Daily Score Blog

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?

Via smarter folks, a nifty illustration that GDP isn't all that matters in life.  For all of the phenomenal productivity in the US economy (and, for that matter, Canada's), we're among the world's laggards when it comes to providing paid vacation (pdf link).

Sorry, that image is kind of hard to read -- but the upshot is that the United States is the only industrial democracy that doesn't guarantee full-time workers any annual paid leave.  Japan, second worst among the nations studied, assures its workers at least 10 paid leave days per year; and Canada, third worst among the nations studied, assures 18 days between holidays and vacation.

To be clear:  most US workers do, in fact, get some paid leave.  In fact, if you look at national averages, workers with a few decades of tenure under their belts work their way up getting 18 or 19 days off a year.  Of course, that's rougly Canada's minimum allotment of paid time off; and Canada is pretty sorry by international standards.

So really:  what good is all that productivity if you don't get time off to enjoy it?

Via Tidepool, some incredibly disappointing news.

Endangered spotted owls in British Columbia have fallen to such critically low levels that the provincial government has been advised to capture all the remaining birds in "a triage approach to conservation," so that a zoo-based breeding program can be started.

BC does a lot of things right, in our view.  But apparently, protecting owl habitat ain't one of them.

This is outside of my usual geekery beat, but it fascinates me nonetheless: an excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. I haven't read the whole book yet, so I can't necessarily recommend it.  (Caveat lector.)  But the excerpt is great, discussing, among other topics, how the manipulation of public opinion has been turned into a science.

A key anecdote from the former veep:

I vividly remember a turning point in [my first] Senate campaign when my opponent...was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%.

I bet that it's actually pretty unusual for public opinion projections to be so spot on. Most polls have a margin of error of at least 3 percent, so Gore's experience is probably a bit of  a fluke. Still, it's an interesting illustration of what seems to be Gore's larger point: manipulating public opinion via television advertising is a science -- but it ain't rocket science. It's actually pretty straightforward.

And the unfortunate result is that, with television being the dominant "information" source for most people, it's astonishly easy to substitute emotion for reason and evidence in public discourse. 

Hey, that sounds a lot like the climate debate for the past couple of decades, no?

Oregon appears set to join California, Washington, and Montana in requiring that insurance plans cover prescription contraceptives. The Oregonian reports.

The state senate approved the contraceptive coverage bill yesterday, following the state house's earlier approval. The governor has said he'll sign it.

The result will be to add another large group of Cascadian women to the ranks of those for whom sticker price won't be a deciding factor in choosing the best form of contraception.

The law applies to health insurance plans that provide prescription drug coverage, requiring that such plans include prescription contraceptives such as the pill.

Laws like this one reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, because they enable more couples to use the most effective forms of contraception. That means, more children are born wanted.