Daily Score Blog

Update 6/5/07: A couple of changes made to the orginal post.

When Measure 37 was up for a vote in 2004, supporters claimed that Oregon's planning laws were so draconian that they reduced property values by $5.4 billion per year. That eye-popping figure may be one of the central reasons why voters were inclined to support the measure. (Voter support has since severely evaporated.) As it turns out, however, that $5.4 billion cost to Oregon's property owners was a chimera.

To unveil the $5.4 billion illusion, Georgetown University's Law Center just published a rigorous empirical study of trends in Oregon property values and found that all those land-use regulations have cost, well, not much at all. In fact, they may have added value, at least on average.

I won't walk blog readers through the whole study, but the Georgetown report should be required reading for those following the issue closely: it represents by far the best-researched examination of the question to date.

Perhaps the most damning finding is one of the simplest: a comparison between property values in Oregon and other states from 1965 to 2005. As it turns out, Oregon's highly-regulated property slightly outperformed values in neighboring California and Washington, though it lagged Idaho by a little. Oregon also outperformed the national average.  

1. Blue lanes.

(Photo courtesy of Jayson Antonoff, International Sustainable Solutions.)

 My youngest son often bikes to drama rehearsals. It’s about three miles, mostly on traffic-calmed neighborhood streets and a bike trail—pretty good bikeways, overall. The only parts I worry about are the intersections where he has to cross especially busy streets, like six-lane Highway 99.

 Oregonians share my concern about crossing big roads on two wheels: they told the state’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance that unsafe intersection crossings are the biggest barrier to cycling (pdf). On many routes, and particularly for children, busy intersections are the weakest links in Cascadia’s emerging bikeway network.

 One cure is Blue Lanes. Pioneered in the cycling meccas of northern Europe, they are bicycle lanes through intersections boldly painted to demarcate which road space is reserved for pedal power. Typically, they’re accompanied by traffic signals specifically for cyclists. The city of Portland has installed ten blue lanes to date.

Not in our bioregion, but interesting anyway:  the L.A. Times opines that carbon taxes would work better than a cap-and-trade system:

A carbon tax simply imposes a tax for polluting based on the amount emitted, thus encouraging polluters to clean up and entrepreneurs to come up with alternatives. The tax is constant and predictable. It doesn't require the creation of a new energy trading market, and it can be collected by existing state and federal agencies. It's straightforward and much harder to manipulate by special interests than the politicized process of allocating carbon credits.

Note: that's their opinion, not mine.  As for me, I'm confused, and desperately trying to figure out how I feel about carbon taxes vs. cap and trade vs. auctioned credits vs. who-knows-what-else.  It's really, really important stuff, but also (obviously) complicated.

So, dear reader:  if you have any comments or preferences you'd like to share here, please do!  I'll promise to read and respond to every one.

Apparently, the California legislature is considering feebates to make new cars and trucks more fuel-efficient.  Go, Cali!

You can read more about feebates here.  It's a pretty awesome idea:  people who buy gas guzzlers pay a fee, which gets rebated to people who buy gas misers.  If it works right, it can be even more effective than CAFE standards and the like, because there's no limit to how efficient the cars will get:  the feebates provide a perpetual incentive for greater fuel-efficiency.

Sightline (among many others) has been touting feebates for at least a decade.  But -- as has been typical in recent years -- California's the first out of the blocks in this part of the world in giving them a serious airing.  I don't mean to downplay what Washington and Oregon have been doing recently on energy policy; but do we always have to play follow the leader when it comes to climate change?

Please, if you have some spare time -- or are bored with work after a nice long weekend away -- skim this (pdf link) report on economic mobility in the US. Or at least see the charts and summary over at Washington Monthly.

But if you really don't have time, here are the key points:

• Americans move up and down the economic ladder far less than is commonly believed -- and much, much less than residents of Northern Europe. (Apparently, Horatio Alger isn't dead, he's just moved to Denmark.)
• On average, American men today earn less than their fathers did, after adjusting for inflation. Families earn a bit more, but only because they're more likely to have two wage earners. (Yes, yes, I know that measuring inflation over long periods is tricky. Still, it was much easier a generation ago to raise a family on a single income than it is today.)
• Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for years, even though the economy has grown far more productive. At this point, when the economy "grows," only the very well-off see much benefit.
  

