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In part 1, I laid out the immense potential for good that Transportation as a Service (TaaS) offers. A future where most private cars give way to taxi rides provided by fleets of smart, autonomous, electric vehicles would be good for our health and safety, our pocketbooks, our economic competitiveness, our climate, and our local environment. But this promise comes with certain risks. They’re avoidable, but not without effort. Today:...

Eric dP: I’ve got a pair of good suggestions this week. In the Vancouver Observer, Barry Saxifrage looks at national emissions trends and reveals that the world leader is—it’s hard to believe it, but it’s true—the United States. And as he points out, US reductions are no small potatoes: How big is a cut of 430 million tonnes of CO2? It’s equal to all CO2 from all Canadians outside Alberta....

Eric de Place For my money, the most important reading stop to make this weekend is at citytank, Dan Bertolet’s nascent project. It’s a think tank about city issues (duh) with a tenor that is part encomium and part wonkfest. Dan’s lined up a roster of heavy hitters to do the writing, which he will no doubt complement with his own able voice. citytank. Go there now.  Also in the...

Back in October, I started noticing the accusation that Seattle is waging a “war on cars” pop up an awful lot in the Seattle-area press, and in suspicious ways. On its face, the charge that Seattle is waging a war on cars is pretty silly. After all, that the bulk of the city’s political leaders support two car-centric megaprojects—the 520 bridge and the Alaskan Way tunnel—that will cost in the...

I’ve been reading more lately about Washington State’s constitution. The summer of 1889 was an eventful one around these parts. The great fire burned a large portion of Seattle to the ground and Washington became a state. Since the fire Seattle has been rebuilt, expanded, and thoroughly revised and updated with a bus tunnel, light rail, and skyscrapers. The population of the state was 357,232 according to the 1890 census...

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.

A few weeks ago we released a little video about rethinking the transportation landscape. It looks like we’re not the only ones trying to picture things a little differently. Just this week, leaders in Oregon, California, and Washington all took steps to tinker with local transportation habits. In Seattle, Mayor Greg Nickels took a cue from Portland and New York by instituting a few “car-free” Sundays where, throughout August, three...

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...