Daily Score Blog

Cascadia’s largest private car insurer—Seattle-based Safeco—has finally announced its first entry into the world of on-board automotive infotech. And it’s not a new insurance plan. It’s a GPS device which, for $15 a month, will notify parents when their teenagers go too fast, too far, or the wrong place. You can now sign up for the service here.

If you’re aghast, well, I’m not surprised. It may make teens feel they’re wearing radio collars. But car crashes cause more than a third of deaths to teens, as the Seattle Times noted in its coverage of Safeco’s new offering. So I’m not against this service, dubbed Teensurance. In fact, I might have considered signing up, if my teenage son hadn’t totaled the family car sixteen months ago, launching us into car-lessness. And, judging only by my own reactions, I’m guessing the commercial market for teen tracking may be robust.

The privacy issues aren’t really what I want to talk about, and I doubt that Teensurance is Safeco’s intended endpoint. The endpoint is pay-as-you-drive insurance, and what impresses me is Safeco’s cleverness.

When it comes to attitudes about climate change, seeing really is believing. The death and destruction left in Hurricane Katrina’s wake prompted public opinion about the reality of global warming to spike (the percent of Americans who believe it's happening stands at about 85), not to mention concerns that we might actually see the effects of climate change in our lifetimes – instead of way off in the far distant future.

Yesterday, Pew released a new study that shows Americans’ climate concerns are on the rise again. This is likely due in part to all kinds of crazy weather we've been seeing lately. From The Independent:

There has been a double-digit increase in the proportion of Americans who say environmental problems are a major global threat - from 23 per cent to 37 per cent [since 2002], according to a comprehensive survey published this week by the Pew Center in Washington.

The environment is increasingly in the news in the US, thanks to violent and unusual weather patterns - mainly floods and severe drought - combined with the rising cost of petrol. The past few days have seen dramatic rainfall across the southern states. More than a foot of rain fell across central Texas and Oklahoma yesterday, with more storms predicted.

*Update: Newer and better versions of  these maps are here.

Ever wondered if your state's climate policy really makes a difference in the big global scheme of things?  If so, here's a little map I made.

For each state, the map shows a nation with equivalent greenhouse gas emissions from energy.

The full US version is here.

When I've shown drafts to people, almost everyone wants to compare populations. The Western states population comparison is after the jump. The full data are here (xls).

Meet Justin our new research intern. He recently moved to Capitol Hill, in Seattle, from Corvallis, Oregon, where he got a Master’s Degree studying the effects of climate change on forest productivity, and where he tried to spend as much time outdoors as possible. 

There has already been a mess of state climate legislation passed in Cascadia during 2007. But who has the time to make sense of all those targets, standards, and dates? (Who’s promising 10% below 1990 levels by 2020? How does Idaho compare to California? And wasn’t there some kind of renewable energy standard?) Well never fear, because I’ve sorted it all out in this nifty table. You can see how your state (or province) stacks up.

Full version here.

The upshot is that Cascadian lawmakers are trying to follow California’s lead on regulating greenhouse gas emissions. In the 2007 legislative session, both Oregon and Washington passed statewide goals for reducing GHGs. It was a good first step to establish a framework, and the goals themselves are ambitious. But ultimately, they’re only that: goals. Unfortunately, they don’t include binding enforcement mechanisms. Only California did that, with its AB 32 bill.

This one's for all the nerds who wonder where the US gets its energy -- and what it's used for. Behold:

Click the image to get a bigger, even more succulent version. (And thanks, Matt, for the heads up.)

Some interesting factoids follow:

A few weeks ago I wrote about an alarming discovery concerning an everyday office product. Those little compressed-gas keyboard cleaners (pictured at left) are vicious climate killers. They emit jaw-dropping amounts of greenhouse gases. A single canister is roughly the climate equivalent of driving my car across the country and halfway back. No kidding.

Evidently, my post struck a nerve: versions of it appeared here, here, and many other places around the web. Better yet, people began to take action.

Here's an example: the City of Seattle's "Green Team," an internal group that helps set sustainable purchasing guidelines, decided to take a close look at retiring the cleaners. One purchasing employee even contacted Office Depot to tell them that the product was verboten in her sector.

