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Cars have shaped much of the North American West, including Cascadia, where drive-through restaurants, shopping centers, highway strip malls, and single-family neighborhoods miles from commercial services dominate much of the urban and suburban landscape. Less obvious to the casual observer is the impact that parking regulations have had on architectural forms. Cities have established parking regulations, often called off-street parking minimums, for each possible land use. When you build a...

Serena I cannot. contain. my excitement. for our event with Chris Jordan next week! He will doubtless rock all your socks off, and at a ticket price of just $5, he can rock all your friends’ socks off, too. Not convinced? Check out this post from earlier this week and the trailer for his film, Midway, to be released later this year. Bonus materials: Just prior to Chris’s event, local...

I have not owned a car in seven years, but I do own a garage. It’s pictured above. In fact, I am legally required to own an off-street parking space; that’s written in the land-use code for my city, Seattle, as for virtually every city. The driveway that leads to my garage, meanwhile, eliminates almost exactly one parking space from my street. Parking in front of a driveway is illegal,...

Cars that drive themselves seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, but recent demonstration projects have shown that the technology is already here. Self-driving car technology, pioneered by Google, has advanced so quickly that its ubiquitous presence on city streets is now simply a matter of time. Boosters say that mass-market autonomous cars are only 3 to 5 years away; others estimate at least 10 years. No one...

In the stormwater world, if a rain garden is releasing more pollution into the environment than it’s capturing, word gets around. So when the city of Redmond crunched its first flush of data from a new roadside rain garden and discovered the water coming out of it was tainted with alarming levels of phosphorus, nitrates, and copper, the stormwater community took notice. Washington State regulators went on the record to...

Here’s a picture of hundreds of people who crowded into a hearing room Tuesday to protest looming and massive bus cuts at King County Metro. If this looks familiar, it’s because we went through a similar exercise two years ago. This time, if the Washington State Legislature doesn’t grant the transit agency new taxing authority to backfill an immediate $75 million budget hole, Metro says it will begin eliminating 600,000...

Alan Charles C. Mann’s “What if We Never Run Out of Oil?” in the May Atlantic Monthly seems likely to become instant conventional wisdom. It’s a wide-ranging, artful, and contrarian look at the way fracking and newer techniques for collecting unconventional oil and gas (which are preposterously abundant on Earth and ever-more-practical to extract) are displacing coal, changing the clean-energy outlook, and even shifting global power. It’s worth reading, if...

Last time, we reviewed accessory dwelling units’ (ADUs’) paucity and slow pace of development in most of the Northwest outside of Vancouver, BC. This time: the constraints that bind them. Why are accessory apartments and cottages so rare? One reason, no doubt, is that many homeowners do not want to host an ADU. But a more pernicious reason is that winning approval to rent out an ADU in most cities...

Eric The long arc of human history has yielded such a diversity of cultures that it’s usually impossible to say that any one of them is truly “the most” or “the best” at anything.  Yet it’s clear to me that when Google Glass comes to market, Western civilization will be crowned the most annoying. Matthew Yglesias delivers a well-deserved skewering to the defenders of his city’s parking mandates. Inspired by...

Let’s take a virtual stroll, via Street View: start on West Seventh and Blenheim in Vancouver, BC’s Kitsilano, as quintessential-looking a Cascadian neighborhood as any you can imagine. In the upper pane of the image above (or by following the link to Street View), point your cursor up and down the block and look around. Familiar, right? In Seattle, it might be on Capitol Hill, in Portland, perhaps in Irvington...