Smells Like Teen Spirit
New numbers (see table A10, here) confirm that teen birth rates in Washington fell to a new low in 2003. For the first time ever, Washington's teen birth rate dropped below British Columbia's!!!
That is, BC as of 1978.
As the chart below shows, the good news of the past decade--that teen births have been falling steadily in Washington (as they have in other Northwest states)--is tempered by the fact that they're still remarkably high in comparison with our neighbors north of the 49th parallel, whose teen birthrates are more typical of the world's developed nations.
Fertility patterns are by no means uniform in the state. In urban King County, for example, there were about 19 births for every 1,000 teenaged women -- well below the state average (though more than half again as high as BC's rate). But this low rate is more than balanced out by the high birthrates in many poorer and more rural counties; Yakima County, for example, had a birthrate of 74 per 1,000 teens. (There'll be more on this in our Cascadia Scorecard release next week.)
But perhaps the most important thing that this chart shows is that slow, steady changes in birthrates have amounted to a slow-motion revolution in fertility. Year to year, we might not notice how much patterns of childbearing are changing. But over time, the percent-or-two per year changes are adding up to substantial delays in childbearing--and, in all likelihood, the lowest teen birthrates in the region's history.
Walking the Walk
An article in today's Vancouver Sun (subscription required) reports on a new study showing that, in neighborhoods that are designed to make walking convenient, people do, in fact, walk more. To wit:
People who lived the most walkable neighborhoods were 2.4 times as likely to walk for 30 minutes or more than those who lived in the least walkable communities.
The study's authors, led by UBC professor Lawrence Frank, defined walkable neighborhoods as having three core characteristics: they're compact, so that distances between destinations are shorter; their street grids connect, so that it's convenient to walk from place to place; and they have a good mixture of stores and homes, so that people have places to walk to in their daily lives. In such neighborhoods, people walk because it's a convenient form of transportation, not simply because it's good exercise.
BC Gas, nee Hydro
BC Hydro does a fair number of things right. It has an impressive energy efficiency program and a commitment to global responsibility.
But today's Vancouver Sun (subscription required) shows the other side of BC Hydro: it's planning to build a large natural-gas fired power plant on Vancouver Island.
A better way to go would be expanded investment in efficiency, renewables, and "demand response."
