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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...

A couple months back, I got a smart phone. One of the first things I downloaded was OneBusAway, an app that provides real-time information on transit stops, routes, and arrivals using data provided by King County Metro. Finally, I thought! I’d never again have to wait around for a bus that’s 20 minutes late. I’d know exactly when the next bus would arrive, shrinking my wait time at the stop....

Oregon could become the next state to pave the way for peer-to-peer car sharing companies, which allow people to rent out their personal vehicles when they’re not using them (which is usually more than 90 percent of the time). It’s a common sense and entrepreneurial idea that we’ve championed here at Sightline for a long time. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you need to rent a car for a...

Imagine a time, years ago, when Johnny and Billie Sue could take a break from jumprope, hopscotch, and tree climbing to ride their bikes down to the corner store, sit at the soda fountain, buy shoelaces, and trade comic books. Sounds like an idyllic bygone era doesn’t it? But I’m not that old and I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I lived it. Even we had a corner store....

There are a couple of ways to tackle the problem of polluted runoff: keep the water from getting fouled in the first place, or clean it up once it’s contaminated. It doesn’t take a hydrology expert to figure out that in many cases, it’s cheaper and easier to deal with a pollutant at its source before it’s dissolved in water and spread far and wide. So goes the logic behind...

This weekend, my in-laws came to town. Which was a very happy occasion. I handed over my two-year-old daughter (and four pages of instructions) to them while my husband and I fled to a hotel in downtown Seattle for two glorious nights. We drank martinis at the Mayflower Park Hotel (among other places, but those were the best), got to see the new Coen brothers movie, slept as late as...

Back in October, I started noticing the accusation that Seattle is waging a “war on cars” pop up an awful lot in the Seattle-area press, and in suspicious ways. On its face, the charge that Seattle is waging a war on cars is pretty silly. After all, that the bulk of the city’s political leaders support two car-centric megaprojects—the 520 bridge and the Alaskan Way tunnel—that will cost in the...

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...

Tax Increment Financing is an important tool for accommodating new growth in Washington, but it certainly won’t address all of Washington State’s growth challenges. Let’s consider some of the arguments against TIF (if you need to get more basics on TIF start here). The central criticism of TIF—the one that is most likely to give fodder to opponents—is that what began as an effort to rescue cities from blight, TIF...

A big challenge to getting folks to care about the damage caused by polluted stormwater runoff is helping them understand what the heck it is and where it goes in the first place. And it appears there’s a lot of work to be done on that front. An informal survey by Eric Eckl at Water Words That Work, a Virginia company that works on water-related communications, sought some answers about...