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Here’s a bad idea. The state wants to widen Interstate-90 over Snoqualmie Pass. While they’re at it, they’re considering building a series of passageways for animals—maybe as many as 14—that would help wildlife move safely across the expanded freeway. It will cost $113 million. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to design our cities and roads to accommodate the natural systems around us. Indeed, I think we have...

From the New Urban News comes this nugget: Researchers presented findings at the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference that show substantial energy savings from higher-density urbanism – greater savings than can be achieved from the US government Energy Star program. As the chart on the left shows (if you can read it—sorry it’s so small), even small increases in density can yield substantial energy savings; increasing housing density...

People who move to the suburbs may think they’re fleeing the polluted air of the city.  Of course, there’s a tradeoff: by living in low-density suburbs, they spend more time in their cars. And as it turns out, the air inside your car may be just about the dirtiest you’ll breathe all day. Last year, researchers in Sydney, Australia released a study (pdf) that measured the levels of benzene (a...

Washington’s population growth appears to be picking up a bit of steam: the state added 88,600 new residents over the past year, according to the state Office of Financial Management (OFM). That was 20,000 more residents than the state added during the previous year. And compared with 2 years before, the pace of population growth increased even more, rising from .9 percent per year in 2002-2003, to 1.4 percent in...

No creature, beside humans, penetrates the Pacific Northwest as thoroughly as salmon. In a single short lifetime a salmon may inhabit pelagic and nearshore marine waters, freshwater streams, mountains, forests, deserts, cities, and farms. Their presence is perhaps the region’s defining characteristic. They are, therefore, the single best indicator of the Northwest’s ecological integrity. The health of salmon is a close proxy for how extensively we have eroded our natural...

Last week, I wrote a post detailing how much car crashes cost.  An alert reader asked some followup questions about how to reduce his risk: Does a decrease in vehicle-miles translate to a decrease in injuries? Am I relatively safer on my bike? On the bus? Here are some quick answers.  First:  the more you drive, the greater your chance of getting in a crash.  See, for example, this chart...

When shopping for food, how important is it to buy local?  This question isn’t rhetorical:  I no longer know quite what to think about this.  Obviously, transporting food long distances requires fossil fuels and creates air pollution, among other ills. So all else being equal, it’s better to buy local.  But how much better, I’m just not sure.  Studies such as this one (reported on here by the BBC, blogged...

Michael, a thoughtful reader of our Fundamentals blog, posted a comment about our proposed principle, Ensure every child is wanted, in which he asks: “[This] goes beyond sustainability’s purview, doesn’t it?” Sightline has long argued that family planning plays a significant role in a range of sustainability issues, starting with our book Misplaced Blame back in 1997, and as recently as our latest book, Cascadia Scorecard 2005 (pdf)–not to mention...

One of the defining characteristics of sprawl is a branching street pattern—one in which cul-de-sacs feed residential streets, which feed local arteries, which feed thoroughfares, which ultimately feed freeways. It’s a design that can work fine for cars, but not so well for people.  I spent (or misspent) part of my childhood in that sort of neighborhood.  There were houses that were literally 100 yards from my house as the...

Two pieces of somewhat hopeful news on urban redevelopment in Washington State.  First,  from today’s Post-Intelligencer: with the help of EPA grants, Seattle is cleaning up and redeveloping some contaminated urban sites to build new housing—including, apparently low-income and affordable housing units.  And in what seems to me to be a wise move, they’re involving community groups in the cleanup: Making sure the cleanups are done right is also a...