The interesting thing to me about this report is that it's not from the usual suspects.  The Economic Mobility Project includes researchers from the Urban Institute, who've been saying this stuff for years; but also from The Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, which...um...aren't typically thought of as economic rabble-rousers.

A belated heads-up: You have *two* opportunities to see Sightline researchers/bloggers on TV today.

It's been mostly buried by the acrimonious debate over the Iraq War supplemental that Congress just passed, but attached to that spending bill is the first minimum wage hike since 1997. The boost to $7.25 per hour will affect about 13 million workers nationwide. President Bush has said he'll sign it. It's good news.

But unfortunately, Congress also missed a huge opportunity to do what Washington and Oregon have been doing for years: index the minimum wage to inflation. It's not rocket science, but it's surprisingly easy to forget this little verity: if your wage stays constant, but inflation occurs, you're really and truly getting a pay cut.

To see what I mean, take a look at the history of the US minimum wage from 1960 to 2009.

Pretty sweet deal for workers, huh?

Now take a look at the same trend, with inflation factored in. [Wages are expressed in 2006 dollars; the red dot is the current wage.]

Not so groovy, is it?

The only fair remedy is to index the minimum wage to inflation. That way the lowest paid workers won't be subjected to the fickle whims of politicians. Those whims can be tough, by the way: Congress just ended the longest stretch of not raising the wage -- thereby effectively decreasing it every year -- since the minimum wage was enacted in 1938.

In an undeniable rush, corporate giants are jumping on the “green” bandwagon: Wal-mart, Ford, Dow, General Electric, British Petroleum, Chevron, DuPont, to name only a few. “There's a tendency to put a green smiley face on everything,” says Joel Makower, author of The Green Consumer. And smiley faces are rearing their heads all over the place. “We use our waste CO2 to grow flowers,” claims a Shell Oil ad.

Right…

But, the concept isn’t new. In 1999, "greenwash" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as: "Disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image." Naturally, green branding breeds even greener skeptics.

There are plenty of arguments for why this is inherently bad, especially if it’s just lip service – or worse, polishing up the public image of big polluters or convincing people that an environmental problem is being solved by industry when it isn't.

On the other hand, if huge corporate ad campaigns help cultivate a green-conscious public that doesn't stop at voting with their dollars but also votes its greenness at the ballot box, we have a better chance of moving sustainable policies forward. Greenwashing, for all the ire it raises among the truly green, might have long term political benefits.

Get this: not spending tax dollars to build a parking garage is "social engineering," according to a column in today's P-I.

Go figure.

The Vancouver Sun has the scoop.  First, the city of Vancouver just released a draft "eco-density" plan that sounds, at least to my ears, like exactly the right way deal with the city's expected population increase:

Vancouver should put high-density housing next to its major parks and along every one of its major streets, suggests the first draft of Vancouver's ecodensity charter, released today.

The city should also close down some roads to cars and require developers to include solar power, rainwater collection, and laundry drying facilities in any new project...

The over-arching idea [is that]Vancouver needs to redefine what it means to be livable city.

Progressive stuff -- and likely to solidify the city's first place status as the most energy-efficient, transit-oriented metropolis in the Northwest.

And then, on forests:

Victoria intends to remake the coastal forest industry with a new set of policies aimed at shifting harvesting away from old-growth forests to second-growth, Forests Minister Rich Coleman said Wednesday.

Forest management -- particularly, the industry's long-time policy of encouraging old-growth clearcuts -- has been a bete noir of BC's environmental policy.  The new plan may have its flaws -- but still, it seems to herald a shift away from logging pristine coastal forests.  And that has to count as good news.

Last week, Flexcar stationed one of its hundreds of hourly car-share vehicles outside our house. So, there’s now often a car sitting at the curb that we can use.

Are we still car-less?

