure. But for every $1 in tax receipts from commercial real estate, only about $.40 goes out, mostly in road expenditures. This is one reason why many suburbs bend over backwards to attract commercial development of any kind—and, perhaps, why so many wind up with the big box retail stores that are the hallmark of suburban sprawl.

Crash Toll

Car crashes, the leading cause of death among young people in Cascadia, are the topic of a global survey by the World Health Organization. It’s astonishing how little attention motor vehicles get as a public health problem. They kill as many people worldwide as malaria. Among young people, they’re not far behind AIDS as a cause of death. As on many indicators, the Pacific Northwest appears to do a little better than average for North America on traffic safety, but it does much worse than many European countries.

Biting Bark

According to this Vancouver Sun article, an increasing share of Canada’s commercial forests is controlled by private companies.

In theory, there’s nothing that prevents private companies from being good forest stewards. Some companies, especially those who have sought out Forest Stewardship Council certification, do a pretty good job. And likewise, federal agencies that have to answer to all sorts of political pressures sometimes do a terrible job of managing forests.

But if experience in the US Northwest is any guide, commercially controlled timberlands are likely to be logged far more aggressively than are lands owned by state and federal agencies. Take a look at our deforestation maps of the Olympic Peninsula, Central Cascades, and Southern Oregon (beware, large downloads) and explore the “map layers” tab at the top to see some of the differences.

I Don't Want To Work

This is definitely a trend worth watching. A slow job market is gradually discouraging people from even seeking work.

This trend is troubling in itself, but also creates confusion about how to measure the actual conditions of the job market. To count as “unemployed” in government surveys, you have to be actively looking for a job—so people who stop looking for work don’t count as unemployed. This means that if workers abandon their job searches because there’s no work to be found, the official unemployment rate can be flat or even improving even as the actual employment picture gets worse. Conversely, if people start to look for work because they recognize that there are jobs to be had, the unemployment rate can rise even as jobs are becoming more plentiful.

These factors can make the official unemployment rate a particualrly slippery statistic to work with, especially over the short term.

Another common way of gauging employment is by dividing the total number of people with jobs by the total working-age population. When employment is strong, that measure tends to rise. Right now, however, this number is at its lowest point in 16 years—even though the official unemployment rate isn’t particularly high.

But employment-to-population ratio also has its flaws. First, the farther we get from the 2000 census, the more likely that our population estimates are out of whack with reality—which could make that figure even less reliable than the unemployment rate.

And second, there are lots of reasons that people stop working: in an ideal world, parents who stay home with their kids, young people delaying work to improve their education, early retirees, and people who simply don’t feel they need to work all the time shouldn’t be seen as a dead weight in the economy.

This points to a common problem with all measurement of social conditions: the quality of a yardstick, and its ability to give you meaningful information, changes with the social and economic landscape. The trick is to know when to abandon your yardstick.

Update: Looks like there’s some good employment news for the month – perhaps we’ll see a slight uptick in the employment-to-population ratio.

Oh, Migratious

We think of the late 1990s in the Northwest as having a scorching economy—dot.com wealth flowed like water, and a tight labor market drew people to the Northwest in droves.

Well, maybe not.

A new analysis suggests that Washington residents, at least, were more settled during the late 1990s than they were during the late 1980s: the share of residents who’d moved into the state recently dropped from 17.4 percent in the 1990 census to 15.4 percent in 2000.

And what’s more, with the exception of people in their early 20’s, recent in-migrants tended to earn less than people who’d lived in the region for longer. This was especially true for people with a high-school diploma or less. Apparently, some migrants were drawn to Washington by the prospect of a hot economy, only to find that jobs in the state weren’t all that lucrative.

This is consistent with our other findings on economic security: Just as the stock market boomed in the late 1990s, unemployment and poverty rates in the Northwest U.S. started to creep up as well. That’s yet another reason to be skeptical of the standard measures of economic progress—and, perhaps more importantly, the headlines in the business pages.

Decisions, Decisions

It looks as though renewable energy beat out energy efficiency in Olympia. The Washington legislature was willing to pay people to make electricity, but unwilling to pay people to save it. That’s a mistake.

Although both efficiency and renewables are clearly important, ramping up energy efficiency is probably a higher priority in the short term, simply because it’s cheaper. As the Rocky Mountain Institute frequently points out, the cost of “nega-watts” (saved electricity) is typically much lower than the cost of megawatts (generated electricity), no matter how they’re produced. Economic theory says that the smartest thing to do is to make the cheapest energy buys first, and use the savings to help purchase the more expensive ones later.

Focusing on renewables is right, and smart over the long term. But in a tight budgetary climate, you should make the best buys first.

It's a Gas, Gas, Gas

As the Cascadia Scorecard points out, Northwesterners are world-class energy consumers. Residents of the U.S. Northwest consume nearly as much energy, in the form of highway fuels and home and commercial electricity, as do Texans.

But leaving electricity aside, we don’t use all that much gasoline, at least compared to other parts of the U.S. Among the 50 states, Washington and Oregon rank 39th and 40th, respectively, in per capita gas consumption. (Idaho’s consumption is slightly above the U.S. average.)

And even more encouraging, Washington and Oregon are among just 7 states in which average gas consumption declined between 1990 and 2000. Rapidly urbanizing Nevada led the U.S., with a 55 gallon per person decline over the decade. (Again, Idaho bucked the Northwest trend, with an 8% increase in gas consumption per capita).

Oregon’s and Washington’s declines are almost certainly due to increased urbanization, not to improvements in auto fuel efficiency. And, even if encouraging, the declines are tiny, in the range of a few percentage points. Northwesterners still use half again as much gasoline as do residents of New York state, and about 3 times as much as Germans.