Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Do Kids Count in Cascadia?

Things are looking up for Cascadia’s kids. Well some things. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count Data Book, released yesterday, teen birth rates in the Northwest states have steadily declined since 2000, and regional rates of infant mortality, and child and teen deaths are all down from 1990. But child poverty is up.

In the report’s 10 measures of child well-being, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington fared better than average for the country overall, ranking 18^th, 16^th, and 14^th, respectively. Montana slipped to number 34 this year.

But for Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, the number of children living in poverty is up from 2000–2003 and is above the national average, perhaps reflecting some of the economic woes the Northwest has seen in recent years. In Oregon, 41 percent of all kids in the state live in low-income families. Oregon and Washington tied at 36^th nationally in the percentage of children who live in families in which no parent has full-time, year-round employment.

Childhood poverty and parental unemployment can be factors in a host of other problems from lower school performance to higher crime rates and teenage pregnancy. Tracking trends such as child poverty and the teen birthrate--in projects like Kids Count and NEW's Cascadia Scorecard--helps raise awareness of the issues, the first step to creating change.

As a next step, the Northwest could make reducing child poverty a major goal for the decade ahead by implementing policies that emphasize personal responsibility while giving working families a way to develop assets that appreciate, not just income (see p. 12 in NEw's report, Population Reprieve). For example, government matching funds for low-income families who save for college or put money away for a down payment on a home.

P.S. The incredibly useful Kids Count website lets you compare trends regionally and by year, create charts, and download the raw data. Check it out.

The Way-Too-Big House

I've been noticing that older houses in my Seattle-area neighborhood are being steadily replaced by much larger mansion-sized structures--one of which is large enough to be an orphanage. Apparently this is a national trend: the size of new single-family homes has more than doubled since the 1940s (from 1,100 to 2,340 sq.ft.), according to a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (see full pdf here). Combining this with the trend towards smaller households (from 3.67 to 2.62 members), authors Wilson and Boehland find that:

In new, single-family houses constructed in the United States, living area per family member has increased by a factor of 3 since the 1950s.

This has several environmental implications.  Larger houses not only use more building materials, but may also consume proportionally more.  Larger houses that include higher ceilings, complex designs such as extra wings, and other features may mean that material use increases proportionally faster than square-footage.

And building out has more impacts per square foot than building up because the increased impervious footprint generates more storm water runoff, taxing sewer capacity.

Not surprisingly, big houses also require more energy to heat and cool. Good insulation and green building techniques can only do so much for conservation.  When the authors calculated heating and cooling costs for a small, poorly insulated house and a well insulated house twice as large, they found the small house still used almost a third less energy.  So size really does matter, as Clark has also blogged about.

What has caused the trend?  Wilson and Boehland cite several factors.  Some zoning laws and development covenants mandate minimum house sizes (but some now also mandate maximums).  Mortgages for new houses often specify a minimum ratio of house value to land value. And until 1998, tax laws required home sellers to buy a house of equal or greater value unless they wanted to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated value of their old house.

Wilson and Boehland also suggest that the notion of "bigger is better" may be inflating house sizes (see Alan’s post on up-sizing the American dream).  But a big house can also be lifeless: quantity without quality.  Instead of adding extra rooms, new home builders could invest in the details that give houses their charm (moldings, built in cabinets, granite countertops) and spend more for green details (better insulation, water-saving devices, sustainable materials).  They’d save money on energy bills and reduce their environmental impact.

Personally, I'd rather spend my home time reading in a bay window seat than cleaning an extra 600 square feet of house.

Marketing With Trees II

A brief follow-up to Jessica’s urban forests post: urban forests have additional benefits to businesses; however this information is, sadly, not widely known.

Other research--in addition to the study by Kathy Wolf that Jessica cited--has found customers were willing to travel farther (hopefully on transit) to reach well-vegetated businesses [1], and the quality of landscaping along approach routes to business districts has also been found to positively influence consumer perceptions [2].

And a study using a detailed pricing model on existing commercial building rents found a clear relationship between quality landscaping and higher office rental rates; quality landscaping (neat, well-groomed, attractive, able to see the business) increased rental rates by 7 percent, as did good building shade [3].

Businesses also experience increased productivity when their employees are exposed to green spaces: Desk workers who can see nature from their desks take 23 percent less time off sick than those who don’t see any green from their windows, and they also report greater job satisfaction [4].

Expanding on this worker satisfaction trend a bit, social and nature researchers Rachel and Steve Kaplan have a theory (attention restoration theory) that “nearby nature” helps alleviate mental fatigue caused by directed attention-- the fatigue caused by our brains trying to filter too many competing messages. And others are noticing and quantifying the apparent fact that urban greenery has positive social effects as well.

Those are just a few of the benefits provided by urban forests. Some of my research in urban forestry included writing a lit review on all of the benefits of urban trees for a client who--for whatever reason--hasn't published it. If any of you wishes to follow up on the topic, I'll send the lit review along in its current draft form (e-mail: dstaley@cityofbuckley.com)

Referenced studies

[1] Bisco Werner, J.E., Raser, J., Chandler, T.J., and O'Gorman, M. 2002. Trees mean business: a study of the economic impacts of trees and forests in the commercial districts of New York City and New Jersey. New York: Trees New York. 141 pp.

[2] Wolf, K.L. 2000. Community Image - Roadside Settings and Public Perceptions, University of Washington College of Forest Resources, Factsheet #32.

[3] Laverne, R.J., Winson-Geideman, K. 2003. The Influence of Trees and Landscaping on Rental Rates at Office Buildings. Journ. Arbor. 29:5 September 2003 pp. 281-290.

[4] Wolf, K.L. 1998 Urban Nature Benefits: Psycho-Social Dimensions of People and Plants, University of Washington College of Forest Resources, Factsheet #1.

Something Wildlife

If you've been following Eric's pieces on sage-grouse, goats, wolves, orcas, salmon, caribou, and other Northwest critters, you may have gathered that NEW is doing research on wildlife in Cascadia--and what it tells us about the health of our natural heritage.

In fact, as we described in a Cascadia Scorecard News article this week, NEW is introducing a wildlife index as part of the Cascadia Scorecard project. The index tracks population counts of five key indicator species--gray wolves, woodland caribou, greater sage-grouse, orcas, and Chinook salmon--and will be released in complete form in Cascadia Scorecard 2006.

As research is completed, we will post articles, maps, and charts from the index both on the wildlife pages of our website and in the wildlife section of our weblog.

