Can Seattle Make Sustainability Legal?
Seattle is a city paved with good intentions. Take a look at our plans and our resolutions and you’ll find three values common to just about everybody here, political leaders ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Where Are the Women Bike Commuters?
Why don’t women bike to work more often? You hear many theories: we’re less willing to ride in traffic, we can’t arrive at a showerless office all sweaty, we never ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Weekend Reading 5/11/12
Anna: Jon Stewart gives the best explanation I’ve seen of cognitive dissonance and how it plays out: Two rats in a bag! And in related cognitive dissonance news: Want partisans to listen ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
26 Ways to Store Your Bike
Editor's Note 6/22/15: Happy summer, Cascadia! Have you bought a new bike in honor of the sunny season? Moved to a new place and still wondering where to stash your wheels? Here's a hefty dose of inspiration from one of our all-time most popular Sightline articles. More ideas still welcome! Back in February, Treehugger posted a visually tantalizing slideshow of bike storage options. We featured it in Sightline Daily's news digest, but something about it ate at us: many of the solutions were utterly impractical. As even an occasional Northwest bike-rider knows, our bikes get wet. Sometimes, really wet---not to mention muddy, gritty, grimy, etc. Certainly past the point of wanting to hang them over an expensive couch. Still, the article piqued our curiosity. How do real people park their bikes? We put a call out to readers to submit their bike storage photos. Here's what we got.
Author: SwatchJunkies
Weekend Reading 5/4/12
Alan: More than slogans and sound bites about the causes of the record-setting low teen birth rates in the United States. President 42 on President 36. Liz Canning in the ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Saving Cash with Green Stormwater Solutions
Here’s a good reason to build rain gardens and green roofs, and to plant and protect trees: It’ll save you money. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Rain Garden Reality Check
Roadside rain gardens are, for the most part, enormously popular. Yet after a recent faulty installation in Ballard, which was later corrected, some folks have begun loudly criticizing them as a threat to health, safety, and quality of life. Check out the comments section on Lisa Stiffler's recent blog post, Rain Garden Backlash is All Wet, for a good example of the controversy. I don't want to minimize the concerns that some neighbors have. That said, I do think it's useful to remind ourselves that the status quo isn't exactly wine and roses. The system we have now is aging, challenging to maintain, prone to frequent failure---and fixing it with conventional technology will be extremely expensive.
Author: SwatchJunkies
Rain Garden Backlash Is All Wet
Rain gardens are suffering from an identity crisis. On one hand, there are homeowners who love rain gardens composed of feathery grasses and bushy native shrubs. They even hire landscapers ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Seattle On the Cusp of Making Sustainability Legal
Next week, the Seattle city council will take up a package of modest but important regulatory reforms. These are precisely the sort of fixes Sightline has been advocating: targeted updates ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Weekend Reading 3/23/12
Eric dP: For Northwest history geeks, I recommend reading the introduction to this assessment of Latinos in Washington. It traces the history of Latinos in the region from the earliest Spanish ...
