Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

One Mile from Home

(Editor's note: See the two other posts in the walkability series, "Carless in Seattle" and "Dead Man Walking.")

Last week, I displayed the wreckage of our 1986 stationwagon; this week, its replacement: our 1996 Burley stroller/bike trailer. (It’s Cascadia-made in Eugene, Oregon.)

The kids have long-since outgrown the thing. But since we decided to experiment in car-less living, we’ve resurrected it to haul groceries, library books, and (recently) a broken vacuum cleaner.

The Burley’s range is only as far as you want to push it. And for my family, that limit seems to be about one mile. Less than a mile is a comfortable walk; more is a burden. (To extend the range, we can fit the Burley to a bicycle—on which, more another day.)

A one-mile perimeter, therefore, defines this car-less family’s pedestrian travel zone—call it our “walkshed.” Fortunately, because we chose to live in a compact community, our walkshed turns out to be well stocked.

We can stroll to scores of shops and services—248 to be precise. I know because I counted. You can, too, in less than 60 seconds. I’ll tell you how in a moment.

Among the establishments in our domain are a bowling alley, a produce stand, a movie theater, and a hardware store, plus public institutions such as our post office, swimming pool, farmers’ market, and skate park (new and very cool!).

We’ve got pairs of independent booksellers, thrift stores (we know them well), and bakeries (ditto). Three pharmacies, three yoga studios, and three video stores offer us medication, meditation, and mesmerization, respectively. Five grocers and six dry cleaners compete for our appetites and our wrinkles. Nine barbers eye our locks. Dozens of specialty shops hawk their curiosities in the range of our Burley: one sells only flags, another only gifts from Norway, a third only old magazines.

True coffee houses number six, only one of them a Starbucks (which, because it's so low, may be the most surprising number in this tally). Restaurants? We’re provisioned with 54! (And there are 151 within two miles: we’ll walk farther for great eating.)

Two neighborhood ice creameries are counteracted by an astonishing 42 dentists (none of them covered by our insurance, sadly). Two local smoke shops are outnumbered by an even more astounding 74 doctors (again, not covered by our insurance). And then there’s our one neighborhood orthodontist: he has straightened or is straightening all three of our kids’ teeth, for which we've paid him enough to buy three used Volvos or most of a new Prius.

I should perhaps note that, despite these large counts, we do not live downtown. Far from it—-in fact, five miles from it. Our neighborhood of Ballard is a typical streetcar community developed largely in the 1920s and replicated in every North American city of similar age.

I should also probably note that our neighborhood is definitely not Mayberry. It's got 44 auto shops, 10 taverns, and a liquor store. Oh, plus two sex-toy shops and two strip clubs. (Or so the signs say -- I’ve never been inside. I swear.)

All of these counts I did in my head or using the yellow pages, and you can do the same for your home if you live in the United States. (4/10 Update: This tool is really only reliable in states where Qwest offers local phone service. Elsewhere, the count is incomplete. Here's a map of their area. Tip of the hat to Joseph W., in comments, for this catch.)

Here’s how:

To get a fairly complete count of businesses (in Qwest's 14 states), go to this Qwest online phone directory, select the business listings, type “all” in the category field, click “near a street address,” type in your address, and choose “1 mile.” (Sorry, Canadians, I have yet to find a .ca that performs this trick.) If you’re lucky and the database gods are smiling on you (the site is temperamental), Qwest will promptly reveal how many businesses there are within a one-mile walk of your front door. Call this your Walkshed Index, your Burley Score.

Ours, as I said, is 248. There are two hundred and forty eight places where my family can do business within a mile of home, not counting public facilities. That number is not remarkably high: the walkshed index at my downtown office address is 6,623. Nor is it remarkably low: one suburban family I know has a score of 0. But it means that living car-free is more viable for us than it would be for many families.

What’s the Burley Score where you live?

P.S. More than one quarter of car trips in the United States are shorter than one mile, as we noted in Seven Wonders. One quarter!

P.P.S. Realtors provide detailed information to prospective home buyers on schools and resale values. They could as easily report the Walkshed Index-—high scores translate into thousands of dollars of potential savings in fuel and car payments.

P.P.P.S. According to one map-making friend, creating walkshed maps and yellow pages would be a relatively simple Google Maps “Mash Up.” Anyone know of such a tool? Anyone volunteer to do this project? I’d love to have a detailed map stowed in the “glove box” of our Burley of all 248 businesses in my home zone. (I can get close with the Qwest online directory, plus the cool mapping tools at Map24, Google Local, and Windows Live Local. But these tools are designed for car drivers, not walkers.) Ideally, I would want a walking map or PDA application that shows me the whereabouts of public restrooms, water fountains, bike racks, curb cuts, bus stops, and benches. Besides, the Qwest tool is clunky and imprecise. (My total score of 248 is inexplicably less than the sum of all the categories of establishments listed above!)

UPDATE: A reader points out (in comments) that Canada411.ca will calculate a metric version of the Burley Score. Leave "category" blank, choose 1 or 2 kilometers, enter your address, and you're set. I calculated a 2-kilometer Walkshed Index of almost 7,000 for  an address in Vancouver's West End.

Seattle's Growing Up

Solid article in the Seattle Times today on the rising building height limits in downtown Seattle.

The article even includes a brief historical note on the 1989 voter-approved height cap following the construction of the super-tall and hideous Columbia Center Columbia Seafirst Center Bank of America Tower BankAmerica Tower Columbia Tower. Seattle's thinking on downtown density has changed quite a bit since then. Instead of constricting development, most are enthusiastic about new development in the city's core--development that is revivifying once-dormant neighborhoods.

Seattleites have change their minds partly because of the dawning realization that downtown density is good environmental policy. It's a superbly efficient use of land (among many other environmental benefits). Over the last two decades, residents watched sprawl devour the Cascade foothills and lowland farms and realized that the salvation for natural spaces was partly in the city.

The article does include once curious bit:

There's scant evidence, however, that the changes would curb sprawl over the next 20 years by pulling more people downtown. Under current or proposed zoning, city studies project about 10,000 new households downtown and 29,000 new jobs in that period. [Emphasis mine.]

That's a non-trivial number of households and jobs, but it's odd--at the least--that city growth projections are the same with or without the height increase.

What's going on here? Are the projections mistaken? Or is the height zoning change just a matter of aesthetics, not a substantive policy to increase downtown density?

Searching for Salmon in the Wrong Places

  OK, let’s consider just how absurd this predicament is. People are terrestrial creatures. We like to eat salmon, which spend most of their lives in the ocean. Fortunately, salmon have a habit -- nay, an instinct -- of returning to fresh water to spawn. They do this every year. Used to be, people would wait for them in rivers and estuaries, and catch them there, close to home.