The index will measure population counts because they are the most basic assessment of a species' prospects and may reveal how the larger ecosystems that sustain the species are functioning. We're comparing current numbers to historical levels (see chart above); and we'll depict habitat loss through maps that track species’ current and historic ranges. The index may also help identify the policies that are most effective in protecting these species. Here's a bit on each of the five:

• Gray wolves in Idaho and Montana. Wolves--reintroduced in the mid-1990s--are flourishing and helping to re-balance their native landscapes by, for instance, pressuring the elk herds that formerly browsed on streamside saplings. This, in turn, improves beaver and trout habitat.
• Woodland caribou of the Selkirk Mountains, a remote region in northeast Washington, northern Idaho, and southern British Columbia. They are the last remaining caribou to visit the continental US and their continued existence hinges on repairing fragmented landscapes, such as forest clearcuts.
• Greater sage-grouse in Oregon are sensitive to alterations in the vast “sagebrush sea” of the inland Northwest, including ranching, fencing, and invasive species.
• Chinook salmon returning as adults to the Bonneville Dam, the lowest dam on the Columbia River. These mighty fish are a proxy for the Northwest’s once-prolific salmon runs and for the health of the vast river system that binds British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
• Southern resident orcas that inhabit the inland seas of Washington and British Columbia. For much of the last century, these orcas were under siege. Now, although they are still in jeopardy, conservation efforts have paid off.

We'd love to hear feedback on the index as we develop it, so please add your comments below.

Coming to Their Census

A few weeks back, there was a bit of a stir (see this article for an example) over new US Census Bureau estimates suggesting that, after the urban resurgence of the 1990s, center-city populations in the US were once again on the decline.  For someone like me who's convinced of the environmental and social benefits of city living, this didn't seem like good news.

But now, two Brookings Institution researchers writing in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin newspaper are urging that people take the Census estimates with a healthy dose of skepticism.  Apparently the agency was singing much the same tune a decade ago -- a tune that turned out to be off-key:
 

Like Denver, Oakland, New York and other big cities, some of the Census Bureau's methods effectively "cheated" Milwaukee out of population gains in the their mid-1990s estimates—and they may be doing the same thing this decade.

(The article makes some other good points -- it's definitely worth reading.)

Now, obviously, I'd like to believe that the Census estimates for urban areas are off-base; but I have no real basis for challenging them.  Still, it's worth remembering that estimates are just that -- estimates. So before we get carried away with hype -- one way or the other -- it's worth keeping in mind that even the best estimates, by the best estimators, don't always match up with reality.

Marketing with Trees

Urban ecologists are fond of reciting the benefits of trees in the big city: they reduce storm water runoff, absorb pollutants, increase real estate values, and make neighborhoods more attractive. But a recent study (pdf) shows that urban trees may have an unexpected bonus for city shopkeepers:  apparently shoppers are willing to pay extra to shop near trees.

UW professor Kathleen Wolf showed photos of retail streets with and without trees to inner-city residents across the US and asked how much they would be willing to pay for a variety of items at each location. The study participants perceived shops on treed streets not only as better maintained and having a more pleasant atmosphere but also as likely having higher quality products.

These perceptions may translate into more business, because participants also said they were willing to drive farther to those shops (expanding the customer pool) and to pay more for parking. And most important for the bottom line, trees may lead to higher prices: on average, participants said they were willing to pay nearly 12% more to shop on treed streets than on treeless ones.

So add happy store owners to the benefits of maintaining trees in the city.

Security and the City

This article in Sunday's Washington Post, penned by New America Foundation fellow Joel Kotkin, is definitely thought provoking.  In the wake of terrorist attacks in London and New York, Kotkin argues that the single most important challenge facing modern cities is providing basic security to their citizens.  To wit...

While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations.

With memories of 9/11 still fresh, perhaps it's natural that people should question whether cities are really safe.  Terrorism is, quite obviously, a serious problem; and central cities have proven to be ready targets.

Still, I think that the article's emphasis on terrorism per se reveals an interesting and broader cultural bias about risk.  There are certain kinds of risks that our culture fears more than others. Some hazards--say, the threat of random violence, whether by ordinary criminals or by terrorists--seem intolerable, and society demands a concerted effort to put a stop to them.  Others--say, traffic accidents--we generally shrug off, and accept as part of the unavoidable background of modern life.

But sometimes the "unavoidable" risks are far more hazardous, and every bit as avoidable, as the ones on which we focus our attention.

At least two peer-reviewed studies (pdfs here and here) have looked at how urban form affects the risk of dying in a vehicle collision.  Both studies concluded that people who live in low-density, sprawling neighborhoods face a much greater risk of dying in a car accident than people who live downtown.  In New York City, the risk of dying in a collision, either as a pedestrian or a motor vehicle occupant, was only a fourth to a seventh as high as it was for people living in the suburban outskirts of Cleveland, Toledo, Kansas City, or Greensboro, North Carolina.  The reason: people who live in sprawling suburbs drive more than people in the urban core, and accident risk is fairly proportional to the distance that people drive. 

Likewise, combining the risk of collision and crime, counties on the urban fringe were often more dangerous than those at the city center (though older, inner-ring suburbs were often the safest of all).  Apparently, the added risk of dying in a car accident in car-dependent, outer-ring suburbs more than counterbalanced the (slightly) elevated risk of dying at the hands of a stranger with a gun in the inner city. 

This idea--that, looking comprehensively across a number of risks, central cities are safer than bucolic outer-ring suburbs--runs counter to intuition.  From Kotkin's article...

Attempts by mayors in these cities to be "hip and cool" have not turned them around, in large part because they are still perceived as unsafe. Baltimore's Mayor Martin O'Malley has cultivated an image of coolness for himself and encouraged other "cool" people, including singles and gays, to add to his city's "creative class." Yet as one Baltimore resident suggested to me recently: "What's the point of being hip and cool if you're dead?"

That sentiment might be reasonable enough if it were really true; but the numbers suggest that, as a general rule, it's not.  (Baltimore, of course, may be an exception to the rule -- its murder rate is high enough that it's a bit riskier than the average city.)

Of course, terrorism may throw a monkey wrench into these sorts of calculations; one serious attack at a city center can more than make up for the risk of dying in a car crash at the outskirts of town. Worse, the risk of a terrorist attack in any given city is quite literally unknowable; it may be quite high, or it could be close to nil.  Which makes it very hard to say with any certainty how risky it might be to live in a modern city.

But still, it may be that big cities suffer from an image problem:  their problem isn't so much actual security as it is perceived security.  As a general rule, center cities may, in fact, be fairly safe; but in an era of heightened attention to crime terrorist threats, they may not feel that way.

Now, Kotkin's article doesn't claim that the threat of terrorism has, by itself, enticed large numbers of people to flee center cities.  Most central city populations have declined in the US and Europe over the past 50 years or so, but many other demographic and cultural forces are at play here. Still, he finds plenty of historical examples in which security threats eventually turned even big cities into ghost towns -- and suggests that the same thing may be happening again.

