Daily Score Blog

People who move to the suburbs may think they're fleeing the polluted air of the city.  Of course, there's a tradeoff: by living in low-density suburbs, they spend more time in their cars. And as it turns out, the air inside your car may be just about the dirtiest you'll breathe all day.

Last year, researchers in Sydney, Australia released a study (pdf) that measured the levels of benzene (a carcinogen) and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs), as well as asthma-inducing nitrogen oxides, among people who commute by car, bus, train, bike and foot.

The verdict? Car commuters breathed the worst air, getting the highest doses of benzene and other VOCs. Even bus commuters were exposed to lower levels of VOCs than car commuters (though bus riders breathed higher levels of nitrogen dioxide). Train commuters had the least exposure overall, with cyclists and walkers coming in second-best.

Washington's population growth appears to be picking up a bit of steam:  the state added 88,600 new residents over the past year, according to the state Office of Financial Management (OFM). That was 20,000 more residents than the state added during the previous year.  And compared with 2 years before, the pace of population growth increased even more, rising from .9 percent per year in 2002-2003, to 1.4 percent in 2004-2005.  All in all, it's a fairly signficant uptick.

Seattle's monorail project has smashed into the biggest bump in its bumpy history. This is hardly news anymore: the $2 billion 14-mile line will end up costing $11 billion, with $9 billion in interest payments, and the tax to fund it will extend until 2053. City hall and Olympia are, in short, freaking out. Read about it here, here, and here.

There's good reason to freak out. The monorail financing as it is currently proposed is absurd. HOWEVER, the monorail is not dead yet. And while the financing debacle is more serious than a flesh wound, it should not spell the end of the project. Following, I spell out a few ways to salvage it.

(Full disclosure: I am an unreconstructed believer in the monorail. At its essence it is superior to any other form of transportation in the region. You can read my in principle defense of the monorail at the end of this post.)

1. Truncate the line. It's clearly not cost-effective the build the entire 14-mile green line without additional funding. Lopping off the arm north of downtown would preserve valuable capacity to West Seattle (even more valuable when the $4 billion viaduct tunnel inevitably implodes). It might even be possible to cut out only the downtown section, saving money on the most expensive property acquisitions. Riders could still get from the neighborhoods to Seattle Center or SoDo, close enough to walk to downtown or switch to other forms of transit.
2. Raise taxes, or diversify. Why not raise the value-based tax on cars, perhaps extending to brand new cars--an egregious oversight in the current financing? This would shorten the terms of the debt, dramatically reducing the overall cost. Alternatively, the monorail should consider taxing 1) commercial parking (the city has the authority to do this and it has the advantage of both encouraging transit and discouraging driving); 2) cruise ships (surely, Seattleites would love this one. After all, those clueless cruisers will undoubtedly be using the monorail).
3. Get government funding. The feds, the state, the county, and the city manage to come up with huge sums of money for all sorts of less worthy projects--the asinine viaduct tunnel, I-405 expansion, the asinine 520 expansion, the South Lake Union streetcar, and light rail, not to mention buses. There's no reason, in principle, that the monorail shouldn't be subsidized by government funds.

To the casual observer, the sage brush country of the American West looks like the Big Empty--undisturbed land stretching to the horizon. So vast is this landscape that early travelers dubbed it "the sagebrush sea." The reality, however, is that the rich native biological integrity of this Inland Northwest ecosystems has been substantially diminished. And no single creature is better proof of this than the sage-grouse.

No creature, beside humans, penetrates the Pacific Northwest as thoroughly as salmon. In a single short lifetime a salmon may inhabit pelagic and nearshore marine waters, freshwater streams, mountains, forests, deserts, cities, and farms. Their presence is perhaps the region's defining characteristic. They are, therefore, the single best indicator of the Northwest's ecological integrity. The health of salmon is a close proxy for how extensively we have eroded our natural heritage.

They are woven in the cultural fabric of the Northwest and even into the bodies of those who have lived here: from the salmon-centric diet of early Native Americans, to gung-ho fisheries that sprung up in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the $25/pound Copper River salmon that city-dwellers eat in late spring. Their spawning ritual is certainly one of most astonishing events in the natural world. It is mysterious too--massive fish battle relentlessly, in some cases hundreds of miles upstream, for a single chance at procreation in the face of certain death.