By our definition, yes. For my family, “car-less” never meant anything beyond not owning a car. Some people have misunderstood, thinking we’ve made a pledge not to drive (and teasing us for “cheating” when we do drive). We’re happy to drive; we just don’t own.

We don’t own the Flexcar. We didn’t pay anything to put it there (though we and our neighbors did ask for it). And it’s not standing by waiting for us. It’s shared with thousands of other Flexcar members, any of whom can reserve it for any period.

Still, it’s available to us a sizable fraction of the time. And when it is, it’s right there, staring us in the face—offering a private, door-to-door, non-aerobic ride, and the pleasures of a good radio.

New York, which is probably the most energy-efficient city in North America, is taking things to a new level. Mayor Bloomberg is planning to convert the city's entire fleet of 13,000 cabs to hybrids -- or at least drastically improve their fuel efficiency.

Wow. That's a far cry from what's happening here in the Northwest. Take Seattle, for example. We scarcely even have cab service, much less an all green fleet.

First, I should note that taxis -- even the old Crown Vics -- can be a smart environmental choice. That's because when cabs are plentiful and reliable, it's easy to opt out of car ownership. And that means folks can travel many fewer miles by car, and thereby burn many fewer gallons of gasoline.

So you might imagine that that we'd want more cabs. But no. Seattle limits the number of cabs to just 667. Why? Because that's what the city council decided 17 years ago.

Never mind that the city has changed since 1990, when the taxi limits went into place. Population has grown by more than 12 percent. Density has increased too. And civic leaders have promised to reduce both driving and greenhouse gas emissions. But in an act of industry protectionism (or maybe social engineering?) the city won't allow more cabs.

There's little sign that the ice is cracking. Even after a raft of recent complaints -- here's a hilarious one -- about awful wait times and unreliable service, the city may allow a few more cab stands. Oh, and whopping 24 more taxis, a 3.6 percent increase.

 As they say in New York: "oy vey." 

Ok, I'm whining. But the obsession with paper vs. plastic shopping bags just plain bugs me.

As The Oregonian's Michael Milstein correctly points out: both paper and plastic have their pros and cons. Plastic has some surprising environmental advantages (more here), but also some unexpected drawbacks, including gumming up recycling equipment -- which makes it hard to figure out which option is actually worse in practice. But, quite clearly, reusing bags you already have is better than asking for a new one.

The thing is, we already know all this. What's more, we've known it for decades.

And (heresy alert!) the truth is that this is that paper-vs-plastic is an astonishingly low-priority issue.

Despite record-setting gas prices, US drivers haven't changed their gas-guzzling habits, says AP. Not only are we consuming as much as we always have, new vehicle sales seem to be tilting even more in favor of trucks than cars.

But wait, USA Today disagrees. They say that drivers are, in fact, starting to cut back on how much they drive -- a clear sign that higher gas prices are starting to bite.

Who's right?

Who cares! Either way, the consumer response to massive increases in gas prices has been fairly tiny. New studies are suggesting, in fact, that gas prices are even feebler in motivating changes in driving behavior than they used to be. It's not hard to guess at some reasons why.  Gas is still incredibly cheap compared with our incomes (even 18 cents a mile is a bargain!). And more importantly, we've designed our cities and our lives so that many of us have no choice but to drive.

Which brings me to the last bit of news, this time from north of the border.  Apparently, Vancouver, BC has had a huge surge in transit ridership as gas prices have gone up.  Vancouver is already the Northwest's transit leader, and the latest surge is likely to put them even further ahead.

Which suggests, perhaps, that the key to helping people cope with rising gas prices is to foster compact neighborhoods where cost-effective transit is an option.  In Vancouver, many people have a choice if they don't want to pay for gas -- they can take a bus or a train. Unfortunately, not all of us are so lucky.

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide “walking lane” painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?

Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at “walk?! in traffic?!”

Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for pedestrians in most of Cascadia, but it’s not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.

Cascadians react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don’t. "It’s not safe" is what the overwhelming majority of northwesterners say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it’s safer than most assume—on which, more another day.)

So what would Cascadia's cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?