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The golden boy of Northwest news reporters, Timothy Egan, ventures to southern California to compose an excellent overview of the US trend toward high-occupant/toll (HOT) lanes in today’s New York Times. (Money quote: The Gubernator says, "Californians can’t get from place to place on little fairy wings.") All across the United States, variable tolls-congestion pricing-are becoming the new conventional wisdom about how to do road expansions. In a few places,...

Via Planetizen, some depressing news:  an international study has found that transportation planners regularly get their traffic and rail ridership forecasts wrong.  And not just by a little.  Half of all road traffic forecasts are wrong by at least 20 percent (though road projects tend to get a little more traffic than forecasted).  Rail ridership, on the other hand, is typically less than half (ouch!!) of what the planners forecast. ...

Ottawa officially unveiled its plan for complying with the Kyoto Protocol yesterday. The Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun (subscription required) have good coverage. Unfortunately, the news was mostly drowned out by a continuing scandal that may trigger a new federal election. The upstaging of the announcement is disappointing, because the Kyoto "plan" deserves an intense public debate—something it’s unlikely to get during the hockey brawl of a Canadian federal...

Via Worldchanging:  Check out this handy gas savings calculator for hybrid vehicles.  It’s simple, but nifty—and good for minutes of uninterrupted fun! The take home message—high-mileage hybrids can, in theory, save you a bundle.  But just how much money depends not only on how much gas costs, but also on how much driving you do, and what your other alternatives are. So let’s say you expect to drive 2,000 miles...

Just like Canada, the United Kingdom is seriously considering vehicle feebates, reports the invaluable newsletter Green Budget News.  To recap, feebates (sometimes called “freebates”) are a great way to harness market forces to encourage energy efficiency and discourage pollution.  The article above gives a good explanation of how they’d work: The proposal would require owners of more polluting vehicles to pay an extra levy, while drivers of environmentally friendly cars...

Wonder no longer:  oil and gas get subsidies out the wazoo.  Here’s the latest example from British Columbia… The province will spend $408 million over 15 years to bolster northeastern B.C.’s oil and gas industry, Minister of Energy and Mines Richard Neufeld said Tuesday, which includes new or expanded support for resource road construction, community infrastructure, education and the reclamation of abandoned natural gas wells. Of course, this sort of...

Which states use the least gasoline?  Which ones have the best gas-conservation trends? Probably not who you’d think, at least for the latter question. Based on Federal Highway Administration data covering 2001 through 2003, residents of New York State use the least gasoline, person for person, of any U.S. state:  about 0.8 gallons per person per day, vs. the national average of 1.2 gallons per person.  That’s to be expected:...

This Eugene Register-Guard editorial–cautioning Oregon’s politicians to take a sober, hype-free look at biofuels before launching a program to subsidize them—is definitely worth reading.  But it makes one point that, while not clearly out-and-out wrong, at least deserves a closer look.  According to the editorial, legislative action to promote biofuels in Oregon would be unnecessary… …if biofuels could compete with other forms of energy in the marketplace. The fact that...

US gasoline prices are about to set a new record, at least in nominal terms. Prices are highest on the West Coast, where a gallon of gasoline currently sells for $2.29, on average. As we’ve pointed out before, the Northwest doesn’t produce any of its own gasoline. We refine it, sell it, and tax it, but over half of the cost of gasoline is the crude oil itself (click on...

The Vancouver Sunreported today that British Columbia and Alberta are expected to lead Canada in new vehicle sales in 2005 "thanks to healthy economies and confident consumers." The good news—aside from the confident consumers—is that hybrid vehicles, as in other parts of the Northwest, are rocketing out of BC car lots "as fast as they can be supplied." Hybrid sales have been spurred on in part because BC just doubled...