From their death, however, springs life in many forms. Bald eagles and grizzlies feast on their carcasses and the nitrogen of their decomposing bodies enriches farmlands. Even the multitudes of younger salmon who do not reach their spawning grounds are food for birds, whales, sea lions, and otters, among many other of the Northwest's inhabitants. Salmon are, in many ways, the heart of the region's ecosystem. Connected to nearly everything, their lives support countless others forms of life.

But salmon, as everyone knows, are disappearing from the Northwest. Many runs and distinct population have already disappeared forever. Others are imperilled, finding a home on the US Endangered Species List or on Canada's "red list."

Percent of salmon stocks that are at-risk and extinct.

An excellent article on wolf reintroduction in Orion magazine. The main focus is on the evolution of our psychology and values around wolves. Here's a sneak preview:

...the culture of the west continues to be transformed gradually by an influx of people holding different, perhaps more modern, values. The old-timers are fading away and, like it or not, the new west is taking hold. Surveys show that if you're about fifty years old or more, you probably hold a pretty negative attitude towards predators; but younger people think the whole idea of killing off all the predators is a joke.... And more people have come to understand that you can't cry wolf on both sides of the issue. That is, those with anti-wolf sentiments realize that there haven't been huge problems with wolves, and even wolf advocates realize that wolves can be a pain in the ass sometimes.

Wolf reintroduction is happening not just in the northern Rockies, but in other parts of the US, such as North Carolina, the Southwest, and, by natural population expansion, in the Upper Midwest. The big question is whether people will live peacably with wolves. And a big part of the answer to that question has to do with what you see when you see a wolf.

Traveling from place to place takes a lot of our time - just under 80 minutes per person per day, according to recent figures.  But who gets a worse deal?  Is it city dwellers, who fight through downtown gridlock and congested city streets, or waste time waiting for the bus or train to finally arrive?  Or suburbanites, who benefit from freer flowing traffic, but who may have to drive for miles and miles to get to work, schools, and stores?

As it turns out, it doesn't particularly matter.  According to data from the 2001 National Household Transportation Survey, no matter where you live - city center, inner ring suburb, or urban fringe - you spend about the same amount of time getting from place to place. Just take a look:

So does location matter at all?  In fact, yes.  Total time spent traveling doesn't vary much with the density of your neighborhood, but time spent in cars, trucks, and SUVs decreases as density increases.  People living in the densest neighborhoods spend roughly a third less time driving than people living in low density neighborhoods spend (43 minutes vs. 63 minutes per day).  That means they can use those extra 20 travel minutes a day doing something else.

Imagine how much reading you could get done on the bus, streetcar, or commuter train.  The average reader could enjoy an extra 17-36 novels a year.

If you are able to work on public transit, say by reading documents or using a lap-top, you could reduce the amount of time you spend in the office.  Some people also use commute time to nap or just decompress from the work day.

Multi-tasking can involve exercise too.  In Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, only around 55% of people get the CDC recommended amount of 30 minutes of moderate activity 5 times a week or 20 minutes of vigorous activity 3 days a week.  If you live in a neighborhood where you can walk to work or bike to the grocery store, you can get your exercise while running errands.

What could you do with all that extra time?

Increasingly, conservationists are pushing for timber thinning on federal land as a means of ecological restoration and fire-fuel reduction. In Oregon, roughly 5.6 million acres need thinning, more than any other state.

Unfortunately, most of the thinned timber is being wasted--simply piled and burned. Luckily, new technologies that convert biomass to usable energy, can perhaps begin to offset the Northwest's dependence on expensive fossil fuel imports. One of the big upsides of biomass is that it would keep money circulating locally, rather than pumping it to North Slope oil corporations.

At present, unfortunately, biomass energy in Oregon hasn't caught fire because producers are worried that there won't be a steady and predictable supply of thinned timber. Of course, that's exactly what has environmentalists worried too. Obviously, it's a shame to waste natural resources and money, but many conservationists are equally worried that biomass energy could unleash a demand for federal timber that could outlive the thinning projects and exert harvesting pressure on national forests far into the future.

Read all about it in today's Oregonian. 

This should come as little surprise, but oil prices just topped $60 per barrel.

