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Alan Do the regulations on subsidized public housing triple the construction costs of apartments? Maybe. Timothy Harris has a short and blistering piece of memoir about being “white.” I read Daniel Yergin’s Pullitzer-winning bestseller The Prize soon after it came out in 1991. I loved its sweep and historical grittiness—the way it brought the geopolitical saga of oil to life on page after page (after page after page). I often...

Unless minds change in the next two weeks, Seattle appears headed towards capping the number of drivers who have turned their personal cars into vehicles-for-hire and have been working for companies like UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar, though city council members have not settled on where that cap should be. Their working proposal would not limit the number of overall vehicles that those “Transportation Network Companies” (TNCs) can dispatch on their...

It’s been a hard road to reconcile Seattle’s broken taxi system with the as-of-yet unregulated environment in which popular smartphone-based ‘ridesharing’ companies like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar have been operating. The plan that City Councilmember Mike O’Brien unveiled at a committee meeting last week doesn’t come close to doing what I’ve previously suggested ought to be done—removing taxi caps entirely, regulating vehicles-for-hire and drivers to make sure they are safe,...

The Oregon Department of Transportation recently admitted that, after going on a construction spending spree in the 2000s, it is now going broke. This chart does a pretty good job of displaying the collapse in the agency’s construction budget… At this point, virtually all of the agency’s revenues are committed to debt service and basic road maintenance. There’s almost no money left for new construction. One of the chief causes...

King County officials are planning to ask voters this April to approve a $60 annual car-tab fee and a tenth-of-a-penny sales tax increase for the next decade to prevent catastrophic cuts to Metro bus service and keep local roads whole. Metro is also planning to raise bus fares by another 25 cents in 2015—the fifth fare hike since 2008—but will soften the economic blow by creating a cheaper fare for...

After months of hearings, a Seattle city council committee has released a draft blueprint for regulating on-demand, app-based “ridesharing” companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar that would dramatically curtail their growth in the city, if not kill their current business model. Until now they’ve been picking up customers illegally and with virtually no oversight from the city. This has been unfair to taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers, the bulk of...

Alan The writer Annie Dillard spent months holed up in a cabin on Lummi Island near Bellingham, Washington, many years ago, writing a historical novel about early settlers in Whatcom County. Published in 1992, it’s called The Living, and I recommend it as one of the greatest Cascadian novels yet. Read it if you haven’t, but do not read it lightly or quickly. And if you’re a youngster, you might...

Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives—a body that has shut down the government over health care reform, taken a hatchet to food stamps, opposed regulating greenhouse gases, and held immigration legislation hostage—still managed to support a federal transportation bill that devoted roughly 20 percent of its funding to transit + bikes + walking and 80 percent to roads. How much worse could the road-heavy transportation package being floated...

Parking reform may finally be coming. Here are eight reasons to hope for change soon: 1. Noah’s (P)ark. UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup, like a modern day Noah, has been carrying a new strategy for parking reform far and wide looking for dry land on which to release it. The three-step plan of action—charging market prices for curb spaces through performance pricing, rebating the proceeds to neighborhoods, and then eliminating...

Oil and coal companies hope to dispatch scores of trains across the Northwest each day, bearing fuel to refineries and port terminals. To help the public understand the magnitude of these schemes, Sightline is highlighting key rail crossings from Sandpoint, Idaho to Cherry Point, Washington along the main path the trains would take from the interior to the coast. In this installment we examine communities along the Columbia River from...