Daily Score Blog

New wolf census numbers from US Fish and Wildlife show another year of astonishing growth--a 20 percent increase. The population now stands at 1,229 in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. And pioneer wolves are now re-claiming their territories in Washington, Oregon, and Utah.

The Rocky Mountain wolf re-introduction program is surely one of the most encouraging success stories in the history of US conservation. The best thing we can do for wolves, it seems, it simply to leave them alone and give them room to recover--making the West a little wilder and healthier in the process.

When we started our family experiment in car-lessness seven months ago, David Sucher at City Comforts blog commented

All I ask is that they [us Durnings, that is] don't pull punches. Don't make their recounting of the experience a political tract about how much happier they are and how the world is so much better because they don't have a car. In other words, tell the truth. Tell us the good and the bad. . . . Tell us when they miss the car, too.

When I read that, I thought, “Exactly, David!”

Yet it’s been hard to write a post about the lows of car-lessness. I’ve been keeping a diary specifically on the drags and dregs of this experiment since the beginning. I’ve been trying without success to write on the subject almost as long.

My writer’s block, I believe, originates in my belief that interesting writing depends on new information, on unexpected lessons. And there’s little surprising about the downsides of car-lessness.

The lows of car-lessness are what you’d expect: episodes of bad weather, bad transit connections, bad health, bad karma. These lows are relatively rare, because we live in a compact community with fairly good transit and plenty of FlexCars on call. And lows strike the car-ful, too: traffic jams, car trouble, crashes, wrong turns, fuel bills.

Whether the lows of car-lessness are worse or more numerous than the lows of car-fulness is the subject for another day. Today, I just want to go on record to declare that car-lessness is definitely sometimes the pits. To answer David’s plea for naked honesty, I’ll recount a few anecdotes.

Being car-less has stunk . . .

[This is part of a series.]

New items are coming in faster than I can keep pace with. But here are a few gems...

In Washington, a group of developers and affordable housing advocates released a report arguing that I-933 would severely impair efforts to supply decent affordable housing.

In a similar vein, David Horsey, at the Seattle P-I, has a clever cartoon in today's paper.

Researchers at the University of Washington released a new study estimating the costs of I-933. The price tag for compensation, around $8 billion, is very similar to the estimate from the state's Office of Financial Management. Advocates for I-933 claim the study was biased, but a good article in the Seattle Times questions that claim's veracity--two of the lawyers working on the UW study are also legal advisers to the Building Industry Association of Washington, which is supporting I-933.

(Ever-astute commenter Dan has argued that the compensation price doesn't matter because communities will waive laws, rather than pay compensation. That's what's happened in Oregon. It's a fair point. But it's also worth noting, as the UW study's authors did, that there's actually no authority, in I-933 or elsewhere, to waive the laws. So Washington communities would be in a bit of a legal pickle. And the high price tag does matter in at least one way: it essentially forces the legislature to overturn important laws or face financial disaster.)

Lastly, the California Farm Bureau, which is opposing Proposition 90, released a short but scorching critique of that state's ballot measure. The reasoning applies well to the measures in other states too.