He may, of course, be right.  But before you hitch up your wagons and head for the hills, it's worth keeping in mind that -- as appalling as the prospect of crime and terrorism may be -- there are other, less heralded but equally real risks associated with life at the edge of town.

A Bridge Just Far Enough

If you want an example of what sets greater Vancouver apart from the cities south of the US-Canadian border, look no farther than this Vancouver Sun headline: Council votes to turn two of six lanes on Burrard Bridge into dedicated bike lanes.

Just for context -- the Burrard Bridge is one of just a few main access points to downtown Vancouver, and carries a significant amount of car traffic into downtown from some of the western neighborhoods. Vancouver tried a similar experiment in the mid-1990s, but it ended after just a week or so because of a public outcry over congestion. The same thing may well happen again.

So politically, this is a risky move. Which makes it all the more impressive: Vancouver city leaders are actually willing to take concrete and potentially unpopular steps to reduce the city's global warming emissions and promote biking and walking -- steps that seem completely outside the realm of political possibility in, say, Seattle or Portland. Even Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, who has won national recognition for organizing hundreds of the nation's mayors to speak up on global warming, has dedicated considerable political capital to rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct--a massively expensive project that will, in all likelihood, increase the amount of greenhouse gases Seattle residents spew into the atmosphere. Sadly, the city's actions fall short of the rhetoric.

Compare that with this statement of on Vancouver city councillor Fred Bass:

"I became a city councillor because of global warming," Bass said after the vote. "And it seems to me that what we have here is a very feasible way of testing out whether we can mobilize people to walk and cycle and for people to leave their cars behind."

Definitely an experiment worth keeping an eye on.

Euro-Paean

A new study of flame-retardant chemicals called PBDEs (reported on here) found low relatively levels of the compounds in German breast milk samples -- about 2 parts PBDE per billion parts of milk fat.

In contrast, the median level in the Pacific Northwest was about 50 parts per billion, with levels ranging over 300 ppb for a tenth of the samples we analyzed. PBDE concentrations of well over 1,000 parts per billion have been detected in other North American tests. The big difference is that the kinds of PBDEs that are most readily absorbed by living things have mostly been used in the US and Canada. Now, undoubtedly, we'll be living with that mistake for decades.

One thing of note in the study: vegetarians had lower levels of contamination than people who ate meat, which is a pattern that hasn't been observed, to my knowledge, in the US or Canada. Typically, fat-soluble contaminants are found at higher concentrations in animal products than in vegetables, grains, and fruits. But it's unclear whether diet is a significant contributor to the high levels of PBDEs found in North America. Some researchers think that ordinary house dust, containing traces of the compounds that have leached from household consumer goods, is the more likely culprit.

Those Boots are Made for Walking

I found a few interesting oddities in a brand new report (pdf) on commuting from Washington's Office of Financial Management. The survey-based report describes how people in 8 different regions of Washington get to work or school.

Not surprisingly, King County does the best overall for alternative forms of commuting. Less than 78 percent of King County residents get to work (or school) by car, truck, or van. And of those, less than 85 percent drive alone. The Tri-Cities region does the worst: more than 92 percent of commuters drive.

But when it comes to walking, King County places a distant third. Second place goes to "North Puget"--Island, San Juan, Skagit, and Whatcom Counties--where 5.5 percent of residents commute by foot. But easily the state's leader in walking is the region called "East Balance"--the low-population rural counties of eastern Washington (and not including the counties that house Spokane, Tri-Cities, or Yakima). Nearly 1 in 10 commuters gets to work or school on foot in Washington's cowboy country.

My guess is that the relatively high rate of walking in rural eastern Washington is due to the colleges in the region--Central Washington, Eastern Washington, Washington State, and Whitman--where students, faculty, and staff live close enough to campus to walk. If my hunch is right, it would confirm what many urban planners believe: that residential density is a close correlate of alternative transportation. While the vast counties of eastern Washington are generally low density, the academic hubs around colleges and universities tend to be medium- to high-density (and also usually boast a good walker-friendly infrastructure).

Walking also appears to be at least mildly correlated to commute time for Washington residents. "East balance" commuters have the shortest commute time--17 minutes--followed by "North Puget" residents with 20 minutes. King County and "Puget Metro" are tied for the longest commute time--27 minutes--while Clark County commuters in the Portland region are runners up at 25 minutes.

Population Gains & Losses

New official population data released today by Washington's Office of Financial Management. The estimates--and they're just estimates--are for every town, city, and county in Washington and 2005.

Here's a quick look at the top 10 fastest growing cities over the past year...

	City	New residents in 2005
1	Federal Way	2,210
2	Sammamish	2,080
3	Vancouver	1,900
4	Yakima	1,800
5	Maple Valley	1,590
6	Mill Creek	1,560
7	Issaquah	1,550
8	Renton	1,480
9	Kennewick	1,440
10	Covington	1,420

And the top 10 cities for population loss from 2004 to 2005...

	City	Loss of residents in 2005
1	Bremerton	-2940
2	Bellevue	-1000
3	Shoreline	-240
4	Lakewood	-160
5	Tukwila	-130
6	Mercer Island	-120
7	Burien	-90
8	Pe Ell	-61
9	Des Moines	-60
10	Kirkland	-60

Driver's Ed, Hybrid Style

Much has been made of the discrepancy between the rated fuel economy of hybrid cars and the actual results that drivers get on the road. Sure, "actual mileage may vary," but that variance proved particularly wide for hybrids, and was especially aggravating since fuel efficiency was the main reason people bought the hybrids in the first place.

Now comes the Dean of Energy Geeks, Amory Lovins, to offer a solution. According to his half-page piece in the current issue of the Rocky Mountain Institute newsletter (p. 15 of large pdf), hybrid owners need to learn a new style of driving to take advantage of their cars' technology. Lovins calls it "pulse driving," and it has two main components:
- Brisk acceleration, then letting up once you reach cruising speed. "The engine is most efficient at high speed and torque," he writes.
- Gentle braking, anticipating the need to stop. This allows the car to recover as much energy as possible and feed it into the battery. If you try to stop more suddenly, the mechanical brakes kick in, and they dissipate that precious energy as mere heat.

Lovins claims that this strategy has enabled him to eek out 63 mpg with snow tires on his 64-mpg-rated Insight, and will bring in 53 to 55 mpg on the 55-mpg-rated Prius.

Not having a Prius, I can't test-drive this advice, but I'd be curious how it squares with the observations of all you hybrid drivers out there.

Sea Food, See Food Travel

Globalization in action: some locally-caught seafood is now being shipped to China for processing, and then back to the Northwest for sale. This saves on labor costs -- labor is a fifth to a tenth as costly in China as it is here -- but massively increases the amount of energy consumed.

