Daily Score Blog

That's the Vancouver Sun headline from reporter Chad Skelton's front-page story on Cascadia Scorecard 2006, Sightline's third annual progress report on the Northwest.

The Seattle P-I also covered the book, in the paper's Health & Fitness section, as did the Surrey Leader in BC; the Daily Journal of  Commerce in Portland and the DJC in Seattle (both require subscriptions to access content); Oregon's KTVZ; and a slew of radio stations.  We're expecting a couple more articles in the next couple of days.

Price Tags author Gordon Price has included the Cascadia Scorecard in his Earth Blog dispatches from the World Urban Forum.

If you've heard or read news about the new Cascadia Scorecard, please drop me a line at elisa@sightline.org.

Random factoid from a recent New Yorker article (not online, unfortunately) on, among other topics, the international shipping business:

For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation.  And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading. [Emphasis added.]

Wow:  shipping shoes all the way across the Pacific accounts for well under 2 percent of their retail price.  And most of the transportation costs cover things other than fuel: labor, rent, financing, etc.

So for finished goods shipped over long distances, the fuel costs of transportation are probably not much more than a rounding error.

Editor's note: Cascadia Scorecard 2006 was just released! This year's focus is on the many connections between community design and health. Go to the press page for a full press kit and regional scorecards, look at new maps (pdf); read about our top solutions for health (pdf), or order or download a copy. And please let us know if you hear or see media coverage about the book (email elisa@sightline.org).

It makes intuitive sense that living in a community that encourages walking--with sidewalks, good street connections, and homes that are close to shops and services--would make you active and healthier. 

As Cascadia Scorecard 2006: Focus on Sprawl and Health, Sightline's just-released annual progress report,  points out, such communities are also safer. Residents who live in a compact community have significantly less chance of dying in a car crash--not because they're better drivers, but because they drive less. (And car crashes, of course, are Cascadia's leading killer of young people.)

And they also tend to weigh less and have less risk of chronic diseases associated with obesity.

Go the press page for pdfs and fact sheets about the new research. But for a quick take, here are my top ten facts from the new Scorecard:

1. Mile for mile, taking transit is more than 10 times safer than driving a car.

2. Each fatal car crash corresponds to about $5.2 million in direct economic costs.

On Friday, CNN spent 7 hours following Amy and me around, and interviewing our kids, about living on a low-car diet. The resulting 2.5-minute segment appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 on Monday.

And you can watch the clip online on CNN's technology page. (Look in the green box on the right side of the page called "Watch Free Video." Look for the story, "Save the planet, ditch your car." Oh, and if anyone can tell me the permalink for the clip, I'll happily post it.)

Thanks to Jenny Frankel-Reed for finding the clip.

UPDATE: CNN's web staff suggested trying this direct link.

UPDATE 2: CNN has also blogged on the story, sparking a lot of comments from the public.