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Clark: Here’s evidence that poor folks don’t own many cars.  At least not in big cities.  So despite the rhetoric, a pro-car tilt in public policy isn’t necessarily “populist,” it’s often simply regressive. Former Grist editor Kathryn Schulz does a wise and witty TED talk on being wrong. My two favorite bits:  starting at 2:32, she discusses the key paradox of wrongness: we all know we’re wrong about something, yet if...

Imagine if state law made it difficult for pizza joints to sell by the slice. You’d have to buy—and eat—a lot of pizza when you got a hankering. Either that, or you’d have to give up on pizza entirely. By-the-slice pizza lets light eaters save money without giving up pie entirely. The car insurance market is like a no-slices pizza world. You have to buy a lot of insurance, even...

Nearly three years ago, Alan announced a plan to bring Pay-As-You-Drive auto insurance to Cascadia. Today, Sightline is pleased to announce Unigard insurance is preparing to launch the pilot program in Washington state. Unigard needs 50 volunteer households to be early adopters to test the technology in their vehicles. These volunteers will be in position to be among the first households eligible for PAYD insurance policies (likely to be introduced...

Over at The Tyee this morning, you’ll find an editorial piece from me and Alan arguing that British Columbia should finally get around to adopting Pay-As-You-Drive car insurance. Maybe it sounds like a small thing, but it’s a policy with a lot of leverage. To wit: Car insurance in British Columbia is like an all-you-can eat buffet: once you’ve made the purchase, you may as well gorge. Mileage is correlated...

Now, here’s a Dutch treat:  last week, the Netherlands became the first country to adopt a tax-by-the-kilometer system to pay for roads, bridges, and other car-oriented infrastructure.  As far as I can tell, it’s not a tax increase, but rather a tax shift:  the government will reduce taxes on car sales, slashing vehicle purchase prices by about a quarter, and replace the lost revenue by charging drivers a few cents...

Yet more confirmation that people who drive more are exposed to higher crash risks. This study from the  Transportation Research Record used data from in-car Global Positioning Systems to see if there was a relationship between driving patterns and the likelihood of being involved in a car crash. Even though the sample size was pretty small, the researchers found a clear relationship.  I’ll let them say it: [C]rash-involved drivers accumulated...

Fifteen years ago this Autumn, a 28-year-old researcher names Alan Durning lugged a refurbished library table into the cramped bedroom closet of his Seattle home, drilled a phone line through the wall, and filed the legal papers to create a nonprofit research institute. We’ve come a long way since 1993, but our overarching goal remains the same: to arm change-makers with the independent research, ideas, and tools they need to...

Sightline’s greatest achievements over 15 years.

Here’s an interesting ranking. For each major US city, the list-happy editors at Men’s Health calculated the negative effects of driving. They aggregated scores on transit ridership, air pollution, fuel consumption, and driving miles. (Presumably, the data are for metropolitan areas, not city limits.) Northwest cities do exceptionally well: Seattle ranks number one, Portland ranks third, and Spokane is eighth. Men’s Health doesn’t appear to include a methodology on the web, but I’ll take a...

Update:Read the sequel to this post, where Alan reconsiders plug-ins. The weekend before Halloween, my car-less family got a loaner plug-in hybrid electric car to try. You see, the City of Seattle and some other local public agencies are testing the conversion of some existing hybrids to plug-ins to accelerate the spread of these near-zero-emissions vehicles. As a favor and, perhaps, for some publicity (this post), the city’s program manager...