For the most part, I prefer to buy food that's grown or caught locally. But sending locally-caught seafood on an 8,000 mile journey in search of cheap labor definitely strains the definition of "local".

But as long as international markets remain open, transportation remains cheap, and disparities in international labor costs remain wide, we're likely to see more and more of this sort of thing. Which means, unfortunately, that green-minded consumers may have to remain vigilant not just about where their food is grown, but also where it's processed.

No Silver Bullets

Here's yet another reminder that we can't rely on technology alone to save fuel. According to The New York Times, the next generation of gas-electric hybrid vehicles is being designed mostly to boost performance, rather than to boost efficiency. To wit:

The 2005 Honda Accord hybrid gets about the same miles per gallon as the basic four-cylinder model, according to a review by Consumer Reports, a car-buyer's guide, and it saves only about two miles a gallon compared with the V-6 model on which it is based. Thanks to the hybrid technology, though, it accelerates better.

Not to pooh-pooh a 2 mile per gallon boost, but does such a small mpg gain really warrant the federal tax subsidy that's currently doled out to hybrids in the US? Of course, the hybrid tax breaks are scheduled for phase-out in 2006. But they've been extended so many times now that I'm wondering if they'll become permanent.

This phenomenon -- using technological innovation to boost performance rather than efficiency -- is really just a continuation of a long-standing trend. Per person energy use in the Pacific Northwest has remained flat for decades, as each improvement in energy efficiency has been accompanied by an equal and opposite increase in our appetites. Still, it's good to get a reminder of exactly what the consumer dynamic is here; said one buyer of a hybrid Accord, "I wasn't prepared to give up anything to 'go green' - not performance, amenities, or space." And that attitude is shared, no doubt, by most of the car buying public. Which serves as a reminder that nobody should be sanguine that technological innovation, by itself, will have much of a dent on our fuel consumption.

Survive Locally

This would make a great reality TV show: As chronicled in online magazine the Tyee, a couple in British Columbia decides that for one year they will only eat food that is grown or raised within a 100-mile radius of where they live--with a few exceptions.

Why? The short answer is "fossil fuels bad." The average American (and probably Canadian) meal, they point out, uses 17 times more petroleum products than an entirely local meal. And:

Let's translate that into the ecological footprint model devised by Dr. William Rees of UBC which measures how many planets'-worth of resources would be needed if everyone did the same. If you had an average North American lifestyle in every other way, from driving habits to the size of your house, by switching to a local diet you would save almost an entire planet's worth of resources (though you'd still be gobbling up seven earths).

And how hard could it be to eat within 100 miles? After all, they live in an area rich in fertile farmland and seas. They imagined they would eat seasonally, their table heavy with the best produce, fish, and free-range meat that British Columbia has to offer, even while their neighbors were chomping on cardboard tomatoes flown in from Mexico and California.

It turns out it’s both difficult and expensive. Local grains don’t exist, except for a few heritage grains. Yes, there are local free-range cows and chickens, but the animals are raised on non-local feed. In summer, BC's abundant farmer's markets serve them well, but many of the supermarkets still sell much shipped produce, except for, say, local organic salad mix at $17.99 a pound. Summer, of course, only lasts so long.

And here’s the kicker: Vegetarianism doesn’t work well because soy isn’t grown locally. So they’re forced to ask this question: “Does vegetarianism fit into a local, sustainable diet?” And the answer isn’t clear at all. (Part II--"Wanted: A Perfectly Local Chicken"--covers this tricky issue.)

Their few exceptions--and funny moments, such as an attempt to make strawberry preserves with honey--begin adding up. Their butts also begin to shrink. (Add a diet book to the reality TV show .)

Their experiment points (again) to this fact: Eating is complicated for thoughtful people who believe that everyday actions such as buying food have a heck of an impact on the world. On the other hand, just the fact that they're attempting the feat, and that they have an attentive audience, bodes well for efforts to limit our impacts.

I happened to pick up a July 2005 copy of Gourmet magazine this week, and noticed that writer Bill McKibben was trying a similar experiment in the Vermont/Lake Champlain area. Interestingly, his take was more positive than the BC couple's. Does that mean that  Vermont is ahead of BC in small-scale food production?

Sunny Share

Some more interesting vehicle news, this time on car sharing companies, which according to The New York Times are catching on a bit in Europe:

Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles...The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer.

Now, 30 to 45 percent is a pretty sizeable decline in driving. But it shouldn't come as much of a surprise; as any economist would predict, converting a fixed cost (e.g., the cost of buying the car) to a variable cost (e.g., the cost of renting a shared car, which for Seattle Flexcars costs up to $9 per hour) makes people far more selective about how much they drive. And that probably saves car-sharers money overall: yes, they pay more for each trip, but they make fewer trips, and also avoid much of the expense of purchasing and maintaining a car for personal use.

A few other good things about car sharing. If the Times' figures for Europe are relevant to the US -- i.e., each shared car really replaces 4-10 personal cars -- then car sharing can reduce toxic emissions associated with car manufacturing anywhere from 75% to 90%. And that's a lot of toxics avoided: for typical cars, about 60% of the life-cycle toxics emissions from cars comes from making them, rather than driving them.

Also, since a typical shared car is driven more than a personal car, it makes more sense for companies like Flexcar to invest in super-efficient vehicles. For a car driven 5,000 miles a year, it may be hard to financially justify paying the extra money for a hybrid system; but for a car driven 20,000 miles a year, the finances pencil out a lot easier.

Which means that, between efficiency gains and reductions in driving, someone who is in a position to ditch a 20 mpg personal car for a 50 mpg shared hybrid Prius or Civic could reduce their personal gasoline consumption by, oh, about 75 percent. And they'd save money to boot. Quite a deal, no matter how you look at it.

Smart Idea

Ok, so this isn't exactly a trend, and it has little bearing (yet) on the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. But I thought I'd point it out anyway: Smart cars -- the product of a joint venture between Mercedes-Benz and Swiss watchmaker Swatch -- are now available for sale in the US. Just two have been sold so far, but there are plans for more.

They had to do a little tweaking to the design -- including adding airbags -- to make sales legal in the US. But the mini-cars get 50-60 miles per gallon, and I'm told that in Vancouver, BC -- where the Smart has already been available for a while -- it's legal to park them perpendicular to the curb. They're that tiny.

It's way, way too early to call this sort of thing a trend. But it could be a sign that, with gas prices reaching new and dizzying heights seemingly every week, the appeal of fuel-efficient vehicles is beginning to catch on in the US.

Zero Sum Logging

Here's a clear example of "perverse incentives," a phrase NEW employs to describe counterproductive policies...

