Weekend Reading 3/16/12
Clark: WSU researchers find that exposure to toxic chemicals can affect the next three generations of offspring. From the press release: “While toxicologists generally focus on animals exposed to a ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Freeing Food Carts
Editor’s note: Eric posted Seattle and Vancouver follow ups to this piece. Whatever you’re craving, you can probably find it on sale at a parking lot in Portland. Barbecue jackfruit fried pie? ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Recipe for a Rice Crispy Road
Water is the enemy of pavement. It gets into cracks, freezes, expands, and makes bigger cracks. It makes the ground beneath roads soggy and soft. Drive some heavy trucks over ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Commuting in Seattle and Portland
Portland, OR has a national reputation as a transit powerhouse. Despite some recent funding woes---which are depressingly common for US transit systems---the City of Roses' combination of bus, light rail, street car, and most recently aerial tram transit has earned national kudos. US News and World Report, for example, recently ranked Portland’s transit system as the the fifth-best in the country, trailing cities like New York and Boston. Yet as we’ve mentioned before, data from the US Census shows that Seattle has far more transit commuting than Portland. It’s really not all that close: in Seattle, about 21 percent of workers got to their jobs on transit from 2006 through 2010. But in the Portland, the figure is just 12 percent.
Author: SwatchJunkies
Our Year of Lent
Starting today, people across the globe will give up something for Lent. (For example, Newt Gingrich won’t have any dessert. A colleague of mine is giving up meat.) My family ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Surprisingly Ambitious Permeable Projects
Municipal engineers don’t exactly have reputations for being devil-may-care, live-on-the-edge risk takers. Speaking generally, they work hard, take their jobs seriously, and really really want their projects to work. Collapsed ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Two Wheels and High Heels
In the Seattle suburb where I grew up, the main transportation choice most residents face is what kind of car to buy. I moved to Seattle after college and, inspired ...
Author: SwatchJunkies
Making Sustainability Legal: 2011 Progress Report
Six months ago, we launched the Making Sustainability Legal project arguing that, although the Northwest could benefit from a top-to-bottom remodel of its public-policy house, deep political divides and starvation ...
