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A new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group tracks driving rates across the US—and finds that driving per capita has fallen for eight straight years: After sixty years of almost constant increases in the annual number of miles Americans drive, since 2004 Americans have decreased their driving per-capita for eight years in a row. Driving miles per person are down especially sharply among Millennials, America’s largest generation that...

There’s a lot of history packed into this chart on Oregon’s vehicle trends: the seemingly relentless driving boom of the 1950s through 1990s; the decoupling of gasoline consumption from vehicle travel after the OPEC crisis and the economic downturn in the late 1970s; and, most recently, the peaking of both gasoline consumption and vehicle travel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, respectively. But perhaps even more telling is the...

Today Yale and George Mason are releasing the third report from their latest national survey, Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in April 2013. The takeaways? Well, for starters, big, fat majorities of voters want Congress and the President to get to work on American clean energy and climate solutions. Americans increasingly looking to corporations and industry to take responsibility and do something about global warming (to lesser degrees...

A new report on climate change attitudes is out from Yale and George Mason University. There’s good news along with worrisome trends, revealing a bunch of odd inconsistencies in our attitudes. Indeed, I see some serious confusion. It sounds bad, but I think there’s opportunity here; majorities think something should be done about climate change, but they’re confused when it comes to what to do, how to do it, as...

Here’s an oldie but a goody: a 2009 Brookings report on sustainable transportation in Germany. The upshot is that Germans enjoy a safer, more energy efficient, and more affordable transportation system than Americans do. (Germany almost certainly beats Canada too, though the article focuses on the US.) Just look at the numbers: compared with the US, Germany’s cars emit 1/3 the CO2 emissions per person, and cause less than half...

And so it begins. Faced with mounting costs and uncertain funding, the planners of the Columbia River Crossing are hoping to “save” money by postponing parts of the project. And unsurprisingly, biking and walking investments are among the first things on the chopping block. If you want the details, BikePortland has the goods. Of course, it’s just a proposal at this point. But it’s a telling one. First, because of the...

Our most recent report highlighted an encouraging trend: northwesterners are using less gasoline. In all, motor fuel consumption in Washington and Oregon declined by about 4.5 percent after cresting in 2002. With population growth, that translates into a 16 percent decline in per capita fuel consumption. When many people hear this news, they immediately think of one thing: the Prius. Surely, they think, the increased sales of hybrids, high-efficiency vehicles,...

The average price that Northwesterners paid for a barrel of crude oil topped $104 last year—even higher than 2008, when global oil price spikes regularly made front page news. Yet at the same time, residents of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington have trimmed back on their oil consumption over the last few years—not only by easing back at the gas pump, but by using petroleum products more sparingly throughout the economy....

Sheesh, kids these days.  In a brand new report, the Frontier Group documents the sharp decline in driving among the under-30 set—and argues that those trends won’t reverse themselves any time soon. I don’t think anybody really knows what the future holds for youth driving. But the Frontier Group has the recent trends nailed down pretty tight. Today’s young folks are less likely to own cars than their older siblings did. Many...

If you’re out to raise money for transportation projects, one of the more clever methods is the so-called “barrel fee” that is the centerpiece of Governor Gregoire’s new transportation package. It’s structured in such a way that it minimizes impacts on Washington by effectively off-loading the costs to oil companies and out-of-state drivers. In fact, my back-of-the-envelope estimate is that for every dollar residents pay, the state will net roughly $2.20 in...