What else happened? I have no idea. Do you?

I heard about Seattle's movement only because I happened to know someone involved. Are other places doing the same thing? Is anyone doing more? Do any governments or companies or workplaces already prohibit these things? I'd like to know, but I need help finding out. To put a finer point on it: Sightline needs a volunteer to do the legwork. If you're interested, drop me a line and we'll sort out the logistics. (A few more details are below the jump.)

What's more, I want to figure out how one would go about getting these canisters banned or at least restricted. (After the jump, I spell out a little more about the way I'd like to see a ban work.) As we move toward responsible climate policy, it makes no sense to sell needlessly harmful products when there are perfectly good substitutes available.

There's another angle to the story too: the canisters are health hazards. In fact, many office supply stores are already treating them as dangerous products. That's because, apparently, they're popular for huffing, which causes brain damage and sometimes even death. (Sheesh, the kids these days.) In fact, at a downtown Seattle Office Max, an employee told me that they're kept out of view for precisely this reason. And sure enough, the product label explains that it contains a "bitterant" added to make the taste of the gas unpalatable to would-be huffers.

During my daughters' school year -- back when my two-stop commute was particularly gnarly -- I noticed what must be a familiar pattern to long-time Seattle-area I-5 commuters: traffic on Monday and Friday mornings tended to be way better than it was from Tuesday through Thursday.

In my experience,  it was pretty common for the entire highway  to be clogged for miles -- even the carpool lanes -- on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But on a good Monday or Friday, the trip from north of Seattle straight into downtown could be a relative breeze, even for drive-alone commuters. The pattern was fairly consistent, but occasionally bad weather or a traffic accident still snarled traffic on Monday or Friday.  However, last week, Seattle's weather was pretty much the same on Monday and Wednesday -- and Monday's traffic was a snap, while Wednesday's was a slog.

I've put together some animations of the two days' morning commutes, from 6:30 to 9 a.m., using archived traffic images from the state DOT. Green means free-flowing traffic; yellow is slight congestion; red is heavy congestion; and black is when traffic has slowed to a crawl.  (Check out my mad Photoshop skillz...)

High-tech hitchhiking is getting closer to prime time.

There's good news, I think, in the new Census numbers that are just out on commuting habits in the fifty largest US cities. Here's how the two in the Northwest stack up.

[Figures show the percent of commuters who use each mode of transportation, and national rank.]

I always like a head to head comparison. But what's really interesting is not the contrast between the two cities but their similarities. Both cities are in the nation's top 10 (or nearly so) in four of the five categories, and they're often neck and neck in the rankings. (Over at Slog, Josh Feit has more detailed listings.)

Neither city is near the top for carpooling, but that's primarily because carpooling tends to be more popular in sprawling cities where cars are the only practical option. So places like Phoenix, Fort Worth, and Charlotte tend to be in the lead for carpooling.

I think the upshot here is that both Northwest cities have done an impressive amount to foster transportation choices. Relative to big eastern and midwestern cities, both Seattle and Portland are young. And partly as a result, they're less dense and didn't benefit from industrial-era investments in subways or elevated trains.

Even so, the Northwest's big cities are among the best for providing real alternatives to solo driving. (Notably, Seattle is the only city in the top 10 for transit use that doesn't have fixed rail or rapid transit.) Seattle's and Portland's successes show that it really is possible for cities to provide meaningful transportation choices -- and thereby to wean themselves from petroleum and congestion.

The grid, the strip, the cul-de-sac – all terms modern developers use in every day language. And all terms to describe the car-centric design found throughout North American cities.

In his latest issue (pdf) of Price Tags, Gordon Price focuses on Tampa, Florida. Our image of Florida as we know it is changing from a green paradise with beautiful beaches, to a landscape of strips, asphalt, and advertising.

“In Florida there’s no alternative to the car. There is some support for transit, but the urban fabric was not designed to accommodate it.”

Price illustrates with images of wide roads with billboards, car congestion, and aerial views of grids and sprawl. Is this the direction we want to continue going?

For a closer look at this issue, check out Price Tags here.

