Daily Score Blog

If you live in Seattle, chances are that you like to complain. You might like to complain about parking or you might also like to complain about ugly new development. (Or, like me, you might like to complain about all the complainers.) So today, all of us Seatteites were happy to see the Seattle Times devote an article to people complaining about the new townhouses sprouting up.

There are about as many complaints as there are complainers. Here are some, swiped from the article:

Their second-floor living rooms encourage residents to squirrel away upstairs instead of chatting with neighbors...

..And the shared driveways are so narrow that parking spills onto the streets...

...it's eroding Seattle's prized single-family neighborhoods...

...said City Councilman Tom Rasmussen. "They are bleak, poorly designed and not consistent with the neighborhood. Some are not sidewalk- or pedestrian-friendly...

...Oustimovitch said, "A project would have been built that would have been appropriate for the neighborhood. Instead what we got was a very vanilla, cookie-cutter town-house development."

Now, many of these complaints are legit. Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?

Last week I wrote a post about Washington's new law to reduce per capita vehicle miles traveled (VMTs). Because I jumped right into the geekery, I neglected to provide the proper context. So, to clarify:

** The spirit of the law is excellent. Legislating VMT reductions is an important step on the way to managing our way out of the current carbon and transportation messes.  

** The "Climate Action and Green Jobs" law (which contains the VMT provision) is, overall, a good piece of legislation.

** Congratulations are in order to the many advocates and legislators and staffers and others who worked hard on the bill -- and especially Transportation Choices Coaltion, the organization that germinated the VMT provision.

 Okay?

Okay. So why did I write the post? Simply, because I've been getting asked questions about it from lots of folks. (I'm talking about well-informed people; people who understand transportation policy in Washington.) And there is quite a bit of confusion about what the law means. I found the law to be confusing too. So confusing, in fact, that I butchered the content the first time I tried to crunch the numbers and write the post.

As importantly, I wanted to answer the most common question I heard: do the per capita VMT targets result in absolute VMT reductions or not? The answer is, as you might expect, is somewhat complicated. But it appears that the provision will not yield absolute VMT reductions, at least not for several decades.

Even so, figuring out how to reduce VMTs is a laudable goal. In fact, it's downright essential to meeting our climate objectives. And Washington should take pride in being the first place to give it a shot.

 A hat-tip to Alissa Thurman, planner for the city of Hoquiam, Wash, (and eagle-eyed Sightline Daily reader), for steering me to a great piece in Mother Jones. For its Earth Day “green” issue, the magazine featured Hoquiam and neighboring Aberdeen in an article detailing how green-collar opportunities are recharging rural America.

Rewind to 1992, when Aberdeen’s most famous sons -- Kurt Cobain and Krist Noveselic -- had just hit the grunge jackpot. At the same time, the town was hemorrhaging jobs. Mother Jones tells it like this: “Families were breaking up and moving out. There were suicides. It was really a hard time." 

Like other struggling small towns, the fallout for Hoquiam, Aberdeen and neighboring communities in Grays Harbor County has not been limited to empty pocketbooks and emotional stress. With poverty comes poor food choices, too, which lead to obesity and health problems.

According to a Harvard/UW study released last week, Grays Harbor and four other Washington counties are exemplifying another new trend in small-town America: life expectancy is declining among the rural poor. "It is what you would expect to see in a developing country, not here," Dr. Majid Ezzati, a Harvard professor and lead author of the study told the Seattle P-I.  

But Grays Harbor’s economy is on the up. According to Mother Jones, Hoquiam’s old mill is now producing 100 percent recycled paper. The plant’s energy source is 100 percent renewable -- it comes from biomass derived from a local source -- Olympic Peninsula logging leftovers.

The local government is an enthusiastic supporter of the business. Today, the Aberdeen Daily World reports that the city of Hoquiam will start buying all its office paper from the mill. The city of Seattle is on board too. Grays Harbor Paper is now the largest employer in town with about 250 on staff.  

Grays Harbor County is finding opportunity, acting local, conserving energy, and saving money. Local governments and businesses are working together. It looks like the green-collar strategy is taking root. Hopefully, a healthy economy will nourish a healthier community too.