But then -- perhaps to jump the queue and get ahead of the crowd unfurling its nets in rivers and bays -- some fishermen started to troll for salmon in the offshore waters. The salmon still had every intention of swimming into our rivers where they are easier to catch. But instead, trollers began baiting their gear and enticing salmon to take their hooks at sea.

As long as salmon runs are abundant, this impatient practice can be written off as one of those idiosyncrasies of our species, yet another method we have devised to needlessly burn diesel fuel. "Technology is needed not to beat the fish, but to beat other fishermen," wrote Richard Manning in Salmon Nation. "The fish would still come back... if we would wait."

But when certain stocks of salmon start to weaken, this reliance on ocean trolling shows its weakness as well. This week, the Pacific Fishery Management Council is weighing its options in the face of a predicted low run of Klamath River chinook. Biologists estimate that 29,000 salmon would make it to the mouth of the Klamath in the absence of any fishing -- already well below the 35,000 minimum that fisheries managers have set as an annual goal to reach the spawning grounds.

At sea, those scarce Klamath-bound fish mingle with other chinook headed for rivers with more abundant runs -- such as the Sacramento, where runs have rebuilt over the last decade. Regulators fear that trollers would hook Klamath fish among their catch, a chinook that would be indistinguishable on deck from a fish headed for the Sacramento, Eel, or Rogue river.

So the council is entertaining a proposal to nix this year’s salmon fishing season along 700 miles of coastline, from Point Sur, near Monterey, California, north into Oregon. Their dilemma has set off a round of finger-pointing, with trollers blaming water diversions from the Klamath for the salmon’s woes on that river, and hence for the possible closure of the fishery. No doubt, in the long term, the water regime on the Klamath needs to change.

But in the meantime, maybe we should change how we fish. Ocean trolling is inherently indiscriminate. As long as some salmon populations are less robust than others, either some stocks will be overfished or many will go under-caught. Instead, if fishing boats sought salmon at the mouths of the rivers they’re returning to, there’d be a much smaller risk of catching a fish from any other run. In California, commercial fishing inside the Golden Gate, at the mouth of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River, has been illegal since 1957. The present situation might offer a reason to move forward by turning back the clock half a century.

To Save a Species, Shoot Here

From the wilderness of British Columbia comes an innovative conservation tactic about which I am strongly... ambivalent. Raincoast Conservation Foundation is acquiring the guide-outfitting hunting rights to five areas along the central BC coast, a remote area of vast wilderness that is home to the rare "spirit bear," among other species. The angle here is probably obvious: Raincoast bought the rights in order to put a stop to hunting.

Raincoast and other conservation groups have a strong interest--one that I share--in protecting biodiversity and relatively pristine wild places. So what's my beef? It's a two-parter.

First, I'm not sure that hunting is bad for the species being hunted. Second, I'm not sure the price--Can$1.35 million plus annual licensing fees--is the best conservation use of the money.

Now on one level, hunting is obviously bad for a species because it involves, well, killing it. But the formula isn't really so simple. For at least two reasons, hunting can actually be beneficial. First, hunters often form powerful constituencies supporting conservation. Ducks Unlimited, a powerful voice for wetlands protection, is probably the best-known example, but it's worth remembering that National Wildlife Federation also first took root in the hook and bullet crowd. Just as hikers often become advocates for trails, hunters and fishermen often become advocates for protecting their recreation. In the Northwest, for instance, you can find plenty of farmers who don't care much for salmon regulations, but you can't find a single steelhead fisherman who doesn't get animated about water quality.

Second, as globe-trotting naturalist David Quammen argues in his recent book Monster of God, hunting can actually be the lifeline that rescues species from the brink of oblivion. In the Russian far east, India, Australia, and Romania, Quammen finds compelling evidence that hunting of the most objectionable sort--big game trophy hunting of endangered species by well-heeled foreigners--can spell the difference between life and death.

The reason is depressingly venal: a lot of money gets spent to bag a saltwater croc or a Siberian tiger. When done right, some of the money gets ploughed back into habitat conservation. But by far the biggest benefit, according to Quammen, is that locals see a direct, tangible (read: cash money) benefit  for conserving that species. And without local protection imperiled species are all too often victimized by poaching or habitat destruction. To localize Quammen's reasoning, the perpetual specter of logging in coastal BC is a far more pernicious threat than hunting.

So hunting, which creates a conservation constituency and provides a financial incentive, is not unequivocally bad for biodiversity. Indeed, I suspect that on balance it's actually a boon. But hunting also doesn't sit well with many environmentalists who are, for perfectly legitimate reasons, ethically opposed to gratuitously killing animals. And I must admit, I have a hard time keeping my blood pressure down when I think about certain kinds of hunting, especially of big predators like grizzlies, cougars, and wolves. When I think that those emblems of wildness may wind up as adornments of faux masculinity in a Texas drawing room, I get positively pissed off. But still, that doesn't mean hunting is a bad deal for biodiversity.

Raincoast and other conservation groups argue that ecotourism can supplant hunting. Ecotourism, they argue, can infuse cash into the region and create a constituency just as hunting is alleged to do. Perhaps it can. Indeed, recent studies in the US show that Americans spend more money watching wildlife than fishing or hunting for it. But ecotourism, despite its green appellation, can also carry tremendous environmental consequences--everything from carbon emitted by many people traveling to remote locations to habitat-destroying development to keep pace with the hoped-for crowds. (Some other time I'll write a post about my deep suspicions of ecotourism as a silver bullet for conservation.)

Moreover, I don't see why BC can't reap the benefits of both ecotourism and sustainable limited-tag hunting. So while ecotourism confers many benefits, I don't see why hunting can't add more.

Finally then, there's the question of whether $1.35 million plus annual fees is worth the benefit. Owning up to opportunity costs can be a painful choice when it comes to protecting places and animals that we love, but it's even more painful for the wilderness when we choose poorly. The model Raincoast is using--buying a license and holding it for conservation--is a good one. It's been done with increasing success with water rights (keeping water in streams for fish), grazing rights (keeping livestock off fragile public lands that need breathing room to recover), and development rights (buying easements on farms, for instance, to prevent them from subdividing).

Hunting rights have even been purchased before too, though never on the scale that Raincoast is doing it. But unlike rights for water, grazing, timber, minerals, or development, the biodiversity threats of hunting rights are far less clear. I would like to know what else might have been accomplished with that money. How many acres of land could have been protected from impending habitat-destroying development? How much logging could Raincoast have prevented with that money? And how much logged-over land could have been restored?

