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In the next year or two, the shape of many Washington cities will be cast in concrete, or at least etched on maps. As the vagaries of land-use planning go, a big clump of counties are doing revisions to their comprehensive plans in the months ahead. These plans, though shrouded in the mind-numbing language of zoning, are among the most important decisions that will be made in the region. The...

A Seattle activist is performing a one-person sit-in under a tree to protest the tree’s removal as part of a development, as the Seattle Timesreports. The development replaces a single house with four units. The area is zoned for such developments. The activist says that she’s doing it for the environment, and there’s no reason to doubt her sincerity. But she’s barking up the wrong tree. Inserting more multifamily dwellings...

Portland fares poorly in one measure of smart growth compared with Washington cities: how many people live downtown. As the table below shows, Portland trails not only Seattle and Tacoma but also Seattle’s suburb Bellevue. Still, all of these cities are pale imitations of greater Vancouver, BC’s various downtown centers, as illustrated in this 2002 report we did. The city of Vancouver itself has roughly one fourth of its people...

There’s momentum in the US Congress to give residents of Washington and other states that have sales taxes but no (state) income taxes a deduction on their federal income tax, as the Seattle Post Intelligencerreports. From the perspective of tax fairness, this change is a good idea. It corrects one of the flaws of the sales tax. Residents of no-state-income-tax states currently pay more federal income tax than their counterparts...

British Columbia often comes off smelling like roses in the Cascadia Scorecard – energy consumption, sprawl, lifespan, etc. But the province lags far behind the Northwest states in the most basic step toward water conservation in homes and other buildings: charging by the gallon. The last figure I saw for British Columbia had more than 80 percent of residents paying for their water at a fixed rate. Most BC buildings...

I’ve been looking for a reason to write about this for some time, but this excellent Eugene Register Guard editorial has forced my hand. The recent runup in petroleum prices has put a new spotlight on an old controversy—whether the world is running short of oil. The battle lines of the debate are clearly drawn. One side—consisting primarily of old-guardpetroleum geologists and a few maverick oil industry insiders–thinks that we...

This piece by John Tierney in the New York Times Magazine is wrong in many ways, so it’s probably important to point out what’s right about it. To summarize the article (we read, so you don’t have to!): Cars are great, high-tech roads are cool, people who don’t like new roads are condescending nanny-statists who oppose consumer choice, public transit is too expensive, and the only real solutions to traffic...

No, really. A new study, mentioned in today’s Seattle Times, found that sprawl is really bad for your health. To wit: The study, which analyzed data on more than 8,600 Americans in 38 metropolitan areas, found that rates of arthritis, asthma, headaches and other complaints increased with the degree of sprawl. Living in the least sprawling areas, compared with living in the most, was like adding about four years to...

The City of Seattle is moving forward with its plans to Vancouver-ize its downtown, encouraging residential development to create a vibrant walking core, as the PI reports. The wacky thing about media coverage of downtown living in places that have relatively little of it-such as Seattle-is the presumption that housing must have yards because it needs to accommodate kids. The PI article spends most of its breath describing how a...

The Vancouver Sun has another interesting article (subscription required)on traffic today. The gist: traffic congestion is terribly unpredictable. Buried in the analysis is, I think, a larger point. Studies by the Greater Vancouver Regional District suggest one reason the daily commute is getting snarlier is that too many jobs are being located in new suburban office parks that are difficult to serve by road and almost impossible by transit. The...