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In putting together some background materials for a recent meeting, I stumbled upon a 5-year-old report by the Housing Partnership called Filling in the Spaces: Ten Essentials for Successful Urban Infill Housing. Five years is like an eternity in this economy, especially when it comes to housing. But I found the report still really fresh on the principles for dealing with growth in Northwest. The basic idea is that infill...

Two major reviews of green jobs in Canada and the United States confirm the basic principle that making the shift from an economy based on consumption to one based on conservation can yield jobs—lots of them. While the news is good, it should also come with a warning. In the case of the Canadian report, a healthy green economy now doesn’t mean the province can slow its investment in training...

If you lived in the Northwest during the early 1990s, you probably remember the so-called “timber wars” when the logging industry clashed with conservationists who wanted to halt the cutting of old-growth forests. Among the arguments made by industry was that limits on cutting would result in economic hardship in rural areas. And indeed, at about the same time that limits were imposed on federal land, unemployment really did rise in some...

In part III, I promised to describe the obstacles that are keeping electric bikes from taking hold in the Pacific Northwest in the way they have in China. Here are four. 1. Immature technology. As BikeHugger’s master blogger (and e-biker) DL Byron points out, electric bikes may be past the garage-tinkerer phase of development, but they’re still complicated, imperfect devices, plagued with breakdowns and performance issues. Battery care, for example,...

Editor’s note: This post is the first in a five-part series. Read more from the Parable of the Electric Bike. Mmmm. An electric bike. Zipping through the city. Surging up hills without gasping for breath. Riding in business dress and arriving fresh and dry. Healthy, moderate exercise. No traffic jams. Free parking. Huge load-hauling potential. Near-free fueling. Zero emissions. Breeze in your face. Appealing! So why haven’t e-bikes caught on...

Seeing the Easter candy displays pop up in my local grocery two weeks ago—immediately replacing Valentine’s Day candy, which immediately replaced Christmas candy, and so on—has got me thinking about the seemingly arbitrary lines we sometimes draw in our food policies. Consider the Washington state sales tax exemption for candy and gum, currently on the chopping block in the legislature. Current state tax policy means that when you reach for...

Rain gardens. Rain barrels. French drains and swales. Green solutions to stormwater runoff sound fancy and complicated, but they’re not. And I’ve got a list of rain garden how-to resources to prove it. The basic principal for controlling stormwater in an earth-friendly way: keep the water where it falls and help it soak into the ground. Homeowners can do that by following any or all of these low-impact development strategies:...

In a post called “We’ve Upped Our Standards, Now Up Yours,” I wrote about a great pilot program in Victoria, BC that is taking the first step toward requiring energy efficiency ratings at the point of sale for single family homes. Programs like this have often run into resistance from builders and others who say that they would be “bad for business,” harming transactions during an already sour housing market....

Washington Policy Center, a right-leaning think tank, is shopping around a legislative memo opposing an increase in the state’s hazardous substance tax. The memo is riddled with errors, including two big ones. First, WPC claims on page 1: The state would collect new revenues by increasing the tax rate on hazardous substances imported into Washington. This would increase gas prices by four to six cents per gallon. That’s false. And it’s obviously...

Because the Census Bureau emails me data, behold: The table shows a rank-ordering of states with the highest rates of Internet use in 2009. Nationally, only slightly more than two-thirds of US residents access the Internet at all. (More Census data here.) It’s groovy enough, but the Internet is sometimes overlooked as a transportation solution. That’s not to say you can drive a car on it, but that given high speeds and high...