The conservation world needs a steely-eyed list that prioritizes the ecosystems and species that are most imperiled. (More on that list tomorrow.) And then it needs an even more steely-eyed accounting of the costs of protection. What are the best buys? What are the investments that are most stable, most leveraged, most likely to reap benefits in the future? As far as I know, that accounting has never been done, but I have a strong suspicion that hunting rights would probably pencil out as a rather bad buy.

Prius, Oil, and Time

Gristmill's ur-pundit David Roberts makes a good point concerning this post, discussing whether buying a Prius or other super-efficient vehicle really reduces climate-warming emissions.  What Dave is wrestling with is whether the oil "saved" by driving a Prius is really just bought by someone else -- leading to no net reduction in overall emissions. 

A few things to say here.  First, as astute commenter Patrick Niemeyer notes, the Prius has other benefits besides using less fuel -- it's also a phenomenally clean car.  Driving a Prius reduces your overall emissions of smog-forming compounds, particulate matter, and volatile organics.  For cars, cleanliness is, quite obviously, a good thing.

But that doesn't really get to the heart of Dave's point -- which is that super-efficient cars may ultimately be irrelevant if all the oil gets burned sooner or later.  I still think that's not quite right.  By reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels in any given year, cars like the Prius offer a couple of clear, tangible benefits to the climate.

Let's say that for every 10 gallons of gas you save by driving a Prius, demand for gasoline from the global transportation system falls by six gallons -- that is, six gallons of gas aren't used in a given year, and are either placed in storage or not pumped out of the ground.  Now, of course, that gasoline may be burned next year, or the year after that.  But the pace at which carbon is emitted to the atmosphere does matter:  the longer the GHGs are in the atmosphere, the more heat they trap.  Delaying carbon emissions may reduce the pace of climate forcing, and buy a little time to deal with the consequences.

Which suggests reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels can slow, however slightly, the pace of climate change. Which is a good thing.

The second benefit stems from this fact:   all else being equal, reducing aggregate demand for transportation fuels will reduce the price of oil.  And lower prices reduce the incentive to pull more oil out of the ground. 

For the "easy oil" -- the stuff that gushes from the ground, or can be coaxed out without too much trouble -- this probably doesn't matter.  (If you can produce a barrel of oil for under $10 with current technology, it's a pretty sure bet that it will get used up sooner or later.)  But for the hard oil -- stuff that takes a lot of technology, effort, and energy to produce -- price matters a lot.  Oil from, say, Alberta's tar sands might be extremely profitable to extract when oil's at $60 per barrel, but a money sink if oil prices fall below $40 per barrel.  Producing the really difficult oil is an especially big climate problem, since it often takes a lot of energy (and climate-warming emissions) to do so.

Now, if prices rise and people think they'll stay high, a lot of the relatively hard oil will get produced -- and sooner rather than later. And there's a huge supply of "hard" oil in the world.  By reducing demand, you make it less economically feasible to extract the really costly oil -- which reduces, or at least delays, the climate impacts of the transportation system.

Of course, it could be that, super-efficient cars or no, the world's "easy" oil will be used up eventually; and following that, prices will rise, and we'll start extracting the stuff that's harder to get at.  And it's even feasible to argue that it's better to face that day of reckoning sooner rather than later -- we'll have to face the music sometime. 

Nevertheless, a world of hybrid cars will probably come to that juncture, with all of the world's easy oil already tapped, a little bit later than it otherwise would; and it might--just might--prevent some of the really difficult oil from being produced at all -- especially if renewable energy technologies get more cost- and energy-efficient in the interim. 

To me, either result -- slowing the pace of global warming emissions, and/or keeping some hard-to-extract oil in the ground -- would be a boon for the climate.   Whether it's a cost-effective way to get to that benefit is a question for another time.

PBDEs: Another Nail

Some cheery news for Monday:  The Olympian, Washington's capital city newspaper, reports that the state departments of ecology and health are proposing further steps to eliminate PBDEs, a toxic flame retardant, from commerce.  And I imagine that some state legislators are paying close attention to those recommendations as they gear up for the legislative session next January.

Just to recap -- PBDEs are flame retardants used in furniture foams and plastics, but have some disturbing similarities to their chemical cousins, the PCBs.  Both classes of compounds have been found to affect neurological development in lab animals, and PCBs are known to cause developmental delays and deficits in children.  Scientists routinely find PBDEs in samples of food, housedust, and human breastmilk and body fat -- and levels in North America, where the use of the most troublesome forms of the compound has been concentrated, are the highest in the world.

Last year the Washington legislature funded a PBDE action plan for the state, but delayed action on a bill to actually remove compounds out of commerce.  Meanwhile, the manufacturer of the kinds of PBDEs most often found in people's bodies has stopped manufacturing the compounds, under an agreement with the US EPA.  Still, one type of PBDEs are still used widely in commercial electronics and other applications (though, apparently, many manufacturers have managed to remove all PBDEs from their supply chain).

Today's news means, in essence, that departments of health and ecology are leaning towards a more comprehensive ban of PBDEs.  As summarized by the Olympian:

The two agencies recommend that the Legislature:
• Ban the manufacture, distribution or sale of new products containing Penta or Octa [which are the most problematic forms of the compounds].
• Ban the use of Deca [the PBDEs that are still in widespread use] in electronic components, as long as safer fire retardants are available or if additional studies show that Deca harms human health.
• Consider a ban on Deca in products that don’t already contain it, but could in the future, including textiles and mattresses.
• Continue research on PBDE alternatives and monitor the levels of PBDE in the environment.

These are all good steps.  Of course, it would have been nice if the same level of caution had been exercised before PBDE contamination became so widespread.

Bashing Bus Rapid Transit

The Stranger takes a crack at Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)--an alternative to fixed-rail technologies like light rail and monorail--and finds it wanting. Severely wanting. And while the short article isn't the paragon of balanced issue analysis, it raises some compelling objections. Among them: BRT tends to have lower ridership, longer travel times, and fails to create incentives for land-use changes. There may even be reason to think that BRT's oft-touted cost-effectiveness may be illusory. 

The debate between BRT and fixed-rail is extensive and even somewhat acrimonious. Personally, I'm undecided (and, in truth, I'm unacquainted with the quantitative claims of BRT proponents) but I have a hard time believing that BRT is preferable.

Fixed-rail transit is not only good for transportation (where it probably out-competes BRT), but it can also catalyze and focus development strategically, just as streetcars once did. BRT, on the other hand, cannot act as an agent of smart-growth development because it lacks the permanence of a rail stop. To get that permanence, BRT must assume its most extreme form: grade-separated, exclusive right-of-way lanes, with large well-designed stops. But then BRT has sacrificed its main selling points and become expensive and inflexible, just like fixed rail. And it's slower and less attractive to new riders too. So where's the beef?