The Oregon senate just moved to aggressively increase logging on state forestlands. The senators aren't just cut-and-run profiteers, they want to raise money for the common school fund. In Oregon, as in Washington, revenue from timber harvests on state land is constitutionally reserved for schools and a few other public goods.

The unfortunate result is that limiting cutting means squeezing a portion of, say, the school construction budget. In Oregon, where the state's budget is already spread too thin, schools need all the help they can get. But the state forests are not in particularly good shape either. In fact, state forestry officials worry that ratcheting up cutting will erode the ecological function of forests, perhaps jeopardizing coastal salmon streams in the case of the Elliott State Forest.

Needless to say, it's silly to pit two of the state's most important resources--education and natural heritage--against one another in a zero sum game. Unfortunately, the only available way out of the dilemma isn't exactly easy: it would require changing the state's constitution.

Future Passed? Notes From Buckley, Washington

Editor's Note: Dan Staley, a frequent commenter on the Scorecard blog, will contribute an occasional column on land use and quality of life from Buckley, Washington, a small town near Mt. Rainier where Dan serves as planning director. This is his first post.

I bicycle a short 5-8 miles to work in Buckley every day, taking different routes through a beautiful pastoral landscape that is full of little surprises. For the past two weeks, I’ve been taking the same route to work and home, in order to see a small herd of elk hanging out on the north side of the White River. These elk are important indicators of Buckley’s future, and I want to be sure I get to know them--at least a little--as I help set the pattern for Buckley’s growth.

I’m the new planning director for Buckley, located in eastern Pierce County, Washington. Buckley’s current population is about 4500 people, all nestled in between the White River and the northern foothills of Mt. Rainier. Buckley also has the last flat land before you head up into the Cascades--and that is the crux of the future challenges we face, being within commutable distance of Seattle and Tacoma and their high-paying jobs.

The citizens of Buckley--like many in the Northwest--are unequivocal in their wish to maintain their quality of life. Folks moved out here to be under Mt. Rainier and to have open space all around--including space in their yards. However, land speculation is rampant and many here wonder what this means for the future of Buckley, as we expect to grow by about 3500 people-–45 percent--in the next 10-15 years. Eric recently wrote about salmon being a canary in a coal mine, and Buckley may serve that same function for many cities on the rural fringe.

So. How do we maintain such a quality of life in the face of land speculation and impending development, while planning for the goals of the Growth Management Act? Do we approach this challenge like so many other towns in Washington are facing, even though we are unlike many of these towns? Do we adopt New Urbanism, even though it doesn’t have a formal theory (it is more like art and science) and we're an exurb? How much do we affect the real estate market to meet Buckley’s goals?

All planners manipulate markets when they plan--zoning arose because cities have externalities ("nuisances"). I have to justify my intervention in the real estate market to meet GMA guidelines, and in my mind, I’m justifying it by making Buckley resilient--as in how an ecosystem is resilient. I avoid concepts like "resilient" or "sprawl" with my neighbors, however, so I explain how it benefits them as individuals: their kids can buy a house here, there are preferred designs, we are making walkable neighborhoods. I also cannot use "sprawl" or "resilient" with decision-makers, so I explain how it benefits the elected’s constituents: efficient services, maintained or improved quality of life, strong businesses.

Oh, and the elk will still be around, too.

Buckley is like a little ecosystem out here, and I want to keep it that way. Please pass along your thoughts on these issues, especially regarding resilience or how you are making your place work.

What Matters?

On our online forum about the fundamentals of sustainability that should guide Northwest Environment Watch's work, we proposed the principle measure what matters.

We rather like the phrase. We first used it as the subtitle to our book This Place on Earth 2002, Measuring What Matters and have referred to it again and again ever since. Our logic: you need to measure what matters because what gets measured gets fixed.

But, as some thoughtful readers have pointed out, this only begs the question of what matters. Our answer: "the health and well-being of our families, the strength of our communities, and the integrity of our natural heritage."

What do you think? What matters to you? Do you think measuring what matters ought to be one of our key principles?

Head on over to our other blog and leave your comments there!

Free Parking: Nun Such Thing

So what, exactly, do nuns drive? 

Don’t search for the punchline; it’s an important question raised by Governing Magazine’s Alan Ehrenhalt in his recent, useful recap of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking:

How many parking spaces should a convent be legally required to provide? If you immediately answered “zero,” then you probably have some common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn’t be a zoning question.

Shoup condemns zoning laws that require businesses to provide free parking without much regard to type of business and neighborhood. Ehrenhalt notes in his article the appropriately large fuss Shoup makes about a pesky little document published decades ago by the Institute of Transportation Engineers called “Parking Generation,” which zoning officials still frequently use to guide city policy. It recommends that businesses—from convents to taxi stands (!)—maintain enough free parking spaces that “virtually every driver will be able to find one virtually all the time.”

Unfortunately, as Shoup points out, this document is frequently misused because the assessments of free parking only apply to “suburban sites with ample free parking and no public transit” (his emphasis).

In denser areas where people use public transportation, even a little, policies based on “Parking Generation’s” numbers can be irresponsible. As we noted in this op-ed, free parking drives up fuel prices, discourages walking and other transportation, and hides the true costs of driving. 

We’ve had a bit to say in the past about Shoup’s book and free parking. To summarize, reducing or eliminating free parking that businesses are required to provide can:

• Create compact downtowns by using land more efficiently.
• Promote economically and socially vibrant neighborhoods.
• Shift money to civic transportation projects via “in-lieu of” fees businesses in some cities can pay instead of providing free parking.
• Open up more space for housing and make it more cost-efficient for developers to build dense, walkable neighborhoods.

A Sea of Troubles

Rather alarming signs of ecosystem stress on the Northwest's coasts, reported in today's Seattle Times. Temperatures are 2 to 5 degrees higher than normal, probably the result of the lack of "upwelling" that usually occurs in the spring and summer. (Those temperatures are normal readings for an El Nino year, but there's no El Nino this year.) In normal years, cold water from the ocean's depths rises to the surface carrying algae, krill, and other bottom-of-the-food-chain sustenance for small fish that in turn feed salmon and seabirds. This year: nothing.

The result is not pretty:

This spring, scientists reported a record number of dead seabirds washed up on beaches along the Pacific Coast, from central California to British Columbia... "This is somewhere between five and 10 times the highest number of bird deaths we've seen before," said Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries and Sciences at the University of Washington.

Some seabirds, like murres, are breeding very late or giving up. The dearth of food sources may also be partly responsible for the anemic salmon returns this year. But what's causing the problem?

Upwelling is caused by cold winds from the north. But this spring was warm and wet and the winds came from the southwest.

"In 50 years, this has never happened," said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Newport, Ore. "If this continues, we will have a food chain that is basically impoverished from the very lowest levels."

