Daily Score Blog

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?

New state-level income and poverty data just released today by the US Census Bureau. I've just begun playing with the numbers. But before I get too immersed in the spreadsheets, here's a look at how Cascadian states have fared over the last years for which data is available.

The skinny is that incomes are up, but poverty is up too. (As far as I can tell, the income figures are not adjusted for inflation, so they may not represent real gains.) Of course, these figures are just stats-based estimates, so it's wise not to draw too many conclusions.

Nevertheless, it is telling that all 5 states mimicked the national trend: rising incomes and rising poverty.

Median household incomes

They say that confession is good for the soul.  Here's mine: I'm entering into my sixth winter in my current house, but I only got around to insulating my furnace and ductwork over the last few weeks. I hadn't even insulated my furnace manifold -- the place where all the hot air collects before being blown through the ducts to the rest of the house -- which I understand is the most cost-effective place to insulate.

So much for my "green" credentials.  I can't even hold a candle to this guy.

You see, I kept putting off the insulation job, thinking that we'd replace our clunky old gas furnace and oddly-placed ductwork with a new, super-efficient system before even a modest investment in insulation would pay for itself.  That was, quite clearly, nuts:  by now, the money I would have saved on heating bills would have paid for a nice downpayment towards an efficient furnace. 

Surprisingly -- to me at least -- the payback has been immediate, and not just to my peace of mind.  Even if I don't save a penny overall, the house is more comfortable now.  We don't set the thermostat any higher, but our home seems warmer, with less temperature variation between the overly-toasty rooms and the chilly ones.  (And we had a lot of variation for such a modest house.)

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.

Good news on the smart-growth front: Seattle's mayor is working on a pilot program to legalize granny flats in southeast Seattle.

Currently residents of single-family neighborhoods can't rent out extra space they may have in "detached accessory dwelling units", such as an apartment above their garage, although basement apartments are legal.

Granny flats provide a variety of benefits. They increase density, supporting better transit and more services for the neighborhood. They increase the housing supply and create affordable housing in the city. They can give homeowners a source of income to help with the mortgage. And, with kids returning to the nest post-college and aging parents needing more care, they provide extra space with a degree of privacy.

The program would limit the impact on neighbors by requiring one off-street parking space per unit and restricting the size of the new units. Reactions to a demonstration project in Magnolia, in which a wheelchair-bound resident added an apartment for a future live-in nurse, were very positive: 65 percent of surveyed neighbors rated the project "good". While some are worried that allowing rental granny flats will turn neighborhoods into "ghettos," (huh!?) that doesn't seem to be the case in cities that already allow them, such as Mercer Island, Kirkland, and Redmond.

It may come as a bit of a surprise:  despite rising gas prices over the past few years, total consumption of highway fuels in the US has actually increased, rather than fallen.  Some have seized on this phenomenon -- prices and consumption rising in tandem -- to suggest that changes in gas prices have no discernible effect on how much gas we actually use. 

The idea that gas prices have no effect on consumption doesn't accord with economic theory, to put it mildly.  And this Excel spreadsheet (courtesy of Charles Komanoff and the ever-informative Todd Litman) sheds some light on what's really going on.  Apparently, even as US gas prices have risen, so have population and GDP.  And GDP growth tends to push consumption levels up -- in fact, over the short term, gas consumption seems to be more responsive to changes in GDP than to changes in prices.

The spreadsheet tries to tease apart the two competing forces, and finds that -- all else being equal -- each 10 percent rise in gas prices is, in fact, accompanied by a 1 percent decline in gasoline sales within a year. Which suggests that, had gas prices remained stable over the past few years, consumption would have risen even faster than it did.

It should come as little surprise that, over short time horizons, substantial gas price hikes only reduce sales a small amount.  People have only so much flexibility to reduce their gas consumption over the short term -- a fact that economists have understood for years. 

But what remains to be seen is whether a sustained increase in gas prices will be accompanied by deeper declines in sales, as people begin to change houses, jobs, or cars to account for higher transportation costs.  That's what economists predict will happen; but  we'll just have to wait to see how well reality matches up with theory.

Editor's note: Guest contributor Hans Peter Meyer writes on community development issues from Courtenay, British Columbia.

Saturday, November 19, is local government election day in British Columbia.

It's too late to nominate anyone, and it's too late to really organize. By the time British Columbians read this, there won't be much left to do but vote for whoever you think has the vision and the energy to put the pieces in place for a more 'livable,' more 'sustainable' future.

