• Bike Safety on Burrard Bridge

    Last Friday was bike to work day and I was in Vancouver for a meeting being hosted by the Candian Centre for Policy Alternatives on climate justice. Before I got on the train for home I walked over to the Burrard Bridge. I have been reading lately about efforts to create a dedicated bike lane on the bridge. In other posts I have written about what supports increases in bike...
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  • In the News: Urban Gardeners Get the Lead Out

    Urban gardening’s great. The 0.03 Mile Diet is the ultimate in eating locally and seasonally. It can provide valuable perspective for how much water, fertile land, and labor go into growing our food—after taking up gardening, I can’t toss wilted veggies without serious guilt pangs. The popularity of pea patching is growing rapidly: the number of American households tending their own produce increased  nearly 20 percent over the past year....
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  • Built to Last

    Here’s a great, short video on development, sprawl, and transportation that illustrates some of the concepts we here at Sightline have been talking about for a while. Created by John Paget, it’s the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. And it’s pretty cool to boot:   If the video doesn’t work, you can see it on YouTube. H/t to Stephen Rees’s blog for finding this....
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  • Our Poisoned Puget Sound

    Toxic chemicals plaguing Puget Sound’s fish and orcas, polluted rainwater streaming into the sea, overfishing, damaged shorelines—all of this was my bread-and-butter for news stories during my recently-ended decade at the Seattle P-I. So I was really excited this week to tune into PBS to watch Frontline, a standout of investigative journalism, as it delved into what’s ailing Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in a special called “Poisoned Waters.”...
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  • But is it Affordable?

    Last summer, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) prepared a report to the Vancouver City Council on the city’s EcoDensity Initiative pointing out the initiative’s weakness on affordability. The backers of EcoDensity, a City initiative to make environmental sustainability a primary goal in all city planning decisions, argue that increasing supply by adding density will result in a decrease in housing costs. That follows basic economic principles, but we...
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  • Look Who’s Hiring

    McKinstry Company is perhaps the most dynamic and interesting company in the Northwest right now. They’re earning high-profile shout-outs from President Obama. And even in this economy, they’re adding jobs and expanding. Check it out: SEATTLE—Mayor Greg Nickels today presented McKinstry Company with a permit and approved plans for an expansion of its Georgetown facility in south Seattle.  The company expects to hire an additional 500 people, a combination of...
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  • Happy 15th Birthday, Sightline

    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...
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  • Fighting Congestion, RAND-Style

    Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a non-profit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster.  They considered lots of the standard solutions—improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth—and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. But here’s the rub:  RAND found that over the long haul, these kinds of solutions simply don’t have much...
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  • Happy 15th Birthday, Sightline

    Sightline’s greatest achievements over 15 years.
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  • Vancouver Evolving: 10 Minutes with Gordon Price

    Editor’s Note: As part of our “Escape to Vancouver” campaign, Sightline talked to Gordon Price—urban design expert and former Vancouver city councillor—to get his take on the changing landscape of Cascadia’s most urban city. Gordon, who has offered a Vancouver walking/biking tour to the winner of the trip, blogs and posts his popular urban design newsletter on his Price Tags website. (Full disclosure: Sightline is also lucky enough to claim...
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