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As if it wasn’t popular enough, Walk Score (everyone’s favorite walkability tool) made a new bound last week by announcing partnerships with several leading real estate websites, including Zillow.com, Ziprealty.com, and Postlets.com. These sites will show a Walk Score on all their property listings—that’s a whopping 85 million properties. It’s great news for our friends, a big step towards their goal of getting Walk Score on all property listings. Zillow...

Fifteen years ago this Autumn, a 28-year-old researcher names Alan Durning lugged a refurbished library table into the cramped bedroom closet of his Seattle home, drilled a phone line through the wall, and filed the legal papers to create a nonprofit research institute. We’ve come a long way since 1993, but our overarching goal remains the same: to arm change-makers with the independent research, ideas, and tools they need to...

Sightline’s greatest achievements over 15 years.

The US election is over, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop voting!  The geek-hipsters (or is it hipster-geeks?) at Front Seat just launched a new website that lets you vote on priorities for the Obama administration’s brand-new Office of Urban Policy.  Users have submitted dozens of ideas—everything from investing in rail, to changing zoning laws to promote walkable development, to reforming systemic pro-highway biases in federal transportation funding. ...

Sides are lining up in the debate over how to best gain control of high gas prices. Like we’ve said, the prices we’re seeing today are bad for working families. When costs rise so rapidly, consumers just don’t have enough time to adjust. Of course, people are stepping into the ring with solutions. A major point of discussion has been offshore drilling, setting California as one arena for the match...

It’s here! The largest 40 cities in America, ranked by their walkability. Plus, every single neighborhood in those cities — all 2,508 of them—rank-ordered for your walking pleasure. ** In a surprise upset, San Francisco edges out NYC for top honors in walkability. Who else made it into the Top 10? ** The Northwest’s most walkable neighborhood is in Portland. It’s the Pearl District, no suprise, ranking as the 15th best neighborhood for...

As you may have noticed, we love maps, especially interactive ones. I just came across a nifty new little tool from the Center for Neighborhood Technologies that shows annual spending per household on gasoline in 52 major metropolitan throughout the US: The maps provide data for the years 2000 and 2008, enabling comparisons for the eight-year period between annual household gasoline expenses, monthly household transportation expenses (including vehicle purchase price,...

Our friends at Walk Score are out with a ranking of Seattle’s neighborhoods. It’s good stuff, and Jennifer Langston has a great article about it in the P-I. There’s also a nice segment on King 5 news and a good piece in the Times. So which areas do best? Unsurprisingly, it’s the nexus of Pioneer Square, downtown, First Hill, Belltown, the International District, and South Lake Union. But there are...

A growing body of research shows that walkable, compact communities can promote good health and a healthier planet by promoting exercise and reducing the risk of obesity; lowering car crash fatalities; reducing greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle-related air pollution; and cutting down gasoline bills and oil imports.

Sightline Institute’s reports on sprawl and smart growth in several Northwest cities analyze how each city did at curbing sprawl and developing efficiently, starting with the period of the 1990s.