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A striking lede: New research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds that all the impervious surfaces-buildings, roads, parking lots, and roofs-in the continental United States cover an area nearly the size of Ohio. I have a love-hate relationship with this sort of fact: it’s shocking, but I don’t quite know what to make of it. Is Ohio a lot of impervious surface, or just a little given...

 (This post is part of a series.) Last night, I spoke briefly at a lively public debate about the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the elevated highway hugging the Seattle waterfront through downtown. Constructed in the early 1950s, the Viaduct is aging and considered seismically unsound, and is slated for replacement. The Washington Department of Transportation is looking at several alternatives for replacing the facility, including a tunnel, a...

Update: The Seattle P-I published an article on this proposal. Small and inexpensive tweaks to transportation infrastructure, as opposed to the charismatic mega-projects we hear so much about, often prove the best way to enhance the mobility of urban Cascadians (as we have argued here). One such proposal—developed by former Microsoft employee Anirudh Sahni—suggests a small re-route of a popular Sound Transit bus linking Seattle’s downtown with Redmond’s corporate campuses....

Big decisions are coming down in Clark County, Washington, the sprawling area surrounding Vancouver (Washington) that’s functionally part of greater Portland. The county is working on its 20-year growth plan and the implications are huge. There’s momentum in the county, though no consensus yet, to slow the pace of growth and concentrate development in existing neighborhoods. The sprawling record Clark County is trying to recover from is evident in the...

Salon.com has a great article that discusses the environmental impacts of building larger and larger houses. Apparently, even super-efficient, high-tech houses that use the latest in “green” construction techniques use more energy than smaller but less efficient homes. For example, a 1998 Environmental Building News article found that… a 1,500-square-foot home with low energy performance standards will use less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house with high...

More thoughts on the same item. Fires in the dry, inland Northwest are igniting as usual, near Washington’s Lake Chelan, for example. But such fires are commonplace; in fact, they maintain vigorous ecosystems. Cascadia’s coastal rainforests, especially northern ones, are a different story. They’re not adapted to fire. On our coast, as in tropical rainforests, fire is a sign of something unnatural-most likely, global climate change. North of Cascadia, in...

The most recent city to be inspired by Vancouver, BC’s smart-growth success is none other than Fort Worth, as the Star-Telegram reported last week (registration required). The fast-growing Texas city is using Vancouver, particularly its waterfront development, as the model for a grand plan to transform its downtown, its river, and boost the city’s quality of life “for the next century.” Early on, the idea—which includes rerouting part of the...

May figures show another record-setting month for sales of condominiums and other forms of housing in compact communities in greater Vancouver. Condo sales jumped by half over last May’s levels, which were already very high by the standards of other Cascadian cities. The boom has spread well beyond Vancouver’s downtown core, too.

Most northwesterners believe that governments pay for roadwork from gas tax revenue. And they’re right about the federal and state/provincial level. But they’re wrong about city and county road spending. That comes out of property and sales taxes. Regionwide, we spend several hundred million local, general-fund dollars a year on the infrastructure for cars and trucks. (Read details here.) A citizen panel in Seattle has studied the city’s roads and...

Northwest pedestrians, especially in Seattle, are known for being peculiarly law-abiding. We wait patiently at crosswalks for the walk signal, even when a car is nowhere in sight. But we might be better off—even safer—with a little more anarchy on our asphalt, according to this fascinating Salon article (you have to register for a one-day pass, then go to the Tech section). Portland writer Linda Baker describes a trend called...