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From today’s New York Times:  new results from a long-term health study suggest that 9 out of 10 men, and 7 out of 10 women, will become overweight or obese at some point in their lives.  In fact, even if you’ve never had a weight problem as an adult, you could still at risk—half of men who made it well into adulthood maintaining a body mass index in the normal...

UPDATE 9/26/05:Pretty good blow-by-blow coverage of the monorail’s unraveling in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Saturday. We’re not dead yet, proclaims the monorail board. Just minutes ago, the board unanimously agreed to send the monorail back to the voters this November. This is apparently a last ditch effort to resuscitate the project in the face of stern opposition from the mayor and city council. The new plan may actually be financially...

  (This post is part of a series.) As Joel Connelly points out in today’s P-I, there’s no guarantee that I-912—the Washington State initiative that would roll back the most recent hike in state gas taxes—will pass.  That said, repeal of the gas tax looks pretty likely, in no small part because of the surprisingly tepid response from the state’s business community, which had previously been outspoken in its support...

From the National Bureau of Economic Research comes a new study on the effects of joblessness on family income.  From the abstract: [J]ob loss leads to large permanent reductions in family income. Comparing outcomes among individuals whose fathers experienced an employment shock to outcomes among individuals whose fathers did not, we find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9% lower than similar children whose fathers did...

From CNN, a story suggesting that Oregon’s emphasis on pedestrian and bike-friendly cities has helped it keep obesity in check. According to a study released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based Trust for America’s Health, the percentage of overweight Oregonians held steady at 21 percent last year, a sharp contrast to Alabama, where the rate of obesity increased 1.5 percentage points to 27.7 percent. What makes Oregon different is its emphasis...

If you’ve been following Eric’s pieces on sage-grouse, goats, wolves, orcas, salmon, caribou, and other Northwest critters, you may have gathered that Sightline is doing research on wildlife in Cascadia—and what it tells us about the health of our natural heritage. In fact, as we described in a Cascadia Scorecard News article this week, Sightline is introducing a wildlife index as part of the Cascadia Scorecard project. The index tracks...

If you want an example of what sets greater Vancouver apart from the cities south of the US-Canadian border, look no farther than this Vancouver Sun headline: Council votes to turn two of six lanes on Burrard Bridge into dedicated bike lanes. Just for context—the Burrard Bridge is one of just a few main access points to downtown Vancouver, and carries a significant amount of car traffic into downtown from...

Health care has become such an expensive endeavor—consuming roughly an eighth of all the money our economy generates—that even small improvements in health can save a lot of money. A recent study, mentioned here in the Seattle P-I, looks just at the health costs—care for asthma, cancer, lead pollution, and the like—resulting from exposure to manufactured chemicals. And according to Dr. Kate Davies, the study’s author, the costs are pretty...

First, London started charging cars a fee to enter the city center—a move widely credited with easing congestion and making it easier to get around in the crowded downtown. Now, the British government is considering instituting congestion pricing for the entire nation. Says this BBC article: The London scheme brought in two years ago is reckoned a success in reducing traffic congestion, despite the fears voiced in advance. The daily...

Newly released data shows that Canadian obesity rates are skyrocketing alongside American rates. In 2004, 23 percent of adult Canadians were considered obese, up nine percentage points from the late 1970s. Adolescent obesity rates tripled during the same period. Obesity rates in Canada are still lower than those in the US, where 30 percent of the adult population is considered obese. But interestingly, researchers attribute most of the difference to...