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Oregon and Washington have done a better job of protecting rural land from sprawl than they have at encouraging growth inside city limits. If you want to build a cutting-edge, smart growth development in a designated growth center in Washington, for example, you should expect an arduous process of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. (We posted on this problem here.) Now, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is quietly moving to clear away...

"Not long ago skyscrapers were so distasteful we banned them. Now we want to live in them." That’s the kicker of a great column by Danny Westneat in today’s Seattle Times. He shows how Seattle’s attitude toward downtown has changed for the better in fifteen years.

Former Vancouver city councillor (and Sightline board member) Gordon Price welcomed Seattle to the tall, skinny club with an op-ed in the P-Iabout what Vancouver’s learned in its pursuit of a compact and livable downtown. (See news about Seattle’s zoning changes here.) – High-rises, for example, should be not just tall but thin, since thin towers offer more privacy and light to residents. And stagger building heights for variety and...

As the Seattle Timesreports, the mayor of Seattle has proposed increased density in downtown, by changing zoning codes to allow taller, skinnier buildings. This step is welcome and long overdue. Pop a cork! Two observations: Seattle’s vision for downtown is still modest compared with Vancouver’s, as I noted here. And Seattle’s problem isn’t in vision but in implementation, as Parke argued here. The city says it wants downtown development but...

Real estate prices are rising quickly all across British Columbia (as this Vancouver Sun article mentions).  In the past year alone, the total value of assessed property in the province grew by 17 percent.  Demand has been fueled by a hot economy and low interest rates. Not surprisingly, luxury real estate—waterfront property and the like—appreciated fastest, with rises in some areas of 50 percent in a single year.  But perhaps...

Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel—which described how quirks of geography and environment (rather than, say, racial or cultural superiority) helped some cultures succeed—has a new book out.  This one analyzes why some cultures fail; it’s titled, appropriately enough, Collapse.  In this week’s New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell’s reviews the book, giving an interesting twist that’s very relevant to the Northwest. As a caveat:  I haven’t...

Here’s a neat idea:  NuRide, a web-based service that makes it easier to find carpool matches—and actually gives incentives (such as gift cards) for people to use the service.  It hasn’t reached the Northwest yet, but you can sign up to be notified when it does. According to Earth Share Washington’s Dave Manelski, who tipped us off about this, NuRide may get funding from state transportation agencies or other entities...

A non-hybrid bus, Seattle Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer breaks what it seems to think is an important story: the diesel-electric hybrid buses King County Metro operates are burning a lot more fuel than anticipated. In fact, their fuel economy is no better than that of the older buses they are replacing. This news is a little disappointing but ultimately doesn’t matter much. Here’s why, in a series of points that...

Walking is supposed to be one of the healthiest activities around, but unfortunately, when you add cars into the mix, it can be lethal. The Surface Transportation Policy Project’s latest “Mean Streets” report finds that walking is the most dangerous mode of transportation, per mile, and is becoming more dangerous in some areas of the United States, particularly for certain segments of the population: African-Americans, for example, make up 19...

Watching reactions to passage of Measures 37-and my original post here (Lessons from Measure 37) -it seems the issue isn’t whether the glass if half-full or half-empty. It’s whether the glass has been shattered, never to hold water again. Former Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin writes for High Country News’ Writers on the Range: “When Oregonians passed Measure 37 by a lopsided margin of 60 percent to 40 percent, they signaled...