While this is the highest nominal price ever, it's far from the highest inflation-adjusted price; in the early 1980s oil topped $94 in today's dollars.  Still, the recent price runup has been pretty darn steep: the price of a barrel of oil has increased roughly fivefold since the winter of 1998. 

As a reminder:  Washington, Oregon, and Idaho combined use about 250 million barrels of oil every year (see this US Energy Information Agency site for details for your state), none of which is produced within the states' borders.  Much of this oil comes from Alaska's North Slope; and this oil is a little cheaper than the light crude to which the spot price refers.  Still, at current prices (link to Anchorage Daily News; registration may be required), our oil consumption habits will siphon off about $14 billion from the combined economies of the three states, which is about one out of every 30 dollars generated in the region.  And, obviously, the more money that leaves the region to pay for oil, the less is left to circulate among local businesses and residents.

The Pacific Northwest is no stranger to the ill-effects of nuclear production and waste storage. And according to this article in today's New York Times, the region is about to see even more of it. Idaho National Laboratory, near Idaho Falls, is slated to manufacture 330 pounds of plutonium-238, at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion and 55,000 drums of hazardous waste.

To my mind, the truly worrisome aspect of the project is this:

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any details.

UPDATE: An editorial in the Idaho Statesman arguing that the Department of Energy should justify its plan to produce plutonium in Idaho.

Feeling guilty about driving your car? If you've been ranting at too many of Clark's recent posts, then I've got a sales pitch for you...

For the low, low price of $160 you can turn your Hummer H2 into a zero emissions vehicle. It's easy. All you need is a TerraPass.

Now here's the fine print: it won't actually reduce the emissions from your tailpipe, or turn your gas-guzzler into a sipper. What the pass does is buy smog allowances from the Chicago Climate Exchange where companies buy and sell pollution credits. By buying up a few credits, you reduce their supply (and presumably raise their price), and you thereby indirectly reduce the amount of pollution from other people. 

Yes, it's weird. And disturbingly similar to the Catholic practice in the Middle Ages of allowing rich believers to buy indulgences to expiate their sins. And perhaps even more disturbingly, the program so far has attracted mostly drivers of fuel-efficient vehicles. According to the article on CNN.com, SUV drivers aren't very interested because they don't feel guilty in the first place.

Last week, I wrote a post detailing how much car crashes cost.  An alert reader asked some followup questions about how to reduce his risk:

Does a decrease in vehicle-miles translate to a decrease in injuries? Am I relatively safer on my bike? On the bus?

Here are some quick answers.  First:  the more you drive, the greater your chance of getting in a crash.  See, for example, this chart from a Victoria Transport Policy Institute analysis of car crashes in British Columbia:
The relationship is pretty close to linear.  So if you want to decrease your crash risk, the most obvious strategy is to arrange your life so you can drive less, if you can.  Of course, some roads are riskier than others -- and rural two-lane highways are among the riskiest.  Congested urban roads and streets tend to have more crashes per mile driven than average, but fewer fatalities -- slower speeds make crashes less deadly.  Which may be one reason why the risk of dying in a car crash is higher at the urban fringe than in center cities or inner-ring suburbs, and why sprawling cities are more dangerous than compact ones.

Next:  If you want to be safer, take transit.  Measured per passenger-mile, transit buses and commuter rail are about as safe as you can hope for; buses seem to be more than 10 times safer than cars for their occupants, while commuter rail is about 80 times safer.  (But both are more dangerous than cars for other occupants of the roads.)  I wish I could say that biking would make you safer, but it doesn't seem to; mile for mile, biking is about 10 times deadlier than driving. Exercise benefits may partially offset the increased crash risk.

It's a shame that biking is so risky in the US.  Biking fatalities are down, of course -- they fell by 27% between 1975 and 2001 -- but mostly because of a steep drop in cycling by children.  But in Germany, the exact opposite has happened:  the number of bike trips doubled between 1975 and 2000, while the number of bike fatalities dropped by 64%. The difference, according to some researchers, is that public policy in Germany has emphasized bike and pedestrian safety -- including infrastructure, traffic calming, traffic education, and traffic regulations -- while policies in the US tend to emphasize fast travel by car.