A River Runs Free

A spot of good news from Montana: the Bonner Dam on the Blackfoot River was removed with a minimum of problems. For the first time since at least 1884, that river of literary and cinematic fame is unfettered.

Other dam-removal projects in the Northwest are certainly more ecologically important, but there's something poetically fitting about the Blackfoot running free again. As Norman Maclean explained, "the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time." And now it does once more.

Electric Boogaloo

Driving is far and away the biggest source of climate-warming emissions in the Pacific Northwest.  Together, motor gasoline and highway diesel account for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels in BC, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.  (In Washington, the figure is 36 percent -- click on the graph for details.) Nothing else we do comes close to matching the amount of CO2 that we emit when we drive.

Which would make one think that reducing emissions from driving is the highest priority for reducing our impact on the global climate.  Given the disproportionate amount of CO2 from driving, that sounds reasonable, right?

Only I'm not sure that it's true.  In fact, if I had to choose one area of the northwest's energy system to focus on, I'd probably choose the one that is, comparatively speaking, the most climate-friendly:  electricity.

Most of the Pacific Northwest's electricity comes from hydropower dams.  Now, obviously, the dams that staple the region's streams and rivers have their problems; they're largely responsible for the decline of the region's iconic salmon runs.  However, while hydropower isn't always climate friendly, the dams in the northwest are fairly climate-benign, as energy sources go.

But we've pretty much hit the limit on hydropower generation in the Northwest.  Annual hydropower generation varies with the weather, but the long-term average has been roughly stagnant for a couple decades. There simply haven't been many new additions to hydropower capacity recently: all of the good sites already have dams on them. So these days, new production comes from other sources; and while a few new wind farms have gotten a lot of press, we've been largely meeting rising demand for electricity by burning more natural gas and coal.

And coal is a real problem.  Coal emits more CO2 per unit of usable energy than anything else the nation's energy portfolio.  At this stage, anything we can do to keep coal in the ground has got to count as one of the best ways to help stem the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. 

Now, the thing is that there's very little coal-fired electricity in the Pacific Northwest itself; the Centralia power plant in Washington is the only major coal-to-electric plant In the region.  But there are quite a few large coal-fired plants Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah -- plants that also power growing demand throughout the US West.  Arguably, the most climate-friendly policies we could pursue in the Northwest would...

1. help us use electricity more efficiently -- which would reduce the demand for imported coal-fired electricity; and
2. help us generate more electricity renewably -- which could help us export more electricity outside the region, offsetting electricity generation from coal-fired plants.

Of course, I think this line of thinking poses something of a dilemma: is it really possible to convince people that the best thing to do for the climate is to use less of the one energy source that -- in this region, anyway -- poses the least threat to the climate?

Bowling Together, One Last Time

Today in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a sweetly-sad story about the closing of a bowling alley in north Seattle. There's nothing terribly profound, of course, about one business closing down, but columnist Susan Paynter does a terrific job of characterizing the place as a nexus of social capital, though she doesn't use the term herself. In light of the recent dialogue on this blog about the role of density, gentrification, and community, I thought I'd toss out this article as food for thought.

"You should start the day off with a little bit of laughter," Wayne Luders told me. He and wife Ruth come from home a few blocks away for the friendship, the circle of acquaintances they count on around the tabletop, and down-to-earth servers like Louise Adams who, Wayne admits, sometimes calls him worse names than "Sweetpea."

Like the other regulars -- the serious night-league bowlers with monogrammed bags, the daytime senior señoritas sporting matching shirts, and the every Tuesday and Thursday railroad retiree -- they dread March when they'll loose their moorings.

That the business closing is actually a bowling alley, gives a certain literal heft to the worry that social capital is declining, a worry that is most commonly connected to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. But more to the point, Leilani Lanes is not closing because business is slow (though it's worth noting that league bowling there has declined sharply, as it has almost everywhere). No, the alley is closing in part because real estate values have gotten so high that it's hard for the owners to justify the building's current use.

There's much more money in re-developing the alley into apartments, condos, retail outlets, or more profitable businesses. It strikes me that the closing of this alley--like the passing of many timeworn elements in any city--should not just be shrugged off as a matter of amoral invincible "market forces." It's truly regrettable when places of close community pass away, but it's a problem that's damnably hard to fix.

I'm certainly not a no-growther. I believe, for instance, that much of the new development in Seattle over the last two decades has made the city healthier and better in a thousand and one ways. A profusion of new commercial districts, walkable neighborhoods, and even farmer's markets is breathing a great deal of life into the city. But at the same time, there's something lamentable about the loss of "great good places" like the bowling alley--places where the community has gathered for years--places that forge the bonds that keep cities vibrant and may even keep people healthier too.

Waldal worries it will be the end of social contact for many. That they will sit, immobile and isolated by their separate TV screens.

Longtime bowling-league secretary Mary Pelan, a self-described senior citizen, started bowling at age 17. She guesses she'll walk for exercise -- probably alone -- when the place shuts its doors. "So many connections will be shredded and that's just a shame," she said.

But what to do? In the face of a growing population and the practical need for increasing density (not to mention the environmental and social needs), how do we preserve the "great good places" that make the places where we live worth living in?

Thoughts?

Is Seattle the New Singapore?

That's what mossback Knute Berger argues in his latest Seattle Weekly column.

As near as I can decipher his rantings, Berger thinks that density and gentrification in Seattle are tantamount to becoming a police state in the model of Singapore. Also, houses in the city are unaffordable. And, oh yeah, the University Village is--gasp--basically just a tony shopping mall.

Really, it's hard to know where to begin.

According to Berger, increasing Seattle's density is functionally equivalent to gentrification, which in turn implies Singapore-style law and order:

Proponents argue that the [neo-Victorian] laws work, the streets are safe, and that such rules are necessary for dealing with high urban density. As Seattle floats atop a real-estate bubble that increasingly makes the city affordable mostly to the affluent, we can probably look forward to more laws intended to make the whole town more like Singapore (recycle or else!). That is part of the price of urban gentrification, the signs of which are everywhere.

It's precisely these sorts of hysterics that make it hard for me to take anti-density arguments seriously.

Leaving aside the notion that gentrification may actually be a good thing for a city, it's not at all clear why increasing density would imply gentrification or Singapore-style law and order. It doesn't in, say, Vancouver or San Francisco.

Affordable housing is, I think, a legitimate concern. (Incidentally, that's why Berger's repeated lionization of the suburban Eastside in this column is so puzzling. Housing prices there are higher than in the city, so Berger's affordable housing spleen should presumably be vented there.)