It may be tempting to blame global climate change for the disturbance--and, indeed, some scientists suspect that it is in play here. But ocean cycles and seasonal weather variations are so complex and variable that it is difficult to be certain that the alarming events on the coast are the fault of global warming. (And it is even tougher to say that they result from human-induced global warming.)

It seems to me, we're in a frustrating dilemma. There's little doubt that climate change will have a serious impact on ecosystems, yet we can never say for certain that any particular impact is the result of climate change.

In a similar vein, E magazine and CNN report on scientific research from the UK's Royal Society that carbon-dioxide emissions are not only warming the atmosphere, they are also increasing the acidity of the world's oceans. Greater acidity makes life tough for coral, shellfish, and squid.

"The rising acidity of our oceans is yet another reason for us to be concerned about the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere," said Professor John Raven, chair of the Royal Society working group on ocean acidification. "Failure to [cut emissions] may mean that there is no place in the oceans of the future for many of the species and ecosystems that we know today."

Pay-As-You-Drive in Two Pages

Todd Litman of Victoria Transport Policy Institute has just posted a two-pager on pay-as-you-drive car insurance (PAYD) that does a nice job of briefly summarizing its benefits, such as making insurance more affordable for low-income residents and giving consumers more control over their driving expenses.

It also responds to some of the myths about PAYD, such as that suburban and rural residents would pay more if insurance was priced by the mile. (Not true: Because of how the pricing works, suburban and rural residents would only pay more if they drive more than average among suburban and rural motorists.)

Distance-based vehicle insurance has slowly been making progress in the Northwest; the most recent example is the Vancouver, BC City Council's resolution asking the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) to offer optional PAYD. The resolution has sparked debate in BC about pros and cons of PAYD; Litman's summary should help clarify those.

P.S. - See a summary of recent PAYD developments here.

Man Himself is a Visitor

In recent months, the Bush administration's undoing of roadless area protection--by devolving the authority for them to the states--has generated a renewed burst of concern over the fate of the last unprotected wilderness-quality lands in the US.

Wilderness protection is, at least arguably, no longer center stage for most environmental organizations. Nevertheless, land (and water) protection remains critically important for the continued existence of countless species and, I'd argue, for human sanity. It also has a strong intuitive appeal: you can see the results on a map (here's one of my all-time favorites). Plus there's something deeply satisfying about drawing boundaries around a chunk of the earth, however small, and saying, "there, that's protected for good. Whatever else we do, we won't screw up that piece."

I was reminded again today of the importance of wilderness conservation--and also of the power of good biography--by an excellent article in the Los Angeles Times (free registration req'd) profiling storied conservationist and architect of the federal wilderness act, Stewart Udall. I wish I encountered more good story-telling like this about conservation successes and the people involved with them.

Udall, now 95, is nothing if not a compelling writer. Here's a sample:

We need to preserve places where nature can maintain her own balance, set her own pace. These natural places, completely untouched by the hands, the machines, the tools of man, are absolutely essential as laboratories of life — yardsticks against which to measure our efforts to improve the environment, as well as our dismal successes in destroying it.

It's hard to read Udall and not suspect that something is completely different today.

In fact, in today's Idaho Statesman, a cri de coeur to protect Idaho's roadless areas. Reading the column (it's good) I was reminded that today's arguments for conservation often rely heavily on economics--establishing the market value of ecosystem services and recreation, for instance. By contrast, in Udall's era, the arguments were primarily spiritual and nature-centric.

Has the conservation movement has lost its "soul" and perhaps thereby its gut-level appeal to people? Or were conservationists of Udall's era simply not able to develop economic arguments, and so relied on whatever reasoning they could conjure?

Post-script: By coincidence there's a newly proposed wilderness area in Montana. As the Missoulian reports, the wilderness is the longtime dream of a Montana rancher and geologist, Winton Wedeymeyer. Another good chance for biography, I suspect.

Three Years After The Morning After

The headline is pretty self-explanatory: 'Morning-after' Pill Doesn't Increase Unsafe Sex. (Well, at least it didn't in Britain, where the study was done.) A pdf of the actual article from the British Medical Journal is here.

Note that Washington State was the first state in the US to allow pharmacists to dispense emergency contraceptives without a doctor's prescription, serving as a model for California, Alaska, New Mexico and Hawaii, as well as for British Columbia. See more here.

Cost Plus

Health care has become such an expensive endeavor -- consuming roughly an eighth of all the money our economy generates -- that even small improvements in health can save a lot of money. A recent study, mentioned here in the Seattle P-I, looks just at the health costs -- care for asthma, cancer, lead pollution, and the like -- resulting from exposure to manufactured chemicals. And according to Dr. Kate Davies, the study's author, the costs are pretty sizeable:

Davies said the environmental health costs associated with children's conditions is roughly .7 percent of the state gross national product, while environmental health costs for adults equates to 1 percent of the local annual GNP.

Which means that the health costs of a polluted environment rack up to about, oh, $4 billion a year or so in Washington State alone, at least by this estimate.

I'm not sure how much sway cost-benefit analyses should hold over environmental policy. Not only does the classic cost-benefit framework tend to sidestep fairness (why should I pay if someone else benefits?), but perhaps more importantly, cost-benefit analyses can overvalue short-term & concrete costs and benefits, while undervaluing the long-term and nebulous ones. Still, cost-benefit analysis can be an important tool if used wisely. And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that if lead, for example, had been required to pass through a rigorous cost-benefit analysis before it was added to paint and gasoline, there's no way we'd still be paying the costs today.

Salmon Saviors

I'm a little late on this, but Shared Strategy's new salmon recovery plan for Puget Sound deserves a bit more attention. Written by some of the heaviest hitters on the local conservation scene, including Bill Ruckelshaus and Billy Frank Jr., the plan is a carefully crafted and astonishingly inclusive design to restore Puget Sound Chinook salmon to sustainable and abundant levels. One thing I particularly like about the plan is that it takes a genuinely multifaceted approach to salmon recovery. It's not just one or two politically viable prescriptions, but a sincere look at the rather daunting obstacles facing salmon in a heavily populated basin that is projected to add 1.4 million people by 2030.

Also, capitalizing on the plan's momentum Governor Gregoire called for more muscular strategies to clean up Puget Sound.

They're Kidding, Right?

From The Oregonian comes an article decrying the "baby bust" in downtown Portland, OR, and contrasting it with the baby boom in Vancouver, BC.

Now, as much as I like a good pun in a headline (and 'No Kids on The Block' counts, in my book) I found the article both annoyingly alarmist and factually misleading.

First, the article seems to suggest that the low number of kids in Portland's trendy Pearl District is some sort of crisis:

The numbers are startling. During the past 10 years Portland has built about 6,400 units of new housing in the Pearl District. But school district demographers say only 25 school-age children live there, and fewer than 20 babies are expected a year.