For a while now I've been fascinated by the role that charismatic "poster species" play in the conservation movement. But instead of droning on about it today, I'll just point out that The Onion is much funnier than me on the subject:

"If you want a poster that's going to grab an audience, you show the gray wolf instead of the Iowa Pleistocene snail," said Roberts, adding that no endangered mollusks made the final cut... it's not like anyone is going to be inspired to protect wildlife by a photo of a nearly extinct medicinal leech. You go with what is going to bring in the dollars."

Even National Public Radio spent some air time the other day on cause celèbre, Paris Hilton’s trip to jail, crying jag, and premature trip back home – albeit in a bemused “we’re-actually-above-reporting-this-kind-of-story” tone. Not surprisingly, the Paris saga was among the top five stories reported by American media last week, due only in small part to celebrity gazing briefly taking on a more serious flavor as a “morality tale about double standards in the criminal justice system.”

Here is the week’s news agenda breakdown according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism:

In our newest edition of the Cascadia Scorecard (released yesterday), we examine one of the most important trends in the region: sprawl. It's an area where there's been a surprising reversal of fortune. Oregon, long a regional and national leader in smart growth, is losing its lead.

According to a new Sightline analysis, in the Portland metro region alone more than 2,000 residential applications for Measure 37 waivers were approved. Together, these claims could add nearly 14,000 housing units and, based on prevailing rates of occupancy, up to 36,000 new residents outside of growth boundaries.

[One red dot represents 10 potential new people outside of growth boundaries, based on claims from 2004 to 2006.]

Such poorly planned sprawl has not been typical of Oregon. The state has a well-deserved reputation for successful growth management; and in every previous edition of Cascadia Scorecard -- not to mention numerous other Sightline studies -- we've highlighted Oregon's success at curbing sprawl and preserving farms and forests.

In fact, in the very first edition of the Scorecard, in 2004, we specifically contrasted ex-urban residential sprawl in Clark County, Washington (home to Vancouver, WA) to the Oregon counties of metro Portland. The difference was profound.

It’s high times for the Northwest’s economy, right? Stocks are soaring. Our region’s GDP is up too. But the prevailing gauges provide a crooked accounting of how the economy affects ordinary people.

So to straighten out the books, Sightline’s Cascadia Scorecard 2007 (just released today) shows that the Northwest’s economic security is scarcely better off than it was more than a decade ago. For all the attention that we give to our pocketbooks in our personal lives, policymakers have little information about the financial security of working families.

Consider, for example, median household income, an excellent gauge of middle class well-being.

Since the mid-1980s the Dow has risen nearly tenfold, and real economic output in Cascadia has more than doubled. By comparison, middle-class incomes in the region scarcely budged. (And keep in mind that the Dow has virtually no bearing on most people’s pocketbooks: the wealthiest fifth of Americans own 90 percent of all stock-market assets, while the bottom three-fifths of Americans own a scant 3 percent.)

So what does a more accurate gauge -- the Cascadia Scorecard -- tell us about economic well-being? It's a different story:

• Median income isn't much higher today than it was in 1990. After adjusting for inflation, it’s slightly higher today than it was in 1990, yet it remains several thousand dollars below its 1998 peak. In British Columbia, the picture is grimmer: although median income has improved a bit recently, it's still roughly 6 percent lower than it was in 1990.
• Many northwesterners still face precarious economic conditions. After years of ups and downs, by 2005 (the most recent year of complete data) the poverty rate remained unchanged from 1990, while the child poverty rate was slightly lower and the unemployment rate slightly higher.

The 2007 edition of the Cascadia Scorecard, the Pacific Northwest’s annual progress report, reveals that the region lags behind world leaders on trends such as energy, sprawl, and economic security.

The good news is that we are making progress—and adopting smart solutions will accelerate those gains. Seattle Times has called the Cascadia Scorecard "a pioneering attempt to assess life in the Pacific Northwest across a broad array of measures." Launched by Sightline Institute in 2004, the Scorecard aims to assess the region’s progress in key trends shaping its future, and to provide an alternative to one-sided measures such as the Dow Jones industrial average and GDP.

The new book is chock full of maps and charts.

Press materials, data supplements, state breakdowns, and solutions -- along with the full book -- are available for free download here.