I'll hazard one guess why Seattle's prices are a little lower: density. It's easy to bemoan the high prices in once anemic neighborhoods like Madrona and Mount Baker, but it seems to me that the best remedy for high demand and high prices is, well, more supply. The only (slim) hope of keeping Seattle's single-family neighborhoods even moderately affordable is to create an array of other housing choices.

I could go on and on about this week's column. Speaking as a mossback myself (though younger than Berger), I too often miss the "old Seattle," a quiet and unpretentious place with a character all its own. But time does not stop and cities are by nature dynamic. I wish Berger would quit gnashing his teeth and start using his column more constructively--perhaps finding ways to preserve the best features of the old place while we're trying to build something even better.

(Okay, okay, one last jab: Berger's flippant Singapore-bashing is awfully ill-informed. While Singapore is not a good model for liberal Western democracies, it's impossible to understand the place without reference to its geopolitical context and history. That is to say, it's a damn sight better than anything else in southeast Asia. Oppression comes in many guises and Singapore has managed to avoid the oppressive evils of poverty, race-riots, and Islamic fundamentalism that are even now wracking its nearest neighbors. The price of Singapore's freedom is government by a rather benign one-party psuedo-democracy that has built a prosperous and peaceful nation on the foundations of education, multiculturalism, and free trade. That and Singaporeans are denied their inalienable rights to litter and vandalize. The horror.)

They've Got A Bridge To Sell You

Noted in passing, a Seattle Times article with a mildly galling headline: Rebuild or replace the viaduct?  So, what then, are those the only two options on the table?  Obviously, no.  But it's hard to know that from the Times' coverage.

The article highlights the musings of a retired structural engineer and I-912 supporter who claims that the Viaduct could be patched up for the low, low cost of $200 to $300 million (perhaps using Viaduct tape), as opposed to a minimum of $2.5 billion for a whole new structure.  His reasoning:  only one section of the Viaduct needs to be replaced. "We think the rest is simply OK."  (One hopes that "I think it's ok" doesn't become the default health and safety standard for highway projects.)

Meanwhile, engineers who've actually...you know...studied the issue say that this is bunk, and the whole thing could come down in a big quake.  Repairing the Viaduct to meet reasonable safety standards is nearly as expensive as building a whole new one, and would extend the structure's working life by only a few decades -- which makes the high cost hard to justify.

Now, I don't personally know whether this retired engineer guy is onto something, or just a crank.  I suspect the latter.  But, quite clearly, the Times thought that the thoughts of a rogue engineer (I didn't know there was such a thing) were worth front-page coverage. So when do they start covering the rest of the debate -- including the people who think that replacing the Viaduct's capacity is still too expensive at $2.5 billion, let alone $4 billion for a tunnel?

Update:  It's a good idea to read the comments here -- seems like I was pretty unfair to suggest that the retired engineer, Neil Twelker, might be a crank.  Apparently, he's quite a renowned figure, and an exceptionally well qualified engineer.

And, just to be clear, I intended the title "They've got a bridge to sell you" to refer to the Times' coverage -- which seemed to assume that the two poles of the Viaduct debate were "repair" or "rebuild" -- and not to the engineers themselves.  Sorry if that seemed like a swipe at the engineers.

Monorail Stopped In Its Tracks

Well, so much for that transit project.

I just finished listening to the Seattle City Council unanimously approve a resolution to deny the monorail permits for building and right-of-way. They also agreed to do everything possible to get the state legislature to dissolve the monorail project. Basically, the council is concurring with Mayor Nickels, who demanded that the monorail return to voters with an improved plan. The monorail board refused and the city pulled the plug. Absent city permitting approval, the monorail's already troubled bonds will become anathema to investors, thereby essentially killing the project.

So barring something completely unforeseen, the monorail is effectively dead. But while the corpse is still warm, Seattle needs to conduct a thorough post-mortem.

Around the office here, I am was known as something of a rabid monorail proponent. Obviously, I was aghast at the ridiculously flawed financing scheme this summer that put the monorail on a collision course with the mayor and council. Still, I remained hopeful that the monorail board would revise their plan and come up with something credible, even if it was for a less extensive line.

One thing I'd like to see investigated--apart from the chicanery or incompetence of the monorail board--was the unreasonable hostility to the monorail that emanated from city hall and other city leaders. Despite consistently strong support from voters, the monorail made little headway with many decisionmakers, some of whom seemed predisposed to hate the thing at every step along the way. I wonder if that hostility didn't help create a culture of defensiveness and secrecy in the monorail project that ultimately led to its undoing.

City officials probably did the right thing today in the face of a recalcitrant monorail board. But I'd argue that the blame for the project's failure lies partly with city hall, as well as other institutions like the Downtown Business Association. I'd like to see some soul-searching from our leaders about the fractious and close-minded civic culture that stifled the monorail.

We should, of course, continue to debate the merits of transit alternatives. What is cost effective? What is efficient? What is politically possible? And what do ordinary residents--as opposed to engineers and billionaires--actually want to see in our fair city?

More importantly, we need to acknowledge a basic truth: there will never be a perfect transit system (or road project, for that matter). If we agree that we need better transit in the Emerald City, we should stop hunting for perfection and start looking for something practical. And we should do it with a quickness.

Is Gas Elastic?

In 1999 you could buy a gallon of gas in Washington state for less than a buck.  As recently as 3 years ago, gas prices averaged about  $1.20 a gallon.  Right now, though, expect to shell out about $2.85.

So what has a 136% price hike done to gasoline consumption?  As it turns out, not a lot.  In 2002, the average Washington resident went through about 8.4 gallons of gas per week.  Based on data through July 2005, that's now down to about 8.1 gallons per week -- a 4 percent reduction.

Elastic?  Not so much. 

Of course, the trends are a bit confusing. The state economy was in the doldrums in 2002, but has picked up a bit of steam since; if economic conditions had remained constant, the decline in gas consumption might have been a little steeper.

Over the longer term, the trends are a little more promising.  Person for person, gas consumption peaked in 1978, at 9.7 gallons per person per week.  We're down 17% from then.  (Which convinces me that federal CAFE standards--while far from perfect--really did accomplish something useful.)

Remember, though, these are per capita trends.  Population growth has worked at cross purposes to improved fuel efficiency:  all told, Washington state is on track to use the same total amount of gasoline this year as it did in 2002, and possibly a bit more.

San Francisco, Here We Come?

As Joel Connelly points out in today's P-I, there's no guarantee that I-912 -- the Washington State initiative that would roll back the most recent hike in state gas taxes -- will pass.  That said, repeal of the gas tax looks pretty likely, in no small part because of the surprisingly tepid response from the state's business community, which had previously been outspoken in its support for higher gas taxes and transportation spending.