Now, to be sure, that's not a lot of kids. But what does it matter, really, if there are a few neighborhoods in a huge metropolis that appeal more to the childless -- empty nesters, young singles and couples, and people who choose to remain childless -- than to families with kids? Does that somehow prove that the Pearl District is a bad neighborhood? Clearly, the people who flocked to live in the Pearl District didn't think so.

And then, there's the comparison with downtown Vancouver, BC, which does have a lot more kids than downtown Portland. But from what I can see, the Vancouver central city has more kids largely because it has more people, period: lots of new residents--including some with kids, or inclined to have them--have moved into a revitalized and booming downtown. But residents of downtown Vancouver are still a very low-fertility bunch. As the graph to the right shows, lifetime fertility rates in downtown Vancouver have been stuck at about 0.6 children per woman (look down the linked page for "City Centre") since 1990. By comparison, the so-called "replacement rate" -- the level which, if maintained over the long term, leads to a stable population -- is 2.1 children per woman, more than 3 times as high as the rate in downtown Vancouver. Notably, fertility rates in downtown Vancouver haven't declined as they have in the rest of the province, but the lack of a baby bust isn't the same thing as a baby boom.

The real point of the article, I guess, is that downtown Vancouver offers some good lessons in how to create dense downtown neighborhoods that work for both kids and their parents -- lessons that Portland could take to heart. That's fair enough. But still, given that Portland's downtown renaissance is literally decades behind Vancouver BC's, it seems awfully premature to declare childlessness in the Pearl District to be a sign of some sort of urban malaise.

I've Got a (Wildlife) Bridge To Sell You

Here's a bad idea. The state wants to widen Interstate-90 over Snoqualmie Pass. While they're at it, they're considering building a series of passageways for animals--maybe as many as 14--that would help wildlife move safely across the expanded freeway. It will cost $113 million.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to design our cities and roads to accommodate the natural systems around us. Indeed, I think we have a moral responsibility to do so. But I'm rather unconvinced that a) this project will do much to help the state's wildlife; and b) it's the best use for wildlife of $113 million.

I admit that the basic idea is simple and appealing. By building overpasses with native plantings and widening existing underpasses, we can help animals move safely from north to south across the interstate. It's worked in Florida and Banff National Park in Canada. In fact, it already works in places where I-90 is elevated as it traverses the Cascade Mountains. So far, green groups seem to love the idea. So why do I think the project is so stupid?

1. I don't want the freeway widened. Already, people are living in Roslyn and Cle Elum (and even farther east) are commuting to jobs in the Puget Sound region. A new resort in the area, Suncadia, is leading the next wave of development there. Widening the freeway will make it easier for people to live in the hinterlands, on the sunny side of the mountains, and drive 70 miles to work. This has at least two serious consequences: 1) It will mean more carbon emissions and hence more global warming, which may have profound consequences for the region's wildlife, especially salmon; and 2) By encouraging development in the eastern Cascade foothills, it will actually substantially reduce wildlife habitat. (Don't underestimate the significance of this last point: Cle Elum is primed to become a bedroom community, the resultant low-density sprawl could put a serious dent in critical wildlife habitat. Freeway-widening like this can be the Trojan Horse that will turn Seattle into LA-north.)
2. The money could be better spent elsewhere. The Ellsworth Creek Watershed in coastal southwest Washington preserved 5,000 acres of lowland old-growth forest and salmon streams, along with cut-over forest. It cost $20 million (about $4,000/acre) and was heralded as one of the region's biggest conservation achievements of the decade. There's terrific potential for restoration there, including reforestation, which will soak up carbon out of the atmosphere rather than add more to it. It also shelters the species that need it most, such as salmon and spotted owls. For the price of the I-90 passages, we could replicate the Ellsworth success nearly 6 times! (In fairness, the money for the passages comes from federal highway funding and likely wouldn't be available to alternative forms of conservation. That's a failure of the federal funding constraints that should be changed. Conservationists should lobby for more flexible mitigation money for freeway expansion, not solely for passages.)
3. The passages will not help the most critically endangered species. Passage advocates trumpet the corridors' usefulness to black bear, elk, mule deer, and a few others. But it's hard to see what all the excitement is about. Washington has probably the largest black bear population of any state in the nation, except Alaska. Deer are, if anything, overpopulating Washington. Even elk fare well in the Evergreen State: there are ten herds, with thousands of animals dispersed widely around the state. Not that we shouldn't protect these species--we  should--but it seems more important that we focus on struggling keystone species like salmon. Or maybe on species that are vanishing from the state, such as the Selkirk caribou herd or sage-grouse.

The sad fact is, wildlife habitat in the central Cascades is severed by I-90 almost as effectively as the Columbia River segregates Oregon from Washington. It would be nice if our high-speed freeways didn't have an impact on wildlife. But they do. And there's no fix for the fundamental problem that doesn't cost so much money that it would be better spent--for wildlife--elsewhere.

In my more cynical moments, I fear that this project is an example of the worst kind of greenwashing. Road-builders won approval from environmentalists, their usual nemesis, by sugar-coating the freeway project with an expensive patina, the wildlife passages. But the pernicious consequences of freeway-widening--accelerated habitat loss, climate change, lost conservation opportunities--pose a far more serious threat to wildlife.

Washington is fortunate to have a remarkable share of its montane ecosystems intact. The state is home to millions of acres of wilderness and roadless areas in mountainous areas. On the other hand, we're desperately short of protected areas in sagebrush country, in Puget Sound lowlands, along coastlines, and in low-elevation forests. It's annoying that the big wilderness areas of the northern Cascades are divided from those in the Mount Rainier-region, but no species' survival depends on migrating between those areas. At the same time, many species in other ecosystems in Washington are speeding straight toward extinction. Our conservation priorities ought to lie with them. 

A City We Can Afford?

I have to admit that I'm a little confused by this guest op-ed in the Seattle P-I criticising Seattle's proposed high-rise development for exacerbating low-income housing problems.  The crux of the argument:

The past 30 years have seen the greatest development boom in our city's history since the turn of the 20th century. During that same period, however, we have seen an explosion in the numbers of homeless people and of working households living on the economic margins that are paying 50 percent and 60 percent of their meager incomes for housing. We have also seen a growing movement of lower-income racial minorities out of the city into south King County in search of affordable housing.

No amount of increased density is going to answer the question of where these people -- many of whom perform essential clerical, service and retail tasks -- are going to live, especially when increased density comes at the expense of the existing supply of affordable -- mostly rental -- housing. With the combined effects of the high cost of new construction, developers' profits, demand for higher-end housing and the evaporation of government subsidies for low-income housing, changing the city's zoning laws to allow greater density is more likely to hurt than help our affordable housing supply.

