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UPDATE: I apparently got much of this post wrong.  See this followup post for more details. This article from the libertarian-leaning Northwest Meridian applauds the Brookings Institution’sMargy Waller—who advocates for big-government programs to subsidize car ownership for people at or near the poverty line. Strange bedfellows indeed.  The small-government Meridian presumably likes the idea because they feel that transit is expensive, big-government meddling.  Waller welcomes support from all corners, since...

A few weeks ago, President Bush encouraged Americans to conserve fuel by cutting back on non-essential driving.  Unlike some, I think that it’s actually helpful to use the bully pulpit this way.  I just don’t think it’s terribly meaningful: people respond far more to prices than to jawboning.  And as  Brookings Institution scholars Robert Puentes and Bruce Katz point out, the sprawling layout of American cities makes an awful lot...

This is big news:  last Friday, a judge in Oregon  ruled that Measure 37 violates the state constitution. To recap:  Measure 37, which was approved overwhelmingly by Oregon voters last fall, required state or local governments either to compensate landowners, or to waive development restrictions, whenever land-use rules reduced the value of private property.  The measure was strongly supported by timber interests, who faced limits on logging near streams and...

That’s what mossback Knute Berger argues in his latest Seattle Weekly column. As near as I can decipher his rantings, Berger thinks that density and gentrification in Seattle are tantamount to becoming a police state in the model of Singapore. Also, houses in the city are unaffordable. And, oh yeah, the University Village is—gasp—basically just a tony shopping mall. Really, it’s hard to know where to begin. According to Berger,...

One of the problems with building cities near waterways is this:  building bridges is just phenomenally expensive.  See, for example, the bridge across the Columbia River, connecting Portland, OR with Vancouver, WA.  It’s a rush-hour chokepoint, regularly clogged with drive-alone commuters; and transportation planners in both states are wondering what to do about it.  One option on the table is to build a shiny new bridge in basically the same...

While studying the connections between social capital and health I stumbled across something rather odd. States with high social capital—strong connections between people and their communities—tend to vote democratic. Harvard researcher, Ichiro Kawachi, one of the leading lights on social capital and health, has performed several studies that make state-by-state comparisons; and he’s shown that, on average, states with higher social capital also have better health outcomes. But as I...

As big-time blogger Duncan Black noted over the weekend, high gasoline prices seem to have boosted ridership on some of the the nation’s transit systems—which led big-time blogger Matthew Yglesias to speculate that gas consumption may be more sensitive to price than economists have predicted. Yglesias’ take seems mistaken to me.  Nationwide, less than 5 percent of all commuting trips are taken on transit; and commutes represent a minority of...

There’s more to this article than the headline, but the headline alone says quite a bit:  "Poll: 8 in 10 want drivers to drop SUVs."  That’s another tentative—though possibly shallow—sign that high gas prices are turning Americans against their gas guzzlers.  Of course, since SUVs, trucks and minivans have commanded roughly half of the new vehicle market in recent years, one wonders if this means that 3 in 10 people...

Obesity has many causes, but currentresearch indicates that sprawl may play a part. So far, researchers have concluded that people who live in sprawling, car-dependent neighborhoods are more likely to be obese, while people who live in walkable neighborhoods are apt to do more walking. But researchers still trying to tease out cause and effect: do walkable neighborhoods encourage people to walk? Or do people who like to walk move...

In 2004, total health care spending reached roughly $30 billion in Washington state.  In Oregon, that total was $16 billion; In Idaho, about $5.5 billion.  That’s not chump change:  health care now absorbs about one-eighth of the total output of the Northwest states’ economies. And, based on the results of thesenational studies, and thesestate-level estimates, at least a tenth of all medical spending in the Northwest is related the ailments...