Come November, if the new gas taxes are repealed, the $2 billion in state money currently slated for Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct will simply evaporate.  And as Mayor Nickels has pointed out, without that money there's essentially no chance that the Viaduct will be rebuilt:

If Seattle doesn't get the $2 billion approved by the Washington Legislature to help replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the city will tear down the deteriorating elevated highway anyway because it is unsafe, said Mayor Greg Nickels.

So it's perhaps a good time to point out what just happened in San Francisco:  the city just opened a new 6-lane boulevard that -- get this -- replaced an elevated urban highway.  This is the second time the city has replaced an elevated freeway with a boulevard.  The first was the waterfront Embarcadero Freeway, which was torn down after it was damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.  The city put up a waterfront boulevard in place of the highway -- a move that, according to most observers, revitalized a waterfront formerly depressed by the blight of a freeway.  And city residents liked the results enough that they decided to do the same thing to a stretch of the Central Freeway smack in the middle of downtown.

Obviously, the Alaskan Way Viaduct plays a different role in Seattle's transportation system than the Embarcadero and Central freeways did in San Francisco's.  But that city's highway removals do serve as important reminders that, no, a big-city's transportation system doesn't necessarily grind to a halt when you put the budget for downtown highways on a strict diet. 

Poor Reasoning

The US federal poverty line is not a good measure of real life poverty. Most researchers agree that the standard method of computing poverty is outdated, overly simplistic, and probably drastically undercounts the number of poor. (Here's a quick summary from Dan Staley; here's the longer version of the same story.) Still, despite its glaring flaws, the poverty rate remains the most widely reported gauge of how many poor people there are.

Enter a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The report develops a more meaningful poverty rate--they call it a "basic family budget." EPI adjusts for geographic differences in prices--a huge oversight in the federal poverty calcuations--and makes realistic but frugal cost estimates for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care, other necessities, and taxes. Based on these costs, EPI calculates how much money families need to earn just to get by (assuming they don't save money, go on vacation, or even have renter's insurance). 

You can play with EPI's handy calculator to get a sense of what their basic family budget is like. A family of 2 parents and 2 children in the Seattle metro area, for instance, needs to earn $45,516 to make ends meet. On the other hand, a family of 1 parent and 1 child in rural Idaho needs just $26,988 per year.

EPI's report gives an entirely different sense of poverty--and not just because the numbers are much, much higher.

According to the Census Bureau, for example, Idaho has the lowest poverty in the three Northwest states (WA, OR, ID), with just 9.9 percent. But EPI's more detailed and accurate assessment of economic conditions, makes Idaho by far the worst with fully 37.5 percent of people living in families without enough money for a basic budget. 

So not only is Idaho's "true" poverty situation 3 to 4 times worse than federal estimate suggests, it's skewed with relation to its nearest neighbors. What's the explanation here? Does Idaho have a smaller share of very poor people (below the federal poverty line), but a larger share of people who can't really make ends meet? Or is there something else going on?

Whatever the explanation, I find the comparison troubling, partly because poverty rates are often used to allocate scarce resources.

Washington, on the other hand, has an undistinguished poverty rate for the Northwest, but boasts the smallest share of people unable to earn a basic family budget (see table below). Could this have something to do with Washington's most-generous-in-the-nation minimum wage?

Here's a fuller account of federal poverty rates compared to basic family budgets in the Northwest.

	Federal poverty rate, 2004	Percent below basic family budget
Alaska	9.2	28.2
California	13.3	33.7
Idaho	9.9	37.5
Montana	14.1	40.3
Oregon	11.7	29.9
Washington	11.5	26.9
United States	12.7	28.3

Unhappy Trails

For many northwesterners, summer means an all-too-brief window to capitalize on the region's natural heritage. For a few months city-dwellers like myself become schizophrenics--living in an apartment during the week and waking up in a sleeping bag on the weekends. Northwesterners have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to trails and wilderness within a short drive of our cities. In the wild country of the Northwest's mountains, it is still possible to find solitude on high country trails, in alpine lake basins that look like Shangri La, and in ancient dark forests.

But our ability to experience those places is facing a very real threat because many of the best trails to those refuges are going extinct. In some cases, the loss of trails is an especially bitter pill to swallow because there is comparatively ample funding for the roads that lead to those vanishing trails.

In the US Northwest, the vast majority of our precious natural beauty is not managed by northwesterners, but by two federal agencies, the US Forest Service, which operates national forests, and the National Park Service. Both agencies are badly under-funded and short-handed.

In fact,the Forest Service is already beginning to sell off assets. Many national forests lack the resources necessary even to maintain their crumbling infrastructures of campgrounds, forest roads, boat launches, and trails. National forests are increasingly dependent on volunteers and private funding to make up for the severe shortfall of federal dollars.

Here's a case study that hits very close to home for an estimated 5 million northwesterners: the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest--the huge swath of federal land that blankets the west side of the Cascade Mountains from the Canadian border to Mount Rainier National Park. Right now, the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie's website says:

While it appears that repairs to roads are largely funded and most will eventually be made, the same can not yet be said for the trail system.

Here's why.

In October 2003, an autumn deluge of unheard of proportions swept away large chunks of well-known routes like the Pacific Crest Trail, the Stehekin Valley trails, and many others. In fact, the flood did about $4.5 million in damage just to trails in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, not counting additional havoc in Olympic and North Cascades National Parks. (For more on this, read my article that appeared in the Seattle Weekly in May 2004 linking the trail damage to climate change.) 

Even now, in 2005, the National Forest has only about one-tenth of the necessary funding to make the repairs. Groups like Washington Trails Association and The Mountaineers have made heroic efforts to help the National Forest win funding and have volunteered countless hours to help repair the damage. But the fundamental problem is too great to be overcome by volunteers: the forest simply needs more money for trails and the federal government isn't about to supply anywhere near the money required.

But there is plenty of money available for repairing the many forest roads that were damaged by the October floods. (The floods did a number on the roads too, most notoriously the popular Mountain Loop Highway that no longer makes a loop because of washouts near Barlow Pass. Still, road repair is pretty much a sure thing.) The Federal Highway Administration operates a program called the Emergency Relief for Federally Owned Roads (ERFO, for short) and the National Forest was able to qualify for ERFO funding to repair most of the flood damage.

The problem, of course, is that hikers and other recreationists may be left with roads that lead to trailheads, but no actual trails. This is not just a bizarre hypothetical. The White Chuck River Road is slated for repairs soon, but to my knowledge there are not enough resources to repair the White Chuck Trail that leads to Kennedy Hot Springs, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the shortest route of the several long routes up Glacier Peak, a popular mountaineering destination.

Don't blame local Forest Service officials--they're making the best of incredibly scarce resources. Instead, you can blame federal funding scarcity--and restrictions on existing funding--that hamstrings forests like the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie.