Why does local government matter? Joy Leach once said of her experience as Mayor of Naniamo, one of Vancouver Island's biggest municipalities, "Local government is the Hell's Kitchen of sustainability." It's at local council tables and regional board meetings that so many of the big issues become real. Garbage. Sewage. Town design for cars, bikes, pedestrians, and buses. Development applications to spread expensive infrastructure, or 'intensify' populations and reduce the ecological footprint. These are the nuts and bolts of community sustainability.

Some changes seem to take place overnight: All of a sudden there's a $1M highway connector between two small towns. Or a huge box store in the middle of prime agricultural land. But in fact, these land use decisions were made years, even decades before anything happens on the ground. Someone put the pieces in place so that when the time was ripe, the plan and the action unfolded.

We need people in local government willing to put the pieces in place for healthier communities and neighbourhoods in 10, 25, and 50 years.

An interesting bit of local history in the Seattle P-I.

By 1892 Seattle was crisscrossed with 48 miles of electric railway and 22 miles of cable railway, stretching from Georgetown to Ballard. According to state historian Walter Crowley, the construction of the streetcar routes segued into smart new development:

...developers platted new neighborhoods clustered around compact business districts at street railway intersections, built broad avenues such as Westlake, Madison and 15th Northwest, and opened attractive parks at Golden Gardens, Alki Beach and Guy Phinney's former Woodland Estate to lure residents and riders.

Unfortunately, the streetcar city was not long for this world. After losing money for years the city bought the lines--under circumstances so suspicious that a grand jury authorized an investigation. The city eventually ceded authority to the state and by 1941 Seattle was without streetcars, ushering in an era of auto-dominated transportation, with a small emphasis on buses.

And in that short history are a number of explanations for our current transportation problems.

Brookings scholar Eugenie Birch has an interesting paper on trends in downtown living in 44 major US cities between 1970 and 2000 -- finding that, on average, downtown homeownership, educational levels, and racial and ethnic diversity all increased over the period.  Also -- and unsurprisingly -- downtown residents tend to be younger than they used to be.  City living apparently developed a cachet among the 25-to-34 age demographic that it didn't have 30 years before. 

The worst news -- but also unsurprising -- is that downtowns are economically stratified, with some downtown census tracts having particularly high incomes, and others with particularly low incomes.

But most relevant to the Northwest is this:  in percentage terms, Seattle ranked second of all 44 cities in downtown population growth.  As a whole, the city of Seattle grew 7 percent total in 3 decades -- a fairly slow pace of growth.  But the downtown population grew by 86 percent.  Similarly, Portland ranks sixth on the list for downtown growth, with a population increase of 56 percent since 1970.  Meanwhile, Boise's downtown population fell by a quarter -- which is a bit of a surprise, given how quickly the city is growing. Overall, only 15 of the 44 cities saw their downtown populations increase between 1970 and 2000 -- this despite a fairly widespread increase in downtown populations in the 1990s.

NARAL Pro Choice America is supporting a bill in Congress to force FDA off the fence on Plan B. (Via TomPaine.com)

The bill is dubbed "Plan B for Plan B."

(Oh, and about the title, we've already used  "Plan B for Plan B" and "Plan C for Plan B," which left us with "Plan D . . . ")

The saga of malfeasance at the Food and Drug Administration over the emergency contraceptive Plan B just keeps getting worse, as detailed in today's New York Times. (Find earlier episodes here.)

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigatory arm of Congress, has released its report on how FDA has handled Barr Pharmaceuticals' application to sell Plan B over the counter.

The findings are damning. Among them:

• Well before FDA scientists had evaluated Plan B, according to GAO, four senior FDA officials were told by their superiors that Plan B would be rejected.
• Top FDA officials intervened in agency decisionmaking, overriding the recommendations of expert review panels and agency scientists, in ways that were "very, very rare."
• The rationale given for overruling those scientists was "unprecedented."
• All of former agency administrator Dr. Mark B. McClellan's emails and other correspondence about Plan B were destroyed, in apparent violation of federal rules.

GAO is notoriously careful in its wording. So it wouldn't be unreasonable at this point to read into these carefully modulated terms official confirmation of our worst suspicions: the Bush Administration's appointees at the FDA ignored the science and ran roughshod over one the most respected and impartial federal agencies to placate its political base. Then it launched a cover up.

Are we getting close to the territory reserved for special prosecutors?

I make these strong charges without partisan rancor. The intensity of my indignation is fired by the knowledge that ready access to emergency contraception reduces both the abortion rate and the teen birth rate. Every month that passes without over-the-counter emergency contraception means more unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies lead overwhelmingly to abortions, which--no matter how strongly you support the right to choose--are no one's idea of a public good. To a lesser degree, they lead to births--births of babies who tend to be poorly cared for and at great risk for all manner of ills. And these unwanted pregnancies all could have been prevented with emergency contraception.

