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What if a stupendously enormous business opportunity were hiding in plain sight before our eyes? What if this same business opportunity would bring gigantic environmental and social dividends? And what if all that was required to unleash these benefits was a simple legal reform? Personal car sharing is such a business opportunity: a chance to trim emissions, crashes, and fuel costs, all while generating a profit for car owners and...

Last summer, I took a four day hike through the high backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in the Washington Cascades. I’m an experienced mountaineer, accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when after a long day and miles of off-trail travel I heard the voices of young teenage boys wafting toward me from near the Tank Lakes. These remote tarns are in a place...

Editor’s Note: David Brook is a long-time innovator and leader in the car-sharing industry. He contributed this guest post from Portland, where he consults and blogs on personal mobility. Many city dwellers are familiar with Zipcar and other carsharing companies cropping up in major cities and college campuses across America. The business model is based on a company leasing vehicles, placing them throughout an urban area, providing insurance, and requiring...

Clark: Here’s evidence that poor folks don’t own many cars.  At least not in big cities.  So despite the rhetoric, a pro-car tilt in public policy isn’t necessarily “populist,” it’s often simply regressive. Former Grist editor Kathryn Schulz does a wise and witty TED talk on being wrong. My two favorite bits:  starting at 2:32, she discusses the key paradox of wrongness: we all know we’re wrong about something, yet if...

Have a couple empty seats in your car? Why not fill ’em and make a few bucks while you drive? If you live in the Seattle area, there are two new companies trying out ridesharing programs. The first, Avego, is a limited pilot project aiming to get regular commuters using 520 to find passengers for their empty seats. The second is a region-wide program across Puget Sound. Zebigo is launching...

Update!—Location has been changed to a larger space. Please see below. *** Sightline Fellow Yoram Bauman is hosting the Northwest Carbon Pricing Conference. I’ll be speaking at it, but that’s not the main reason you should go. It’s going to be a good event because of what it’s not going to be: a line-up of the usual suspects. The speakers are a genuinely heterodox group of Northwest leaders who are...

I filed my taxes a long time ago (just one of the many benefits of being married to someone far, far more organized than I am). So, I haven’t been thinking about my own taxes much this week—except to hope for a refund and follow President Obama’s road-show about his budget (He did Jay Leno, 60 Minutes, two nationally-televised town hall meetings, and a prime-time news conference—but I caught most...

Holy cow, how did this not get noticed before?  The Washington Department of Transportation’s 2010 deep-bore tolling study claims that tolling the deep-bore tunnel will actually increase driving through downtown Seattle. Take a look at the gem of a chart to the right, from page 31 of that report.  The chart compares forecasted 2030 traffic volumes from a toll-free tunnel (the column to the left) with a tolling scenario in...

Ask people what’s great about Oregon and you’ll get hundreds of answers (from bamboo bikes to the Country Fair to its vote-by-mail system). At Sightline, there’s nothing we love more than policies that remove the niggling obstacles that keep people from making smart, sustainable choices. So here’s an update on a few ideas we’ve been following, and a couple of reasons to love Oregon a little more. This week, the...

From Alan: Feebates in France have performed exceptionally well, according to Market Watch. It’s more than a decade since any Cascadian jurisdication (British Columbia) considered a similar proposal. Is it time? The blog Plurale Tantum unveiled a fascinating examination of why people of color and bicycle advocacy don’t seem to go together. Lots to think about—and do—to build a sustainability movement that matches Cascadia’s shifting demographic profile. WaPo’s Ezra Klein...