Without trails, recreation in national forests becomes based on either internal combustion or on the strength, skill, and time to navigate large stretches of difficult trail-less country. The latter is a more authentic wilderness experience, I suppose, but certainly not something the whole family can enjoy.

One possible solution is to convert some of the roads, or portions of them, to trails. Olympic National Forest has experimented with this solution with the damaged Dossewallips River Road that once led to trails to Lake Constance and Mount Constance, near Hood Canal. It's controversial to say the least. One the up side: the forest gains a few additional miles of trail and the area's natural resources are arguably better preserved. On the downside: some of the best  destinations in the forest are put out of reach of day hikers and families. (The same thing effectively happened years ago on the gated road to Monte Cristo that is now mainly the province of mountain bikes and hiking boots.)

Settling on the right mix of access roads, good trails, and deep (trail-less) wilderness is not easy. In any mix, however, it's galling to find that there is ample funding for cars, but very little for feet.

There ought to be a large natural constituency for the trails of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie. The forest is located within a 70-mile drive of over 3.6 million Washingtonians (and also nearby to 1.5 million British Columbians). No surprise, it's one of the most heavily visited national forests in the country and in recent years it has also become one of the most devoted to trail-based recreation.

It's something of a truism to urge people to contact their representatives in Congress, but that really is one of the best things you can do for trails in the Northwest. Congress controls the purse strings and has the power to fund trail restoration and maintenance. And then when you've done that, hook up with Washington Trails Association or the Mountaineers--they are vocal advocates for muscle-powered recreation on federal land and. They also put their muscles where their mouths are, donating thousands of hours of work to help repair trails.

The Mount Baker-Snoqualmie is a national gem. Just a short drive from downtown skyscrapers you can find your way into more than 1.3 million acres of designated wilderness and even today find plenty of places to be alone with jaw-dropping scenery. If we can't find money to protect our nearest and dearest natural places, is there any hope for the far-flung and less-visited wild places that make the Northwest special?

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.

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?

I Must Be Dense

Seems like there's been a rash of anti-density columns in Seattle of late. First there was last week's Mossback column in the Seattle Weekly (which I discussed here). Then, on Saturday,  P-I columnist Joel Connelly got into the action with this chestnut in a piece about Seattle's struggling middle class:

Are working families going to move into the higher buildings and downtown condos championed by Mayor Nickels? Not likely. The new living space seems intended for affluent empty nesters.

Granting Connelly his due:  that may well be right.  But if so, it's exactly the sort of thing that would help middle-class families who are being squeezed by high housing prices.

The developers who are planning to build some of the downtown residential high rises are probably hoping, very much, that they will be in demand by empty nesters -- folks who'd like to downsize from the single-family homes where they raised their kids, and are looking for a slightly less expensive and more manageable abode.  In fact, for the developers, it would be a dream come true if that happened, since some empty nesters would have a fair bit of cash on hand if they sold their homes.

But what happens when a lot of people sell their single-family homes?  Well, if the number of single family homes on the market goes up, then their price should go down -- or, at a minimum, not rise quite so quickly. 

Which goes to the heart of the matter:  all else being equal, building more housing tends to make housing less expensive.  And one reason that housing prices are rising so quickly is because there's just not enough of it to meet the current demand. Of course, the supply of single-family homes with yards within city limits is pretty much fixed, which means that just about the only way to build more housing is to build a) small accessory dwelling units (also called grandma flats), b) townhouses, or c) multifamily housing, such as apartments or condos.  (Well, you could also cover Lake Union with houseboats, but let's not get into that here...)

This is all pretty basic stuff, but apparently it's easy to lose sight of. 

In fact, it seems to me that some folks who are so critical of increasing density are confusing cause with effect.  They see the cost of housing going up; they see new condos being built, and proposals to build even more; and they figure the new construction is causing the price increases.  That's sort of silly, when you think about it:  the pressure for high-rises, new apartments and condos, etc., is an effect of high housing prices, not their cause. In fact--and at the risk of anthropomorphising an abstraction--new condo construction may be an example of the market's invisible hand trying to bring housing supply into line with demand.

In terms of affordability, if there's one hidden danger with the new construction, it's this:  if you build intersting neighborhoods with abundant housing, nice amenities and a good mixture of stores and services, you may also be creating the kinds of places where people really want to live.  The sort of neighborhoods that people are willing to pay a premium to be a part of.  So if you do too good a job of creating nice places to live throughout the city, then people will start migrating to Seattle for its high quality of life. 

Which is, in many ways, a nice sort of problem for a city to have.

Two-Wheel Drive

The first time I celebrated Bike to Work Day, I didn’t have a job (I was a recent college graduate in search of one) so I experienced the event as more of a Bike-to-Free-Food-Booths Day. Luckily, the sponsors only asked for proof of biking, not working, and since my ancient 10-speed was my main form of transportation at the time, I fit right in.

That was in 1988. Since that time, I’ve gained jobs and various commute modes (including hitch-hiking by pickup truck), but biking remains my favorite. I feel lucky that my home, Seattle, has bike racks, bike lanes (the Sammamish trail is a recent victory), and bike advocacy groups. And hey, I’ve only been doored once.

It’s discouraging to note, though, that bike commuting is only slowly catching on in the US, despite that it’s healthy, cheap, and the most energy-efficient form of travel. According to the 2000 Census, while the number of bike commuters increased slightly from 1990, the percentage was still very low--0.4 percent of all commute trips.

Seattle and Portland do rate third and fifth of US cities in their population category, respectively, in percentage of workers who commute by bike. But I have to say I expected Portland—where the Hawthorne Bridge swarms with two-wheeled businesspeople on weekday mornings, I’m told--to beat Seattle; anyone have different or more recent numbers?

According to this VTPI report (pdf, p.21), Canadians pedal to work at a higher rate than Americans (1.2 percent of work trips were by bike in 2001), particularly British Columbians. Victoria ranked highest of any Canadian metropolitan area--4.8 percent in 2001--for share of work trips by bike.

And then there are countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, where “bike modal shares of travel” average 20-30 percent.

How to encourage more folks to hop on their two-wheelers for the short, everyday trips that they don’t really need a car for? Compact urban design obviously plays a big role. Gas price hikes probably aren't hurting.

Bike paths and lanes are also often promoted as a way to get people to pedal more. I’m also intrigued by the “shared streets” model of integrating transportation modes rather than separating them—which would turn streets into public spaces where children, pedestrians, cyclists, and streetcars mix with slow-moving cars.

With destinations closer together and bikes on equal footing with cars, we wouldn't need a Bike to Work Day--or free goodies--to help us choose two wheels over four.

