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Vancouver, BC’s Price Tags newsletter takes on a nifty subject in Issue 67: the role that lanes have played in the city’s past ("generally housing the messy bits of life") and how they might evolve in the future. Among other things, lanes—which Americans might think of as "alleys"–might "allow a more gradual form of densification, providing access for the granny cottages and secondary suites that accommodate growth without changing the...

I’ve been putting off commenting on Washington State’s recently-passed $8 billion transportationpackage—funded by a 9.5 cent per gallon increase and new weight-based vehicle fees—until I could figure out exactly how I feel about it. I still can’t. It’s complicated. In general, I like taxes on gasoline.  Gasoline carries many costs—security, air and water pollution, climate-warming emissions, and the like—that aren’t captured by the market price.  Which means that, no matter...

In 1970, year of the first Earth Day, lead was still a gasoline additive. Pollution from industrial and municipal facilities was largely unregulated. Commentators likened breathing in Portland to smoking a pack a day. Most environmental laws hadn’t even been conceived. How is the Northwest doing now? Obviously, we’ve cleaned up some—but we also face newer, more global challenges, such as the rising accumulation of greenhouse gases and newly troubling...

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. ...

  (This post is part of a series.) For a couple years now I’ve been obsessed, on and off, with the fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct:  its history (Seattle’s first major urban highway), its present (a seismically unstable eyesore that cuts off development options on Seattle’s downtown waterfront), and its future (still a conundrum—the city and the state want to replace it with a $4 billion tunnel, but nobody...

Earlier this week I grumped that this Seattle Times editorial misled readers about the finances behind a four-cent per gallon statewide gas tax.  Among other problems, the editorial overstates how much a four-cent per gallon gas tax could accomplish.  Over 30 years, it would finance less than $2 billion in infrastructure projects, which would only begin to pay for the highway projects—such as rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct (expected to...

 (This post is part of a series.) The Seattle Times editorializes today in favor of a four cent per gallon hike in the Washington state gas tax. Now, I’m typically in favor of higher gas taxes, on the grounds that the fuel’s massive externalities—ranging from overseas defense costs, to government subsidies to oil companies, to infrastructure costs for roads and highways, to global warming and air pollution—aren’t reflected in the...

As if eating nine servings of fruits and veggies a day isn’t bad enough, now federal health experts are saying we need 60 to 90 minutes of exercise a day. An article in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer tries to soften the blow by claiming that 30 minutes is enough for many people. The truth is, 30 minutes is enough to reduce the chances of chronic disease. But adults who want to...

Imagine a kingdom where the benevolent ruler declares that Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product, and devotes more of the country’s budget to education, and environmental and cultural health, than to economic development. There is such a country: the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and the first movie ever to be filmed there, “Travellers and Magicians,” is currently showing in Seattle one week only, at the Varsity...

Seattle’s schools are going through anotherround of budget crises.  This time, it’s a projected $20 million shortfall in the 2006-2007 school year.  It looks as though the school district may be forced to close some schools to help close the budget gap. Meanwhile, in other news, cityofficials (registration required for the second link) are still gung-ho to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel—a project that is likely to...