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Just wanted to point out a great website, “Visualizing Density,” a product of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (LILP). I’m not feeling like my usual prolix self today, so I’ll let them do the talking: Sprawl is bad. Density is good. Americans need to stop spreading out and live closer together. Well… that’s the theory, anyway. But, as anyone who has tried to build compact development recently will tell...

It’s been mostly buried by the acrimonious debate over the Iraq War supplemental that Congress just passed, but attached to that spending bill is the first minimum wage hike since 1997. The boost to $7.25 per hour will affect about 13 million workers nationwide. President Bush has said he’ll sign it. It’s good news. But unfortunately, Congress also missed a huge opportunity to do what Washington and Oregon have been doing...

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide “walking lane” painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones? Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at “walk?! in traffic?!” Fortunately, this...

Via Tidepool, some incredibly disappointing news. Endangered spotted owls in British Columbia have fallen to such critically low levels that the provincial government has been advised to capture all the remaining birds in “a triage approach to conservation,” so that a zoo-based breeding program can be started. BC does a lot of things right, in our view. But apparently, protecting owl habitat ain’t one of them.

As I mentioned last week, greater Vancouver leads the Northwest in transit ridership, with somewhere between two and three times as many annual bus and train rides per person as Portland and Seattle. So the obvious question: how come? Why does Vancouver do so much better in transit statistics than its southern neighbors? If you’re from Seattle, the “obvious” answer might seem to be Vancouver’s SkyTrain light rail system, which...

Just ’cause I’m that kind of guy (i.e., geeky), I spent a bit of time a few days ago looking at transit ridership figures in the three major metro areas in the Northwest. And—to nobody’s great surprise—Vancouver, BC remains the region’s transit leader: Metro area Annual transit boardings per capita, 2006 (est.) Greater Vancouver 126 Metro Portland, OR 62 Portland including Clark County, WA 52 Seattle–Everett–Tacoma 42 As you can...

The May 5 edition of the Vancouver Sun offers a mother lode of environmental news—edited by “the man most Canadian women said they’d choose to be with on a deserted island”—David Suzuki. There are numerous, numerous stories—from the BC government’s disputed record on climate change, to a Vancouver suburb’s contest to become the no. 1 clean-energy city in the province, to venerable BC writer Stephen Hume’s Great Moments in BC...

I’ve read all sorts of reports and articles about the relationship between mental health and neighborhood design. Most of them focus on the idea that living in a sprawling, low-density area—the sort of place where you can’t walk anywhere, and you only see your neighbors as they drive into their garage—can be isolating, anonymous and…well…depressing. But for the most part, I’ve thought of this research more as suggestive than conclusive....

There are more bicycles in my family than people: five people, seven bikes, and no car. That’s not the usual Cascadian ratio. In the greater Seattle area, for example, the typical household has 2.4 people, 1.4 bikes, and 1.9 motor vehicles. More than 40 percent of Seattle-area households don’t have even one bicycle, much less one bike per person, according to survey research by the Puget Sound Regional Council (big pdf)....

Just confirmed, the Puget Sound orca population has reached 87. The new calf is probably less than a week old—and isn’t it awfully cute? Read about it here and here. (Photo is courtesy of the Center for Whale Research.)