Moss Backwards

I'm trying my best to give a charitable reading of Knute Berger's Mossback column in the Seattle Weekly railing against urban density. But it's hard.

To summarize as best I can:  Berger doesn't like Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' plan to promote high-rise housing near Seattle's downtown because, well...I guess Knute liked the Seattle skyline just as it was in 1980, thank you very much.

Now, Berger makes at least one really good point -- that Mayor Nickels seems to want to do too much, and that some of his goals conflict.  For example, the mayor supports both massive new transportation spending that could suck life out of downtown, and massive new residential development in the urban core. 

But Berger saves most of his fury for the prospect of residential high-rises near downtown.  He'd prefer that the city follow the example of Copenhagen, Denmark -- which, according to him, means making Seattle's policies family-friendly, so more families with kids can afford to live within the city limits.  Encouraging families with kids to move into the city would increase the number of people per household--accommodating population growth without increasing the need to build more housing. 

And if we do have to increase the housing supply, Berger again prefers the model of Copenhagen and other European cities:  creating small-scale urban villages that are interesting places to live, but aren't dominated by highrises.

I guess I understand his instincts -- building residential high-rises might change the character of the city Berger grew up in.  And, without doubt, Nickels' high-rise plan would forever alter the priceless urban gem that is today's South Lake Union warehouse district (sarcasm intended).

But let's be careful holding Copenhagen up as a model, shall we?

Here are the numbers, from the Jeffrey Kenworthy and Felix Laube's venerable International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities and this extremely helpful world city population website.  Between 1960 and 2005, the total population of Copenhagen-Frederiksberg -- basically, the city without its suburbs -- fell from 836,000 to 594,000, a decline of 30 percent.  In Copenhagen's central business district -- the downtown -- population fell faster, from 65,000 in 1960 to 34,000 in 1990.

Copenhagen, in other words, has been emptying out.

Now, to be fair, the population of central Copenhagen rebounded slightly since 1990; central Copenhagen's population is now at about the same place it was in 1980.  But in the meanwhile, the population of the Copenhagen suburbs grew from 772,000 in 1960 to about 1.2 million in 2005, an increase of more than 50%.  In greater Copenhagen, as in greater Seattle, suburban living is now the norm. (Though, doubtless, Copenhagen's suburbs are denser and less sprawling than ours.)

But still, let's say we really should hold Copenhagen up as a model for promoting density by creating urban villages.  That's fair enough -- urban villages can be really pleasant places to live, and we really don't have to accomodate new growth with skyscrapers if there are other viable models. 

But remember, in 1990, after 30 years of population decline, Copenhagen was still two and a half times as dense, on average, as Seattle is today.  Two and a half times.  Now, I'm not suggesting that just because Copenhagen is dense, that Seattle should be too.  But I am suggesting that the European-style low-rise density that Mr. Berger supports would mean changes every bit as momentous, and far more widespread throughout the city, than a strategy of concentrating growth in the middle of downtown.  Urban villages certainly have their charms, but it's hard to see how the politics of that kind of change would work in a neighborhood-focused city such as Seattle.

And that goes to the heart of the matter.  It seems to me that  you just can't prohibit people from moving into greater Seattle.  Legal and moral problems would abound.  There are smart ways to slow population growth -- such as reducing the hidden subsidies for domestic & international migration, discouraging unwanted pregnancies, and the like.  But ultimately, we can't stop people from coming here.  (Moreover, the family-friendly policies that Knute advocates would turn Seattle into a giant population magnet, which would, in turn send housing demand & prices that much higher.)

So if we don't accomodate new residents by accepting higher density within city limits, greater Seattle is going to continue to sprawl at the outskirts, overrunning farmland and rural land at the urban fringe.  This kind of low-density sprawl locks its residents into an auto-dependent lifestyle -- which worsens residents' health, decimates salmon habitat, and increases the region's spending on oil, among other ills.

If the alternative to sprawl is to accept greater density -- whether in urban-style villages, or in skyscrapers, a la downtown Vancouver, BC -- I'm all for it.  And concentrating some of that growth downtown -- where people can drive less -- makes a lot of sense for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that there are a lot of people who really want to live in a pedestrian friendly neighborhood near where they work.  Which is exactly what happened in Vancouver, BC, the city that the mayor's "tall and skinny" strategy is modeled after:  the city cleared the way for lots of development in the urban center, which allowed the city to accept many new residents without fundamentally changing the character of all of the city's neighborhoods.

And Vancouver, by the way, has almost exactly the opposite trends from Copenhagen -- an inner city that has grown substantially since 1960, not depopulated -- coupled with a farmland-protection policy that is simply unequalled in the US, and, on net, far less loss of farmland and rural land than in any of the 20 cities we've studied to date.

Now, that's a model I'm in favor of.

Burnt CAFE

It's a rare treat to read a dry, technical report and--almost by accident--learn something surprising, counterintuitive, useful and (at least to me) genuinely new. 

Which is exactly what happened when I read this paper (beware, pdf) by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute.  The upshot:  raising vehicle fuel-economy standards, which always seemed to me like a good idea, may actually be counterproductive, even if they're truly successful at reducing the amount of gasoline the average vehicle consumes per mile.

Now, I'd long heard the argument that current fuel economy standards (also known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy or "CAFE" standards) were ineffective in practice, because of a big loophole:  current CAFE rules hold big pickups and SUVs to a lower standard than cars.  This has let manufacturers skirt CAFE standards by shifting production away from cars to big trucks, which in turn has led to a gradual decline of the overall fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet -- thwarting the purpose of the CAFE standards.

To me, that seemed to be an argument for fixing the big-truck loophole, rather than scrapping the standards outright.  Clearly, the techonology exists to produce more efficient vehicles; and our economy would be better off, and our roads safer, if there weren't as many huge gas guzzlers on the road.  So ratcheting up fuel economy standards for SUVs and pickups--though currently a political non-starter at the federal level--certainly seemed like it would be a wise move over the long term.

Or so I thought.  But Litman's article argues, fairly convincingly, that CAFE standards suffer from the law of unintended consequences.  Improving vehicle fuel economy would reduce the amount of gas a vehicle consumes per mile--which, as a consequence, makes driving cheaper.  And according to Econ. 101 (which I never took, sadly) if something's cheaper, we do more of it.  So, all else being equal, the cheaper it is to drive, the more driving we do.

Here are the numbers: a 10 percent improvement in fuel economy reduces fuel consumption by 6 to 8 percent (a good thing), but also increases driving by 2 to 4 percent.  The increase in driving increases congestion, parking costs, noise pollution, and traffic accidents.  Plus, making driving cheaper fosters sprawl, while an increase in vehicle traffic makes walking and biking more dangerous and less co