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My last post on Seattle’s process to select a design team to remake the downtown waterfront attracted a lot of great comments and discussion. Here’s more. Now that the design team has been selected—james corner field operations was chosen—I would suggest that they not only read fnarf’s post  that I wrote about, but that they also take a trip to Portland to learn all they can about that city’s South...

The New York Times has a genuinely fascinating article today on a link between rail and reductions in obesity: Riding the rails can leave users an average of 6.5 pounds lighter than others, and 81 percent less likely to become obese over time, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Before this study, it was difficult to say for certain whether the features of the...

I know music isn’t a common topic for our blog, but occasionally worlds collide and we get a look at public policy through the lens of pop culture. Two things caught my ear recently—one a rallying cry to get the next generation on board with electric vehicles, and the other a love/hate tribute to sustainability’s arch-nemesis: sprawl. First off, as Grist notes, They Might Be Giants have a new song...

Trulia, an online “real estate search engine,” has just released some really compelling charts and graphs illustrating recent opinion research showing what they suggest might be the end of the McMansion—the huge, mass produced, housing form associated with sprawl. Their data, together with the drop in lot sizes for single family homes I wrote about last month, might be pointing to a slackening in the demand for homes with lots...

Over at SvR’s blog Brice Maryman has a great post about a presentation on density from Public Interest Projects, Inc. for Sarasota County in Florida. Take a look at these two slides (you’ll need to look at them full size): Click here for full size. Click here for full size. The first slide compares a local mall’s tax revenue to the county compared to a variety of other land uses....

As the work to carry the good news about Referendum 52 out to local school districts gets underway some reasonable questions have arisen about the impact of R52 on local school districts and how it works. Let’s take a quick run through some questions that have come up. Will the passage of Referendum 52 affect my school district’s bond rating or the state’s rating? No. Both the state and local...

It’s so satisfying to be able to promote a pro-environment stance that’s also sweet for the money-crunching bottom line. Especially when the audience for that pitch is Washington’s business community. That’s what Sightline chieftain Alan Durning and I got to do in an editorial about stormwater for Seattle Business magazine that’s out now. The editorial makes the case that low-impact development is the cheapest, smartest, and most environmentally beneficial way...

The Victoria Transport Policy Institute (VTPI) just published an exhaustive review of data about why people choose where they live. It’s interesting to me because I’ve long thought that decision makers get obsessed with very narrow concerns—like the cost of housing—when they consider policies that encourage people to choose dense, compact communities over living in more sprawling single family neighborhoods. It turns out, based on their review, that when faced...

Kevin Downing, a reader in Portland, got me hooked on a fascinating exercise: trying to figure out how long it takes a road expansion to pay for itself. Let’s take a look at how this might work. (But please stick around for all the caveats at the end.) Consider, for example, the Delta Park Project in north Portland. It’s a $60 million endeavor that will add one lane in each direction to a 1.2 mile-long...

Here’s a nice catch, from alert reader Callie Jordan:  transportation guru Reid Ewing discussing his new, comprehensive study of the links between community design and transportation.  Here’s Ewing: The best way to minimize driving appears to be to develop in existing centers near the core of the metropolitan area, in areas of high destination accessibility where there are a whole lot of jobs near by…[O]ther factors like mixed-use and intersections and...