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How is the Texas Transportation Institute like Britney Spears? Oops, they did it again. Yes, the Texas Transportation Institute released their annual rankings of traffic congestion last week.  And for the second time in a decade, the report has undergone a complete change in methodology—one that’s rendered its previous congestion estimates moot.  And for the umpteenth time in a row, they’ve championed a measure of congestion that gets the relationship...

For the last several years something has really gotten under my skin: the way we talk about housing and affordability. I don’t like the way we measure it. The first time I found myself getting unhappy about the discussion about housing affordability was a few years ago when I watched the debate over legislation to create incentive zoning in Seattle. By using a formula based on Area Median Income and...

A video about a Volkswagen factory in Dresden highlights the problems with the way we legislate land use in the Northwest. The factory is right in the downtown of a major German city—precisely the opposite of everything we know about industrial zoning. But it works. As long as cars are still being made, this is a great way to do it. But what about freight mobility for the factory? Won’t...

Given the challenges of getting full Tax Increment Financing (TIF) in Washington State and the problems faced by a state like North Carolina  that actually did make the leap, what should TIF in Washington look like if the constitutional barriers can be overcome? Here are some ideas that I gathered from various looks at TIF, though I am particularly indebted to an article by Richard Briffault in the University of Chicago...

Last weekend I was honored to address the League of Women Voters of Thurston County’s Education Fund Annual Benefit Luncheon. Below are my comments pretty much as I delivered them. We had some pretty good back and forth. Much thanks to the League for the opportunity to speak with them. Let’s go to the movies!  Imagine with me taking a trip to your favorite local movie theater. You buy some...

For decades, we’ve been hearing that congestion is getting worse and worse, and that traffic backups are taking a bigger and bigger bite out of our days (and paychecks) each year.  But what if we’re measuring congestion wrong—and the conventional wisdom is largely hogwash? A geekalicious new report from CEOs for Cities shows that the nation’s most influential measure of congestion—the Urban Mobility Report by the Texas Transportation Institute, which...

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Richard Florida about the changing demographics of cities has me thinking again about how to rid our language of the term ‘suburb.’ Florida’s article points out that many of the cities we have typically called suburbs are transforming themselves from sprawling, car-centric and far-flung places into compact, transit-oriented, and walkable communities. These cities are also experiencing a shift in demographics that...

All across the Puget Sound region, governments are drowning in red ink. So we’re slashing safety nets for low-income families, laying off workers, and cutting back basics like bus service and library hours. But for the most part, we’re still green-lighting transportation megaprojects with abandon, an issue that has given rise to at least two good rants recently. Here’s Michael van Baker over at SunBreak:  But [Washington] is pushing ahead with...

*** Please also see this detailed city-by-city ranking of commute behavior *** I can’t resist fiddling with the big batch of new Census data. So here’s a look at commute habits in Northwest cities, rank-ordered by the least share of workers driving alone: This was quite a surprise to me. Generally speaking, I think of Seattle and Portland as being virtually identical in this sort of ranking. But the reality...

I have one more constitutional fix for Washington State to round out the suite of sustainability amendments that should be considered in the next legislative session. (The first was a repeal or rewrite of the state’s 18th Amendment restricting the use of taxes collected on cars for highways; the second was a fix to allow the state to loan its credit for energy efficiency retrofits.) Constitutional fixes are never easy,...