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The Car and the City
The Car and the City is an offbeat journey through three great metropolises. Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver–by car, train, bicycle, and foot. It’s a fascinating conversation with people who are quietly, but radically, rearranging the furniture of the modern city.Read more » -
This Place on Earth 1996
Part personal history, part regional history, This Place on Earth is a must-read for anyone who’s interested in the politics of staying put, the Pacific Northwest, or the environmental and social consequences of mobility.Read more » -
Approval Voting Is a Risky Prospect for Seattle
Editor’s note: In two subsequent articles, Durning argues that approval voting would start no sooner than ranked choice voting in Seattle, if voters chose it in November, and shares a voting-rights law firm’s evaluation of the two options’ legality. Seattle voters will decide in November whether to adopt approval voting, ranked choice voting, or no change to their primary election ballots. What do the research literature and practical experience say...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 10/30/15
Alan An exposé in two parts on the history, manufacture, and environmental toll of the global color industry, with a focus on Cascadia’s Spokane River. There, a state-of-the-art paper recycling plant—clean and green in itself—proved a contaminator of the first order, because of the viciously toxic materials used in the colored inks in the paper it recycled. The web grows outward from there. Along the way, intriguing observations such as:...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 11-18-11
Clark: Reusable bag humor. Graphs: It’s taking longer and longer to replace jobs after a recession. The world’s sexiest programmable thermostat. AHH! Maybe neutrinos CAN move faster than light. Anna: Here’s polling that shows—yet again—that American values differ from those of Western Europeans. Most notably, and no big surprise, at the same time we’re more religious, and more likely to think our country is superior (49% of us), we’re more...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 3/25/11
Clark: Mostly demographics this week, folks. The share of people in the labor force (working or looking for work) is declining—not just because of recession, but mostly because we’re aging. Surprising: wealth inequality isn’t nearly as stark, nor increasing as fast, as income inequality. The wealth data series ends in 2000, though, so I’m not sure what’s happened since… According to census data, the coasts continue to grow, while the...Read more » -
This vs. That
We face sustainability choices every day: paper or plastic? Drive or take the bus? Fresh or frozen fish? It seems like one week a new study comes out claiming X is better than Y, and a week later Y is better than X. How are we to know what to believe? And more importantly, which choices are the ones that really matter? For years, Sightline has sought to clear the...Read more » -
Transformers
My 1994 Oregon-made Burley bike trailer-stroller (above) is still dear to my heart, but innovations in newer Burleys and in other companies’ offerings show that tools for human-powered urban mobility are developing at a rapid clip. The 31-year-old Eugene company Burley and four manufacturers outside the Northwest offer bike trailer-stroller-cart-jogger hybrids that convert into so many mobility tools they are like something out of Transformers. Almost every Burley model is...Read more » -
Introducing the Bike Tree
A couple years ago, I mentioned that secure bike parking is important to creating affordable, green transportation. Personally, I’m well provided. Here’s the backyard bike shed I built with my father in-law. Here’s the bike storage room in Sightline’s building in downtown Seattle. (Pretty nice!) And here’s what bike storage looks like in one bike-happy Japanese community, courtesy of video from the Guardian in the United Kingdom. Read about it...Read more » -
Walk Score Hits the Big Time
Walk Score lands in the NYT: Last summer, a trio of Seattle software developers started walkscore.com, which calculates the number of potential destinations within walking distance of any given address and then produces a rating. If your neighborhood scores 90 or above, you can easily live there without a car; if it scores under 25, you’ll be driving to the backyard. More than a million addresses were searched in the...Read more »
