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Editor’s Note: David Brook is a long-time innovator and leader in the car-sharing industry. He contributed this guest post from Portland, where he consults and blogs on personal mobility. Many city dwellers are familiar with Zipcar and other carsharing companies cropping up in major cities and college campuses across America. The business model is based on a company leasing vehicles, placing them throughout an urban area, providing insurance, and requiring...

New rules approved by Washington’s lawmakers will cut the amount of salmon-harming copper,   toxic coal pollutants, and algae-stoking fertilizers that foul local waterways. Oregon legislators are halfway to approving a ban on copper brake pads—a ban that Washington approved last year. It’s exciting news for Puget Sound, the Columbia and Willamette rivers, and countless other waterways threatened by the region’s fire hose of stormwater filth. But in truth, the...

Researchers have pointed the finger at stormwater runoff as the top source of pollution that’s getting into Puget Sound and other Northwest waterways. And because runoff comes from just about everywhere—roofs, roadways, parking lots, farms, and lawns—the solution has to be just as widespread. Enter 12,000 Rain Gardens. This week Washington State University and Stewardship Partners, a nonprofit working on land preservation, announced a campaign to promote the installing of...

Editor’s note: This blog is also available as a printer friendly pdf, and a similar version was published this week in Trim Tab, the publication of the Cascadia Green Building Council.  A woman drowns when the basement of her Seattle home suddenly fills with a torrent of filthy water. An overflow of 15 million gallons of sewage and stormwater fouls the shoreline of picturesque Port Angeles, putting the waterfront off limits...

A big challenge to getting folks to care about the damage caused by polluted stormwater runoff is helping them understand what the heck it is and where it goes in the first place. And it appears there’s a lot of work to be done on that front. An informal survey by Eric Eckl at Water Words That Work, a Virginia company that works on water-related communications, sought some answers about...

Last week Seattle’s new Mayor, Michael McGinn reversed a city policy that prohibited commercial parking near rail transit stations and sparked a controversy. In some ways, it’s a hyper-local, even neighborhood-level, controversy but it also makes an interesting case study for parking policies in cities and towns all over Cascadia. Parking issues can be a third rail in local politics and leaders across the region often confront a similar problems...

French film-maker Jacques Tati was known for his unique portrayal of the humor and folly of modern technology. His most well known films feature the misadventures of Hulot, a character that is part Mr. Bean and part Inspector Clouseau.  One target of Tati’s critical humor was the automobile.  Here is a priceless clip from his 1971 film Trafic in which Hulot (played by Tati) is an automobile inventor on his...

On January 4, Seattle inaugurated a new, ultra-green mayor, which got me thinking comparatively. Which of the three largest Cascadian cities is the greenest? Not in plans and intentions and declarations but in facts? I recently pored over data from the Cascadia Scorecard and other sources. The answer? No contest: Vancouver, BC. It’s not so much Vancouver’s new rail transit line under downtown that goes to the airport (which Seattle...

You can adopt a puppy from the pound, or even a soldier fighting in Iraq to whom you can send a care package. And in Seattle, you can adopt a storm drain. That’s right, you can lay claim to your very own portal to the gutter. The city is so understaffed and over-storm drained that it’s asking residents to adopt a drain and remove the leaves and debris that clog...

If you read beyond the dubious headlines today, “Think Twice About ‘Green’ Transport, Say Scientists” and “Train Can Be Worse for Climate than Plane,” you’ll find an interesting study that suggests policy makers go beyond tailpipe emissions when calculating the carbon impacts of planes, trains, buses, and cars. University of California-Berkeley researchers attempted to also account for greenhouse gases released when building the vehicles, generating fuel to run them and...