As if that tragic waste weren't enough, there is the horrifying prospect of a thoroughly politicized FDA. Let your imagination extend this precedent from emergency contraception to all manner of other pharmaceuticals and, I suspect, you'll share my deep concern.

In February of this year, in Cascadia Scorecard 2005, we argued for an innovation in state utility rules called "decoupling." The idea has since made impressive strides; and the next great advance may come in, of all places, Yakima, Washington. (More on that in a moment.)

In a nutshell, decoupling is a way to allow electric and gas utilities to prosper by helping their customers to save money. Utilities are not like other companies. Their profits are dictated by state utility regulators, based on complicated formulas. Since profits rise with sales, investments in improving efficiency can drain away profits. By decoupling sales from earnings, however, utility regulators can write Cascadia's long-term energy efficiency into utilities' bottom lines and turn utilities--precisely the organizations that have the requisite know-how and capital-- into vanguards of clean energy.

This just in: the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) just announced that it will list as endangered the southern resident orcas--the whales most commonly seen in Puget Sound. The NMFS decision came as something of a surprise because the agency had first declined to protect the orcas under the law. Then, following a court order to reconsider that decision, they proposed listing the whales as "threatened," a weaker standard under the law.

Today's listing--which affirms that the orcas are indeed at risk of extinction--is nothing short of a huge victory for conservationists. Though orca populations have been on the rebound lately, there is still much cause for concern because of the daunting array of threats that they face, everything from anemic salmon runs to marine vessel traffic to toxic contamination.

The effects of the listing remain to be seen, but orca restoration will finally get the attention that it deserves. No doubt preserving the southern resident orcas will require changes to the way that we northwesterners act on our native ecology. But I suspect those changes will be good not only for the orcas--they'll be good for us too. Or as my favorite author once wrote:

Restoring [Puget] Sound is good for whales, but it is also quite clearly good for those other inhabitants of the Puget Sound region -- people. As the top predators of a diverse food web, the orcas embody the fate of the entire Sound. Their growing numbers are a promising sign that we can successfully improve ecological conditions, not only for the orcas but for us too. Cleansing the Sound of toxics and bringing back its abundance of salmon will take work but there is plenty of evidence that we can do it.

Read the NMFS press release (pdf). Media coverage here and here.

Today's Seattle Times summarizes the findings of a long-term study of how exercise improves health:

People who engaged in moderate activity -- the equivalent of walking for 30 minutes a day for five days a week -- lived about 1.3 to 1.5 years longer than those who were less active. Those who took on more intense exercise -- the equivalent of running half an hour a day for five days every week -- extended their lives by about 3.5 to 3.7 years, the researchers found.

In other words, sloth kills, and even moderate exercise can lead to a longer, healthier life.  Which is something to keep in mind next time you're in the market for a place to live -- choosing a home where it's as convenient to walk to the store as to drive could actually save your life.

Editor's note: This is one of a series of posts from guest contributor Richard Feldman, regional organizer for the Washington arm of the Apollo Alliance; and executive director of the Worker Center, the economic and workforce development division of the King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Every 20 minutes outside my home in Seattle, a vehicle quietly swishes by that uses not one drop of foreign oil for fuel and emits zero greenhouse gases. What is this wondrous vehicle? It's a King County Metro electric trolley bus, powered by electrical fuel from Seattle City Light, now the first major utility in the U.S. to achieve no "net emissions" of greenhouse gases.

Electricity for transportation? In Seattle, we take it for granted--almost to the point of not thinking about it as an alternative fuel. But electricity could play a much greater role in moving the Northwest to energy independence and reducing tailpipe pollutants. Unlike a hydrogen future, which will require massive investments in fueling infrastructure, electrical infrastructure is pervasive and in place right now.

For example, we could expand the electric bus trolley system. Or make any of the proposed bus rapid transit corridors electric. We could electrify our ports. Oregon's Climate Trust has paid for truckstop electrification; substituting electric grid power for diesel idling. RailPower is making hybrid switcher locomotives powered off a large bank of batteries (it's currently recharged by a small diesel, but in the future perhaps it could be plugged into the grid for recharging).

And on the passenger vehicle front, we could promote plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs) until the automakers start producing them. PHEVs are like some current hybrids but with larger batteries and the ability to re-charge conveniently, so local travel of 20 to 60 miles is electric, yet the vehicle has unlimited range. PHEVs drop gasoline consumption by 60 to 80 percent relative to conventional vehicles across all classes from compacts to full-size SUVs. (See chart below, from ET Currents.)