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It’s here! The largest 40 cities in America, ranked by their walkability. Plus, every single neighborhood in those cities — all 2,508 of them—rank-ordered for your walking pleasure. ** In a surprise upset, San Francisco edges out NYC for top honors in walkability. Who else made it into the Top 10? ** The Northwest’s most walkable neighborhood is in Portland. It’s the Pearl District, no suprise, ranking as the 15th best neighborhood for...

Taking a page out of BC’s playbook, the Canadian opposition leader is proposing an audacious and well-structured carbon tax shift. And in a continuation of the scrambling of left and right about tax shifting, the proposal comes from Canada’s center-left party as an election platform to distinguish it from the governing center-right party (which immediately critized the proposal). This dynamic exactly reverses the situation in British Columbia, where the carbon...

We’ve written a bit about cap-and-dividend: it’s a variety of cap and trade in which 100 percent of the program’s revenue is returned on a per capita basis. It has the pretty terrific effect of simultaneously limiting carbon and advancing equity. Like a climate version of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, it would give people a stake in the program’s success. Now it appears that there’s a tax-and-dividend movement gaining steam. As Andrew...

We here at Sightline are planning a little contest in celebration of Sightline’s 15th Anniversary in October, and we need your help! In the spirit of our work, we’re hoping to give away a fantastic and car-free vacation in the Pacific Northwest as the grand prize. Since Daily Score readers have been so enthusiastic about the subject in the past, we thought it might be useful—to us and you—to collect...

There’s an ecumenical rift in the carbon policy world. Some favor taxes, while others prefer cap and trade. I’m in the later camp, though I’m sort of a carbon Unitarian: I like carbon taxes too. From a policy perspective, they fit together nicely. Among the reasons I’m on the c&t side is that taxes can be radioactive, at least in US politics. Now, this isn’t really a substantive objection to carbon taxes as...

Our friends at Walk Score are out with a ranking of Seattle’s neighborhoods. It’s good stuff, and Jennifer Langston has a great article about it in the P-I. There’s also a nice segment on King 5 news and a good piece in the Times. So which areas do best? Unsurprisingly, it’s the nexus of Pioneer Square, downtown, First Hill, Belltown, the International District, and South Lake Union. But there are...

Here’s an interesting argument, regarding transit service in Vancouver, BC: The planned SkyTrain subway spur along Broadway and out to the University of British Columbia campus will cost taxpayers 15 times what it would take to build a tram line along the same route. In fact, for the $2.8 billion cost of the single 12 kilometre SkyTrain tube from Commercial Drive to UBC, Vancouver could build 175 km of tram...

More and more consumers are trying to reduce the environmental impacts of the foods they eat.  But it’s not so easy to know what to do—in part because of the bewildering array of food choices the market offers, but also because it’s hard to know what food choices carry the biggest impact. This nifty study tries to clear away some of the murk, by tackling a fairly straightforward question:  If...

I’ve been lazy. Today was the first day this year that I’ve ridden my bike to the office.* After what was nearly a nine-month hiatus, it was interesting to observe things with fresh eyes. Here’s what I realized: Riding to work is awesome. Why don’t I do it every day? There are a ton of people biking these days. I doubt it’s the weather. Could it be gas prices? Or the more-crowded buses?...

A while back, George W. Bush said the U.S. had a dangerous addiction to oil. (Madeline Albright said it too). The Center for American Progress just released a cool, interactive map(link here) showing just who we’re buying oil from to get our fix. It turns out drug addiction isn’t a bad analogy—to keep up with our habit, we’re funneling our money to unsavory “dealers,” the most unstable and hostile regimes...