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I have been riding Seattle’s new light rail a lot the last couple weeks. There are three thoughts I have about light rail. The first one is a personal reflection and the second and third are about what I think it will take to make the light rail work in for the three counties it will serve.  First a personal reflection: I’m amazed. Not at the wonders of the technology...

Density is good for many different reasons. But people don’t make choices about where they live based on people per square acre any more than they base them on area median income. The choice of where to live, although influenced by test scores, cost of housing, proximity to work and amenities, is often influenced by qualitative not quantitative data.  Through the years I have seen my friends and co-workers following a typical...

We’ve looked at how dense urban areas compare with sprawling areas in terms of per capita emissions and we’ve also looked at whether Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and gas consumption is higher in areas that sprawl than in compact areas. In both cases studies have shown what we might suspect: areas that sprawl have more climate changing emissions, bigger and less efficient vehicles. Now how about energy use? Do compact...

There are many things to take issue with in Knute Berger’s recent piece in Crosscut about smart growth and sprawl.   But let’s pick two things.  First, Berger’s contention that the discussion about growth in the region is characterized by an assumption that smart growth happens in the city and sprawl in outlying areas. But much of our debate about urban growth in Seattle is reduced to very simplistic notions about...

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has made a new addition to its Housing + Transportation Affordability Index website that maps carbon dioxide emissions. The press release announces that “Urban Living Helps Curb Global Warming” and invites readers to compare where they live to other neighborhoods in their region. So I did. The map works just like Google Maps so it’s pretty easy. I live in census tract 0074 in Seattle...

Here’s a great, short video on development, sprawl, and transportation that illustrates some of the concepts we here at Sightline have been talking about for a while. Created by John Paget, it’s the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. And it’s pretty cool to boot:   If the video doesn’t work, you can see it on YouTube. H/t to Stephen Rees’s blog for finding this....

Editor’s note: Through May 20, we’re offering a chance at one of three gift certificates for Vancouver restaurants Chambar and Wild Rice to BC residents who sign up for Sightline’s daily or weekly emails. If you’re from BC, sign up and take a minute to let your coworkers and friends know about us. Maybe we don’t say it enough, but we love British Columbia. Home of the world’s most comprehensive...

We’ve been writing about some of the ways that federal stimulus funding has been misallocated to projects that would increase greenhouse gas emissions and aggravate our addiction to gasoline. But there is some good news from Portland. The City of Portland and Multnomah County in partnership with Energy Trust and Shorebank Enterprise Cascadia have created the Clean Energy Fund which will use stimulus money to retrofit 500 homes in the...

Alan ran across this aerial time series of Las Vegas sprawl, produced by NASA, which I turned into the animated image below. (Sorry if it takes a while to load.) See how quickly sprawl exploded across the desert landscape at the Las Vegas urban fringe?  (If you can’t see the time progression, you may need to change your browser settings to display animated images.) Curiously, though, the growth patterns in Las Vegas...