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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...

I’m no economist, so I have a hard time evaluating arguments that rely on statements like: Which means that I have no idea if this paper (beware, pdf) by some Harvard economists is really top-notch scholarship.  But it makes the case that one of the chief reasons for rapid housing inflation between 1960 and 2000 was that, in high-priced places, local governments have been increasingly unwilling to issue housing permits—the...

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. ...

What do the United States, Poland, Portugal, and Greece have in common?  Lots of deaths from automobile accidents.  The US ranked 27th out of 30 OECD nations in traffic deaths per capita in 2002—with 30th place (Greece) having the most deaths, and 1st (Turkey) having the fewest.   By contrast, Canada ranked 12th. Now, it’s not that the US has particularly bad drivers, or that our cars are particularly unsafe.  Mile...

In the great Seattle transit wars (light rail—monorail—buses), I have no ideological attachment to any particular technology. I’m interested in real quantitative analysis of long-term benefits per dollar spent. So, in today’s two long articles on Sound Transit in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times, the nugget that stood out to me as important was this one, from the PI: "A study by Sound Transit staff showed that rail...

Mother Jones has a revealing two-page graphic on the upsizing of the American Dream. (The link takes you to a text overview and offers downloads of two jumbo pdfs of the magazine spread.) It caught my eye in the print edition and the good folks at MoJo have now posted it on their website. It’s packed with fascinating tidbits. The crux: The American Dream just keeps growing. Since 1970 the...

Home prices are still booming, at least in Puget Sound: they jumped 13 percent in the region last year, at least 4 times as fast as inflation. A Seattle Timesarticle reporting on the trend explains it using Economics 101 logic: many buyers and few sellers. Makes sense. Scarce supply plus high demand usually brings about rising prices. But then the article hints at a common explanation for restricted supply (and...

I’m a little late picking this up, but both the New York Times and the Seattle Timeshave now run stories on what’s supposedly a hot new trend in Seattle:  adding luxury condo units to downtown hotels.  Condo-owners get the benefits of hotel amenities, such as room service, room cleaners, valet parking, and a concierge. Plus, at least one of the proposed hotel/condo plans would be bundled with a mix of...

According to the Census Bureau, the typical American worker spends about 100 hours—just over 4 full days–commuting to work each year. And that’s just the morning commute; it doesn’t even count the trip back home. Now, 100 hours may not seem like that much spread out over a full year. But consider this: most workplaces offer just 80 hours of paid vacation per year. Washington’s commutes (pdf link) are tenth-longest...

I intend to celebrate this piece of news with a pint of strawberries and a bunch of arugula: the number of farmers markets in the United States doubled from 1994 to 2004. Of the Northwest states, Washington may have the greatest total number of markets (more than 90, according to this Seattle Times article (the USDA lists 87) with a record number, at least two dozen, expected to open in...