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There’s momentum in the US Congress to give residents of Washington and other states that have sales taxes but no (state) income taxes a deduction on their federal income tax, as the Seattle Post Intelligencerreports. From the perspective of tax fairness, this change is a good idea. It corrects one of the flaws of the sales tax. Residents of no-state-income-tax states currently pay more federal income tax than their counterparts...

British Columbia often comes off smelling like roses in the Cascadia Scorecard – energy consumption, sprawl, lifespan, etc. But the province lags far behind the Northwest states in the most basic step toward water conservation in homes and other buildings: charging by the gallon. The last figure I saw for British Columbia had more than 80 percent of residents paying for their water at a fixed rate. Most BC buildings...

I’ve been looking for a reason to write about this for some time, but this excellent Eugene Register Guard editorial has forced my hand. The recent runup in petroleum prices has put a new spotlight on an old controversy—whether the world is running short of oil. The battle lines of the debate are clearly drawn. One side—consisting primarily of old-guardpetroleum geologists and a few maverick oil industry insiders–thinks that we...

This piece by John Tierney in the New York Times Magazine is wrong in many ways, so it’s probably important to point out what’s right about it. To summarize the article (we read, so you don’t have to!): Cars are great, high-tech roads are cool, people who don’t like new roads are condescending nanny-statists who oppose consumer choice, public transit is too expensive, and the only real solutions to traffic...

No, really. A new study, mentioned in today’s Seattle Times, found that sprawl is really bad for your health. To wit: The study, which analyzed data on more than 8,600 Americans in 38 metropolitan areas, found that rates of arthritis, asthma, headaches and other complaints increased with the degree of sprawl. Living in the least sprawling areas, compared with living in the most, was like adding about four years to...

The City of Seattle is moving forward with its plans to Vancouver-ize its downtown, encouraging residential development to create a vibrant walking core, as the PI reports. The wacky thing about media coverage of downtown living in places that have relatively little of it-such as Seattle-is the presumption that housing must have yards because it needs to accommodate kids. The PI article spends most of its breath describing how a...

The Vancouver Sun has another interesting article (subscription required)on traffic today. The gist: traffic congestion is terribly unpredictable. Buried in the analysis is, I think, a larger point. Studies by the Greater Vancouver Regional District suggest one reason the daily commute is getting snarlier is that too many jobs are being located in new suburban office parks that are difficult to serve by road and almost impossible by transit. The...

I suspect this will generate some heat. . . I say “Amen!” to the conclusion of this argument by the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank in Washington, DC. Heritage analysts Alison Fraser and Jonathan Swanson, writing on the federal highway bill: “Congress and the President should work towards the termination of the federal highway program and return the responsibility and financial resources for transportation to the states.” I don’t...

A striking lede: New research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds that all the impervious surfaces-buildings, roads, parking lots, and roofs-in the continental United States cover an area nearly the size of Ohio. I have a love-hate relationship with this sort of fact: it’s shocking, but I don’t quite know what to make of it. Is Ohio a lot of impervious surface, or just a little given...

 (This post is part of a series.) Last night, I spoke briefly at a lively public debate about the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the elevated highway hugging the Seattle waterfront through downtown. Constructed in the early 1950s, the Viaduct is aging and considered seismically unsound, and is slated for replacement. The Washington Department of Transportation is looking at several alternatives for replacing the facility, including a tunnel, a...