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Pam Are young people different than salmon? No, says Jourdan Imani Keith of the Urban Wilderness Project in this beautifully-written essay. Serena Seventeen minutes. That’s the amount of time that passed between when the Wall Street Journal tweeted the breaking new about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death Sunday and the time they posted a verified story about it—and still, this is possibly before the actor’s own family was informed of the...

We don’t get down south as often as we’d like, but next Thursday, February 6, I’ll be on WSU Vancouver’s campus, joining the Center for Social & Environmental Justice as one of two speakers on fossil fuel exports out of the US Northwest and Canada. I’ll talk from 12-1:15 p.m. on the climate impacts of Northwest fossil fuel exports, as well as the threats that shipping them poses to our communities....

Every January, we take a look back at the top traffic blog articles of the prior year. 2013 was an exciting year: we celebrated our 20th anniversary; we released an e-book, Unlocking Home, on affordable housing opportunities hiding in plain sight; we called out self-proclaimed “green” PR and law firms shilling for Big Coal; we started to analyze the taxi vs. rideshare debate; we launched the first comprehensive look at...

Last year was a big one for Sightline. It was our 20th anniversary; we published the e-book Unlocking Home; and we continued to make waves on issues ranging from coal and oil exports to parking rules to ridesharing regulations, and more. All in all, it felt pretty great. But we want to know how it felt for you. Was our work interesting or useful to you? What issues are near...

Alan Just in time for the Arctic Blast, here is a group of Siberian percussionists playing blocks of ice and making jaw-droppingly beautiful music. #BlackFridayParking was the crowd-sourced social-media highlight of the week. A project of our friends at Strong Towns, it set out to vividly illustrate just how preposterously excessive parking quotas are—by photographing empty parking lots at shopping areas on Black Friday. The theory of parking quotas is that they’re set...

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...

Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules? The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it...

There are places in this world the savvy traveler would never drive with any hope of finding street parking: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, for example, or just about anywhere in downtown Los Angeles. That’s what you might think, anyway. If you actually drive to Fisherman’s Wharf today, though, you will have no problem finding a curb spot. A space will offer itself on each nearby block, if you’re willing...

Residents in West Seattle were anxious about plans to install dozens of roadside rain gardens used to control spills of raw sewage into Puget Sound. They were hearing horror stories about Ballard gardens that were slow to drain. Opponents organized and spread half-truths about green stormwater solutions, stories about massive sinkholes and mosquito infestations. King County officials knew they had to earn the public’s support if the project was to...

Alan The National Weather Service actually used the term “biblical” to describe how much rain was falling on Colorado last weekend. The storms over the Rocky Mountains are profoundly disconcerting to me. No individual event can be tied to climate change definitively, but extreme weather like this is what climate change models predict. It fills me with dread—and with rage at the fossil fuel industry and its apologists, flaks, and hired...