Search Results

The day before the People’s Climate March, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an opinion piece by Steven Koonin titled: “Climate Science is Not Settled.” The title conforms to the merchants of doubt’s strategy of sowing doubt and confusion, but it is not even an accurate summary of the article. The article actually affirms that the main things almost everybody thinks of when they hear “climate science”—whether climate change is...

Most Northwest parents trying to raise kids—in an urban setting or no—can appreciate the importance of space. There’s the avalanche of stuff that modern babies seem to require, from diapers to strollers to whatever jiggly thing puts them to sleep. Until parents of young children make a secret pact to stop handing out birthday goody bags, there will be rivers of useless stuff coming into our houses. Urban families are...

­­With the sharp rise in Seattle real estate values over the last several years, you might assume that landowners have been champing at the bit to redevelop some of the low-value, dilapidated properties that they own in and around downtown. Yet in many cases you’d be wrong. As it turns out, holding onto a crumbling building, and even letting it slowly deteriorate, can be a terrific business proposition. As the surrounding neighborhood...

Dear Ms. Solnit, This is fan mail, I swear. Before I get to the gushing, though, I need to tell a circuitous tale. I went to Las Vegas last summer. I went for work, but I had an auxiliary mission: to find the city’s redeeming value, its hidden virtues, its inner humanity. I failed. Granted, I only had a couple of hours away from the conference I was locked in...

Downtown Seattle holds some of the most valuable real estate west of Minneapolis and north of San Francisco. Yet a stroll through Seattle’s urban core reveals unwelcome surprises: rundown, decrepit buildings; empty land parcels; and surface parking lots on prime real estate, like the one below, just blocks away from high rises worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Is an underused (at midday), 63-spot parking lot the new...

Serena To the girl who can never recall even her close friends’ respective birthdays (sorry, guys!), this is absolutely unfathomable: remembering, as an extreme sport. The 9/11 Memorial Museum opened last week: here’s one unflinching reflection on the institution, from a man especially close to the event’s tragedy. A Boston doctor treats lots of poor teenagers, many struggling with weight and nutrition problems. His prescription? Bicycles. And he even gets...

This is the season climax, the culmination, the big reveal. Previously on Parking? Lots! Cities mandate off-street parking (guided only by junk science and groupthink). They do it in fear of territorial neighbors who want “their” curb spaces left alone. Our communities suffer horribly as a result. Information technology is shaking things up, though, and cities can now charge for curb spaces more easily. They can also share the proceeds...

Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules? The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it...

Clark Remember when we wrote about 26 ways to store your bike?  Well, here’s a 27th. Alan My old friend Jewel James, master carver of the Lummi Nation, continues his inspired art and activism, accompanying a new totem pole along the route of the coal trains. He was in Olympia earlier this week, and the Olympian did a good job of writing it up.

“My sister has great food karma. She finds great food, and she never pays.” If you heard someone say that, you’d just scratch your head. What could that mean? Does she dumpster dive? If you substitute the “parking” for “food,” though, it makes sense. Indeed, a friend said those exact words to me recently, so I started asking others about their parking karma. Everyone I asked knew exactly what I...