One side note--although traffic fatality rates in the US are among the highest in the developed world, US drivers aren't particularly unsafe, nor are the roads we drive on.  Measured per mile, our fatality risk is about average.  The real difference is that we drive much more than our counterparts in other nations--and all else being equal, more driving means more car crashes.

A concerned reader is in the market for a used car, and wants to know what we'd recommend: a fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle (like a Prius), or one that can run on veggie-oil-based biodiesel (like a Volkswagen Jetta)?

A while back I posted on a similar question -- whether to buy a new Prius or an old Accord.  There, the price differences were so wide that the Accord seemed the better buy -- provided that the buyer commits to using some of the savings to offset their environmental impacts in other ways.

Here, however, the price differences aren't so wide.  And -- at risk of aggravating people attached to one solution or the other -- I'm not yet convinced that there's all that big a difference.

Perhaps the best-known salmon runs in the world happen every summer in Seattle at the tourist- and locals-thronged Ballard Locks. Right now, sockeye salmon are climbing the concrete ladders that separate Puget Sound's saltwater from the fresh water of the ship canal that leads to Lake Washington and the spawning streams beyond. 657 fish made it through yesterday.

The Lake Washington sockeye must be the most urbane tech-savvy salmon anywhere. Departing young fish are jettisoned into the Sound through high-tech smolt slides. Upon their return, years later, some are tagged with sensors to measure water temperature. Others carry receivers that allow researchers to count how many make it out of the ship canal. And still others get receivers to measure the number that make it to spawning grounds. You can even watch a 30-second movie of them passing through the Locks. No doubt by next year, biologists will be giving them salmon-friendly i-pods.

But while researchers are predicting that 400,000 sockeye will swim through Seattle's urban heart this summer, they are increasingly worried about another major die-off, like the one that happened last year when roughly 200,000 salmon mysteriously died between the Locks and the spawning beds. The best available explanation is unseasonably warm water temperatures that resulted from warmer-than-average weather.

The route from the locks to the lake is thick with urban perils. But most problematic for the cold-water loving fish: the way is often shallow, narrow, and warm; and that warmth can weaken immune their systems and even kill the salmon outright. In fact, new research finds that Lake Washington surface-water temps have risen by about 4 degrees in the last 35 years; and most of that increase is attributed to hotter air. It's not surprising then that three of the four biggest salmon die-offs between the locks and the spawning grounds have occurred since 2000.

The sockeye, which may be suffering the effects of global warming, are Seattle's canaries in the coal mine of climate change. (If by canaries you mean fish, and by coal mine you mean waterways. But whatever.)

If you think we haven't made progress, consider what happened in south Puget Sound in 1976.

One day in March, collectors from Sea World were using powerboats, planes, and explosives to trap orcas in a small inlet where they could be netted. (Although capturing wild killer whales was still legal at that time, the aquarium was violating the terms of their permit.) Luckily for the whales, the scene was witnessed by future secretary of state Ralph Munro, who at the time was an aide to Governor Dan Evans.

Munro, Evans, and Slade Gorton (then attorney general, later US senator) unleashed a legal and PR barrage that resulted in all the whales being released back into Puget Sound, which became a sanctuary for whales. That year finally marked a turning point in the long steady decline of the Northwest's orcas.

By 1976, only 70 killer whales remained in the southern resident population, which is estimated to have once numbered between 200 and 300 animals. The three pods of southern residents--J, K, and L--spend most of their lives in the inland marine waters of Washington and southern British Columbia. They are not the only orcas in the Northwest, but they are the best-loved because they are the best-known. It is the southern residents that make surprise winter appearances in Seattle and delight boatloads of summer tourists in the San Juan Islands. (A larger population of northern residents inhabits northern BC and southeast Alaska; and populations of "transient" and "offshore" orcas roam both coastal and inland waters.)

Northwesterners' fondness for the whales today belies our past callousness to them. It was common practice for fishermen, who viewed the orcas as competition, to shoot the whales. In fact, the Canadian armed forces may even have used orcas for target practice in the 1940s--it was probably considered a public service to kill the predators.

But strict protection measures in the 1970s began to change things. Slowly but surely killer whale numbers began to recover. By 1995, the southern residents counted 98 members, nearly a 30 percent increase in two decades. [Click on the chart at right for a closer look at population trends.]

Not that the threats are past--far from it.