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Following up on Dave Yaden’s post yesterday: now that Measure 37 has left Portland’s urban growth boundary in tatters, David Bragdon, president of the three-county Portland Metro governing body, is looking for other ways to encourage smart growth. From the Willamette Week: Most observers doubt Measure 37 can be knocked off by lawsuits or overhauled by the Legislature. So, Bragdon says, planners must seek new ways of promoting compact urban-style...

As if airlines didn’t have enough to worry about, an AP story on a new government study notes that America’s obesity epidemic is yet another drag on the industry. More pounds per passenger equals increasing fuel costs (which increases environmental costs, too, as you can see in this backgrounder). A couple of morsels: Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for...

Portland gets all the attention for its growth policies. Its urban growth boundary—in place since the 1970s—is widely (and correctly) credited with limiting low-density sprawl on the urban fringe, and promoting compact neighborhoods with a healthy mix of homes, stores, and businesses. But I keep hearing Portland’s critics say that Portland’s effort to promote density has gone too far. That the city has grown too dense, too fast. Are those...

An analysis of how 15 US cities are doing at curbing urban sprawl, with a focus on Portland, Oregon. The study found that Oregon’s land-use policies excel in protecting rural land and curbing low-density sprawl. Person for person in the last decade, new development in metropolitan Portland consumed less than half as much land as the average city in the study.

Vancouver’s soaring downtown construction is now embracing green building practices and multiple use within each tower, says the Sun. Wow. King County’s legal “wall” against sprawl is working, says the annual Growth Report. (King County, containing Seattle, is the most populous county in Cascadia, with 1.8 million residents.)

This is encouraging: the Washington State department of tranportation has decided against building a highway and railroad parallel to I-5 through Snohomish County, north of Seattle. The biggest reason: cost. Quoting the article: “According to estimates, it could take up to 50 years to build such a second north-south corridor and would cost $42 billion to $50 billion.” (Emphasis added.) This should be a potent reminder: building new traffic capacity...

Really. We tried. This week’s New Yorker ran a truly excellent article (available only in the print version) by David Owen, on the acme of eco-friendly communities: Manhattan. Most people think of the concrete-encased island as an environmental distopia. They’re mistaken. Manhattanites use a fraction of the gasoline and far less electricity, have fewer and smaller personal possessions, and take up less physical space, than do residents of any other...

In the next year or two, the shape of many Washington cities will be cast in concrete, or at least etched on maps. As the vagaries of land-use planning go, a big clump of counties are doing revisions to their comprehensive plans in the months ahead. These plans, though shrouded in the mind-numbing language of zoning, are among the most important decisions that will be made in the region. The...

A Seattle activist is performing a one-person sit-in under a tree to protest the tree’s removal as part of a development, as the Seattle Timesreports. The development replaces a single house with four units. The area is zoned for such developments. The activist says that she’s doing it for the environment, and there’s no reason to doubt her sincerity. But she’s barking up the wrong tree. Inserting more multifamily dwellings...

Portland fares poorly in one measure of smart growth compared with Washington cities: how many people live downtown. As the table below shows, Portland trails not only Seattle and Tacoma but also Seattle’s suburb Bellevue. Still, all of these cities are pale imitations of greater Vancouver, BC’s various downtown centers, as illustrated in this 2002 report we did. The city of Vancouver itself has roughly one fourth of its people...