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Astonishing. Based on the best estimates I can come up with, residents of the US Northwest are on track to use a little less gasoline in 2006 than in 1999. That’s right, the region’s gasoline consumption—total, not per capita—has flatlined over the last 7 years. Over the same period, the region’s population grew by 9 percent or so. And that means that per capita gas consumption fell by about 9...

From the Department of Obvious Findings, the world’s wealthiest individuals are a whole lot wealthier than everyone else. But just how much wealthier is sort of astonishing: …the richest 1 per cent of adults alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in 2000, and the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of the world total. By contrast, the bottom half of the world adult...

On most days, my wife and I commute together by car.  And since my kids started a new, out-of-the-way school, our commute has gone from a fairly straightforward 15 minute trip—mostly in the carpool lanes—to a congested daily slog that, depending on traffic, can last over 45 minutes. We definitely pay for our longer commute, through higher bills for gas and repairs.  But we don’t have to pay for the...

Hey, look! Someone else cares about the link between neighborhood design and public health! The Congress for the New Urbanism put out a big ol’ report, covering a lot of the same ground we went over in our most recent Cascadia Scorecard. The upshot—there are a bajillion ways that neighborhood design might affect people’s health; some of the connections are rock solid, while others are more speculative; and the big...

We’re in day two of The Sound of Broken Promises, a six-day series on ailing Puget Sound from Seattle P-I reporters Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler. I’ll have much more to say about the series later—it’s unbelievably good so far. But today I’ll just briefly mention how much I love the “narrative thread” that the P-I is using to stitch the series together: they’re telling the life story of a...

(This post is part of a series.) From the Seattle Times—no surprises, really, but worth noting: The price tag for a new, elevated structure to replace the aging Alaskan Way viaduct has grown from $2.4 billion to $2.8 billion and the cost of building a tunnel has gone from a high of $3.6 billion to an estimated $4.6 billion, according to a report released today by the state. Meanwhile, the...

From Scripps News service comes a summary of the gradual retreat of Washington’s glaciers: unsurprising, but worth noting nonetheless. At Mount Rainier…the area covered by glaciers shrank by more than a fifth from 1913 to 1994, and the volume of the glaciers [declined] by almost one-fourth, the National Park Service says. From 1912 to 2001, the Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier retreated nearly a mile. Since the first stirrings of...

New report on obesity from Trust for America’s Health. The US obesity rate has risen to 32 percent—an increase from just 15 percent in 1980. And 66 percent of adults are “overweight,” a classification that also includes obesity. But one curiosity gets overlooked: national rates of adult obesity and overweight have risen almost not at all since 2000. (That’s not true for children.) See the charts on page 3 of...

The US Food and Drug Administration today, finally, approved the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B for over-the-counter sales in pharmacies and clinics to adults, as the New York Times reports. This news is excellent. We’ve been calling for it for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long,long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. The change will help tens of thousands of...

Our car-less family vacation in Vancouver, BC, was a big success. Here’s a full report, for those of you who shared your own car-lessvacation stories and are interested in such things. For the rest of you, you might want to skim the travelogue to find the five lessons I draw. The only nail-biter (if you can call it that) was the very first leg of the trip, which resembled the...