Search Results

Imagine if state law made it difficult for pizza joints to sell by the slice. You’d have to buy—and eat—a lot of pizza when you got a hankering. Either that, or you’d have to give up on pizza entirely. By-the-slice pizza lets light eaters save money without giving up pie entirely. The car insurance market is like a no-slices pizza world. You have to buy a lot of insurance, even...

Here’s an odd tidbit from a story on highway tolling in the Seattle P-I: The [Washington] Highway 167 HOT lanes cost about $90,600 per month to operate, on average, and take in about $52,600 in tolls per month. [Emphasis added.] For those who aren’t hip to the lingo, HOT stands for “high occupancy/toll“—basically, HOV lanes that solo drivers can use for a fee.  Ideally, HOT lane tolls are tuned to...

The mess being caused by polluted runoff in the Northwest isn’t letting up, and neither are supporters of a plan to pay for stormwater cleanup. Over a single rainy weekend this winter, Seattle Public Utilities got 700 calls about flooding and sent cleanup crews to 332 locations. In Port Angeles, the storm system was so overwhelmed after a December downpour that 15 million gallons of raw sewage and rainwater fouled...

A pilot program is launching today to help match up drivers and riders who are crossing the Highway 520 bridge that connects Seattle and Bellevue. The project, called go520, is being funded by Washington state in an effort to reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles crossing the bridge. The program is recruiting 250 drivers and 750 riders. An Irish company called AveGo, which works on transportation software and technology, developed...

Michael Ennis may have batty ideas about parking policy, but he’s got a nice post today on a subject I’ve been meaning to write about: Washington state transportation revenue is in dire straits. New models show that revenue forecasts have consistently missed the mark. To illustrate the problem, check out this analysis of gasoline consumption, which is (obviously) a key driver of gas tax receipts: What it shows—if you look at the difference...

For decades, we’ve been hearing that congestion is getting worse and worse, and that traffic backups are taking a bigger and bigger bite out of our days (and paychecks) each year.  But what if we’re measuring congestion wrong—and the conventional wisdom is largely hogwash? A geekalicious new report from CEOs for Cities shows that the nation’s most influential measure of congestion—the Urban Mobility Report by the Texas Transportation Institute, which...

Oregon has been having a robust debate over the appropriate date for closing the state’s lone coal power plant. The Boardman plant could theoretically operate until 2040, but its owners have proposed an earlier closure to avoid investing in expensive pollution controls. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the plant should close in 2015 or 2020 (and how much its owners must spend in the meantime.) But that...

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared at Sustainable Industries Journal. For permission to reprint, contact them. Imagine an efficient system of centralized heating powered by renewable energy using underground pipes to heat water and air for multiple buildings. Sergius Orata developed just such a system. Is Sergius Orata a new experimental energy start-up from Scandinavia? Actually, he was a hydraulic engineer who did the bulk of his work about 2000...

It’s all too rare that we get to meet our subscribers face to face. If you work at University of Washington, stop by and say hello to Sightline on Wednesday, October 13th. We’ll be at UW’s Combined Fund Drive kick off event from 11am-2pm in Mary Gates Hall. We’ll be talking to folks as a representative of EarthShare Washington, our workplace giving partner. Even if you don’t work at UW,...

Across North America people are hopping on the food cart bandwagon, something northwesterners know a little something about—CNN Travel recently named Portland the best street food cityin the world. While carts have flourished in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver’s street food scenes have sputtered. Why? Both cities have tough laws on the books that prevent a lively street food economy, such as limiting sidewalk food to precooked items like hot dogs...