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Anna: Are you eating flame retardants with your peanut butter and jelly? A bunch of big US corporations publicly claim to support climate change science and solutions, but behind the scenes they’re contributing heavily to politicians and research groups that deny or play down the threat of global warming, according to a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Can bisphenol A make you fat? Walkability boosts property prices. Here’s...

Imagine for a moment that cities around the world are rolling out fleets of magic carpets and that those carpets are having truly wizardly effects: improved public health and safety, reduced traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and reduced dependence on foreign oil. City dwellers can check them out or drop them off at stations everywhere, and they are free to use for up to 30 minutes. After that, they cost...

Imagine if state law made it difficult for pizza joints to sell by the slice. You’d have to buy and eat a lot of pizza when you got a hankering. Either that, or you’d have to give up pizza entirely. By-the-slice pizza lets light eaters save money. The car insurance market today is like an alternate reality where no pizza joints sell by the slice. You have to buy a...

Conservative Northwest think tanks, I am calling you out. I want you guys to talk about parking policy. Yeah, you heard me: parking policy. By my count, there are 5 prominent right-leaning, market-oriented think tanks in the Northwest: Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center in Seattle; Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia; Cascade Policy Institute in Portland; and Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC. Each of them prominently features a devotion to free markets...

With the US economy in the tank, could it possibly make sense to increase the tax burden? An increase in the state gas tax just might a win-win—boosting the economy while benefiting the environment.  Several states—including Oregon, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Illinois—are considering gas tax increases.  Just consider some of the possible benefits: Less pollution. Last year, we saw that higher gas prices encourage people to drive less, which means...

Via Erica Barnett, Adam Stein has a fascinating post on San Francisco’s move to start treating parking rationally. Here’s Stein on parking spaces:  …their supply is fixed but the demand fluctuates greatly by day and by hour. For most goods, pricing matches supply with demand. But the price for parking is inflexible. Most spots are free. Others are metered at an artificially low rate. Residential permit parking creates local distortions. Private lots skim...

Matthew Yglesias nails the subject of climate fairness. I loved the post so much I’m quoting the entire thing here: Given that coal and oil companies aren’t run by idiots, it’s clear that they’re not going to make arguments of the form “we shouldn’t act to ward off preventable environmental disaster because that would be bad for our shareholders and executives.” Instead, polluting energy firms are going to ride on...

A decade ago, we wrote that the bicycle is one of the world’s seven everyday wonders because it’s so simple, effective, affordable, and pollution-free. To that list, we might have added “enriching.” Bicycling for transportation pumps money into local economies. Bikes are wheels of fortune. If your community spends money building bikeways, you and your neighbors will cycle more. Your cycling will put extra money in the local economy. (I’ll...

  Editor’s note: This post was contributed by Todd Litman, author of “Parking Management Best Practices,” and founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. For more information see his free summary report (pdf), Parking Management: Strategies, Evaluation and Planning. A great example of the maxim “no free lunch” is the common struggle over parking. Motorists often assume that parking should be abundant and free at nearly every...

Bus, rail, or monorail? Here’s a system for figuring out which transportation solutions are the best match to a community’s needs.