I hate to quibble with this, since I share some of the author's concerns -- I'm very interested in strategies for providing affordable housing for those at the bottom end of the income scale.  But I am genuinely baffled about a couple of the author's points.

First, there's this:  I have no idea what he means when he says that we're on the tail of the biggest development boom of the last 100 years.  According to the US Census, Seattle's population in 2000 finally surpassed the level it reached in 1960.  From 1960 through 1980, the city's population declined (largely due to declining household size).  From 1980 through 2000 it rose, and it's increased a bit since 2000 as well.  So the last 30 years saw Seattle's population grow in the range of, oh, 70,000 people.  But compared with any 30 year period from 1900 through 1975, that growth rate was simply anemic, both in absolute and percentage terms.

So unless the author has some specific definition of "development boom" -- perhaps related to the big downtown office high-rises -- no, the past 30 years have decidedly not seen the "greatest development boom in [the] city's history since the turn of the 20th century."  Not by a long shot.

Second, and more generally, I'm a little confused about the hostility towards density per se as undermining housing affordability.  I mean, if there hadn't been a condo boom in Belltown, or new low-rise development in neighborhood centers, would real estate be more affordable for the poor than it is now? It's hard to see how: housing would be scarcer, meaning that people with high incomes would be competing for a more limited pool of available housing. I don't know if anyone's looked at this in any depth, but it seems like the latter scenario -- no new development and tighter housing markets -- could be worse for people who rely on low-income or subsidized housing.

In fact, the only no-housing-growth scenario that would seem to maintain or increase the supply of low-income housing in the city center would be one of urban decay -- with jobs and high-income folks fleeing the center city to the suburbs and urban fringe.  (Think, e.g., the hollowed-out urban cores of some rust belt cities.)  Is that kind of concentrated poverty really better for the poor? I think the experience of the last few decades suggests not.

Now, I think it's both fine and fair to criticize Seattle's plans for new high-for not doing enough to address the problems of low-income housing. I think that providing low-income housing is a laudable goal, and expanding the supply of housing that's affordable to low income folks (or, better yet, improving their incomes) should be a part of a larger strategy to address problems of poverty and of sharpening income disparities.

But I'd hate to have someone read an article titled "Density won't make housing affordable" come away with the impression that the only real alternative to increased density -- ie., rampant low-density development at the urban fringe -- will.

Hail, Britannia

First, London started charging cars a fee to enter the city center -- a move widely credited with easing congestion and making it easier to get around in the crowded downtown. Now, the British government is considering instituting congestion pricing for the entire nation. Says this BBC article:

The London scheme brought in two years ago is reckoned a success in reducing traffic congestion, despite the fears voiced in advance. The daily charge for driving in the central zone is on Monday nearly doubling to £8 ($14), and a big westward extension is being considered.

Last month, the British Transport Secretary, Alastair Darling, suggested something altogether more ambitious: a national system covering the whole country.

Drivers would be charged a varying rate per mile, depending on what kind of road they took. Cars would be fitted with a "black box" to record their movements, probably linked to global positioning satellites (GPS).

Mr Darling described it as "a radically different approach", something that no other country in the world had done.

In some ways, this kind of approach may be expensive. Installing GPS "black boxes," managing the tolling system, ensuring privacy, and the like will probably cost billions for a nation the size of Britain.

On the other hand, greater Seattle alone is facing transportation infrastructure costs -- replacing (or scuttling) the Viaduct, repaving I-5, rebuilding state route 520, expanding I-405 and SR-167, financing the monorail & light rail -- far exceeding $10 billion in current dollars, much of which will be paid through higher gas taxes. I'd wager that managing congestion with a pricing scheme would be far, far cheaper than building all of that new capacity.

A New Chapter in an Old History

This summer marks the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's arrival in the Pacific Northwest. The expedition is storied, but almost exclusively by white historians. Enter a new book with a new perspective on the expedition and its consequences for the native peoples they encountered, The Salish People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Here's a portion of the book description:

For the first time, a Native American community offers an in-depth examination of the events and historical significance of their encounter with the Lewis and Clark expedition... What makes The Salish People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition a startling departure from previous accounts of the Lewis and Clark expedition is how it depicts the arrival of non-Indians—not as the beginning of history, but as another chapter in a long tribal history. Much of this book focuses on the ancient cultural landscape and history that had already shaped the region for millennia before the arrival of Lewis and Clark. 

In the same vein, the Bellingham Weekly has an excellent article by one "Alan Durning" on the sesquicentennial of the Washington treaties of 1855. An earlier version of his article appeared in this blog.

Dust Up

For years now, scientists have known that US and Canadian residents have elevated levels of PBDEs -- a flame retardant known to impair development in lab animals -- in their bodies, compared with European and Asian counterparts. (See, for example, our own study of PBDEs in northwesterners.)

The problem is that nobody's been sure of how the compounds get into us. Some speculated that food was the main exposure route -- and pointed to studies that found the compounds in common foods taken from grocery store shelves. Others suspected that house dust was the real culprit -- and that people were inhaling dust containing traces of PBDEs that had been sloughed off from degrading furniture foams or other consumer items.

Now, one research team claims to have an answer to the food v. dust controversy. Their conclusion: most of the PBDEs in people's bodies comes from house dust.

As far as I can tell, this is based on a computer model; but the model is based on actual measurements of PBDEs both in foods and house dust.

Still, it's probably too soon to call this definitive. But to me, it certainly suggests that -- in addition to banning the compounds outright -- there ought to be more efforts directed at getting PBDE-laden products out of people's homes.

A Whale of a Baby Boom

Researchers have confirmed three new orca calves, in a promising sign for the southern resident orcas, the killer whales that haunt the seas of Washington and British Columbia. At least one of the calves is a newborn--no more than a few days old. That makes five new orcas in 2005, and seven since last October, one of the biggest population increases since the whales have been closely monitored. The Kitsap Sun reports.

Of special importance, two of the new calves were born to the L-pod, the largest of the three southern resident pods. Population losses in the L-pod account for the entirety of the orca's population drop from recent highs in 1995 to the present, but it looks like L is starting to regain lost ground.

 

There are currently 90 orcas in the southern residents (not counting Luna, the young whale stranded in BC), though official population counts are not taken until the end of the calendar year. The first months are the toughest for newborn whales, so it remains to be seen if all 5 new orcas will survive. But even a population increase of 1 would bring them to their highest number since 1998.

It's also important to remember that while the new baby boom is a welcome development, the southern resident populations are severely depressed. Perhaps 3 times as many resident orcas prowled Puget Sound and the Georgia Basin before Europeans arrived in the Northwest. Their fate is closely linked to our impacts on the region.    

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