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Region: Oregon

Poll: Northwest Takes to the Wind (Mill)

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Here’s a quick note on recent polling about wind energy among Northwest voters.

We’ve all heard loud opposition to wind farms—the most ardent critics are usually neighbors who dislike the idea of seeing wind turbines out their windows, but overall, public opinion in the Northwest is looking pretty good for wind energy development.

That’s right. A recent public radio poll of voters in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, found broad support for wind energy among both urban and rural Northwest residents—even if the turbines would be visible from their homes.

Of course, anyone who answered in the hypothetical could go the other way if a wind farm was proposed that would actually be visible from their home!

For my part, I hope these findings signal an emerging clean-energy aesthetic, where clean energy technologies look more and more beautiful to us because they represent good stuff: progress, health, and economic strength.

Public Radio Poll Chart Wind Energy

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Making Food Carts Less Trashy

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As if I needed another reason to salivate over Portland’s exploding food cart scene, the folks over at GO Box have come up with one: reusable to-go containers. The idea is simple: Pay $8.50 once and get a token, which you take to a participating food cart. They’ll serve your meal in a reusable container, … Read more

Northwest Bicycle Bills in 2011

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cyclists-istock

Update 1/21/11, 4:35 p.m.: I’ve modified my original description of HR 1018 to correct a mistatement on my part and to better reflect the views of the Washington bicycling community.

Update 1/24/11: PubliCola is now reporting that HR 1018 has been shelved.

With new legislatures in session in both Oregon and Washington, now is a good time to canvas the bicycle-related bills. Washington has a pair of  bills that enjoy bipartisan sponsorship, while Oregon has a couple that actually restrict bicycling, including one that has pegged local outrage meters at 11. Let’s dig in.

The marquee bill in Washington is the “mutual responsibilties” bill, HR 1018 / SB 5193, the overarching purpose of which is clear enough: “every person riding a bicycle upon a roadway shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle…”

That may sound like business as usual, but the bill does contain some modifications to existing law, and it will be interesting to watch the debate that they generate. Among the changes are these:

  1. Cyclists who are traveling slower than the speed of traffic must ride as close to the right side of the road as the rider judges to be safe. The law also requires cyclists who are traveling slower than the speed of traffic to make use of available paved shoulders or bike lanes when they are safe to use.
  2. Bicyclists are prohibited from riding more than two abreast on normal roadways, unless they are in the act of passing.
  3. Vehicles traveling under 35 miles per hour must allow a minimum of 3 feet of space when passing bicycles or pedestrians. When traveling at higher speeds, vehicles must allow at least 5 feet of space.

The Bicycle Alliance of Washington, an advocacy organization that proposed the bill, has more detail here.

Also of importance in Washington is the “local speed limit” bill, HR 1217, which cuts red tape so that it’s easier for local jurisdictions to reduce speed limits. Rather than having to perform costly and time-consuming engineering and traffic investigations, this bill will simply let municipalities establish 20 mile-per-hour zones in residential areas at their discretion.

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The Poverty of Ownership

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Poverty Picture Free from Morgue FileThe Census Bureau is debuting a new version of its poverty count, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that should represent an improvement over the old flawed version. The new measure is supposed to be broader and more reflective of factors like a family’s size, geographic location, and whether it is receiving benefits such as food stamps, energy assistance, a housing subsidy, or tax credits. Additionally, the new measure takes into account expenses a family might have, including taxes, child care, transportation, and out of pocket medical expenses.

Surprisingly, the new measure revises the poverty rate for renters down but bumps up the number of homeowners in poverty. To understand why, let’s dig into the details a bit.

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A Vacation from My Car (and Kid)

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This weekend, my in-laws came to town. Which was a very happy occasion.

seattle flickr rutloI handed over my two-year-old daughter (and four pages of instructions) to them while my husband and I fled to a hotel in downtown Seattle for two glorious nights. We drank martinis at the Mayflower Park Hotel (among other places, but those were the best), got to see the new Coen brothers movie, slept as late as we wanted, dropped into a yoga class and ate the yummiest – albeit smallest – steak of my life at the Spur Gastropub. Basically, we cruised around the city as if we were unencumbered 22-year-olds.

This was not the kind of vacation we usually take. Our leisure time is dominated by campsites, cross-country skis, pancake mix and road trips to Rocky Mountain trout streams – the kind of places that are most easily driven to.

No doubt, the absence of my kid contributed mightily to the unfamiliar state of relaxation that I haven’t really experienced since she was born. But as I awoke and had to choose only whether to walk 7 blocks to the waterfront for eggs benedict or 7 blocks up Capitol Hill for some uttanasana, I also realized how much I loved the vacation from my car.

So I got curious about what research had been done on car-free travel, and how it enhances the vacation experience. I’d hoped Google would spit out a Chamber of Commerce study that found car-free visitors were so much happier they spent 27 percent more money, but this kind of empirical data seems hard to come by. (If anyone out there has stats on car-free tourism or wants to add to Sightline’s running list of the best car-free vacations, please share!)

Here’s what I can say: there are obvious benefits to carless leisure, and savvy tourism destinations from Alpine ski resorts to California beach towns are taking smart steps to encourage car-free travel and build strong brands around it. So why aren’t more cities doing it?

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Sustainable Versus Affordable

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Redmond 2.JPGFor the last several years something has really gotten under my skin: the way we talk about housing and affordability. I don’t like the way we measure it.

The first time I found myself getting unhappy about the discussion about housing affordability was a few years ago when I watched the debate over legislation to create incentive zoning in Seattle. By using a formula based on Area Median Income and the normative “rule of thumb” for housing costs, the Council decided that a hypothetical worker in Seattle making $45,000 should pay about $1,000 a month for rent. Developers who wanted to build extra housing should have to build more housing at that price.

That just didn’t seem to make sense to me at the time and it still doesn’t. My question is: can’t we find a better way to define affordability? I’m not the only one asking this question. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has developed a new measure and the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center is trying to do the same thing. There must be better ways to talk about what affordability means in an urban context.

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