Economist Peter Dorman has a suggestion to clear up the confusion about free carbon permit allocation and windfall profits: 

...I’m thinking of the decision to commit the WCI as a whole to auctioning only a portion, between 25 and 75%, of the carbon permits they intend to issue, distributing the rest gratis. Isn’t it generous to be handing out free money to the most polluting businesses?

Of course, it’s difficult for the general public to see just what’s going on. To remedy this, I propose the following: auction all the permits. Then take some of the money, between 75 and 25%, and deliver it to the doorstep of firms that emitted the most carbon in the past, preferably in suitcases with unmarked bills.

Maybe if you put the whole operation on YouTube people would get the point.

Nicely put, I thought.

A few weeks ago, Clark wrote about truck drivers slowing down to economize on fuel. It's a great story, but was it a real trend or just anecdote?

Well, I'm here to report that there's some truth to it. Or at least some truthiness. A recent Congressional Budget Office paper examining the effects of gas prices found: "Freeway motorists have adjusted to higher prices by making fewer trips and driving more slowly."

That's surprising to me. I mean, I don't slow down when gas prices are high; it would never occur to me. Do other folks?

But whether it occurs to anyone or not, it is a rational response to high prices, depending on the circumstances. As the paper explains, slowing from 70 mph to 65 mph reduces a typical vehicle's fuel consumption by 8.2 percent. That adds up eventually, but whether it's worth it depends on how much you value your time. (It also depends on how pricey gas is, and how efficient your car is.)

So the paper crunches some additional numbers -- fascinating stuff I assure you -- and finds that freeway speeds really did decline as gas prices rose. Not by much, mind you, but a little: about a teaspoon of fuel every 2.6 miles. There's almost no way that the results are intended; it's almost like individual irrationality adding up to collective rationality. And the paper sort of hints at that:

Such small responses are unlikely to result from concious calculations. Few motorists would have the information required to gauge their responses so acutely, nor the time or inclination to do so. However, higher prices make drivers pay more attention to speed. The modest reductions in speed suggest that drivers may have responded by easing off slightly on the gasoline pedal or dialing back the cruise-control settings a notch. If only a minority of drivers have that response, their reduced speeds could cause nearby drivers to slow down as well, even if gasoline prices alone would not have that effect.

The upshot, I guess, is that there's an easy way to save the planet. Just reduce your fuel use (and everyone else's), by getting in the left lane and driving 45 miles per hour. Folks may not appreciate you at first, but you can just hand them the CBO paper and talk about elasticity of demand. They'll come around soon enough.

Good luck!

Seven Wonders, which was penned by award-winning journalist Eric Sorensen and Sightline staffers, examines seven everyday objects that serve not only as solutions to global warming, but also--and more importantly--as springboards for exploring some of the key issues behind climate change.

• “The Bicycle" is an ode to the most energy-efficient vehicle ever devised--and the world of transportation solutions that is already at our feet. (My favorite biking fact: "Pound for pound, a person on a bike can go farther on a calorie of food than a gazelle can running, a salmon swimming, or an eagle flying.")
  
  
• “The Condom” examines how a little more "wrapping-up" could have a big impact on global-warming pollution, and our health.
  
  
• “The Ceiling Fan” shows that energy efficiency isn't just a free lunch. "It's a lunch you are paid to eat." (Great quote, huh? Amory Lovins said it.)
  
  
• “The Clothesline” starts with a six-dollar piece of rope and ends with the vast potential of renewable energy.
  
  
• “The Real Tomato” uses the well-traveled vegetable to examine how to make agriculture greener. (Favorite veggie fact: "Even a seemingly innocent one-pound bag of lettuce can be a fossil-fuel glutton, consuming 4,600 calories to grow, process, and ship an item that is mostly water and contains a scant eighty calories of food energy.")
  
  
• “The Library Book” shows why "reuse" is the most important of the "three R's." (Library fact: "A typical US library prevents 250 tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, just from the paper it doesn’t consume.").
  
  
• “The Microchip” is a testament to how the online world--and all the technology that drives it--can benefit our real-world climate.

(4/25/2008: Updated by correcting two errors)

One of Washington State’s conservative think tanks has just proposed a carbon tax shift. Interesting. (Read it here.)

The Washington Policy Center has garbed its tax shift proposal in anti-government clothing. Some of the rhetoric makes my skin crawl.

But the proposal itself is sensible if modest. It includes a starter carbon tax that pays for a small sales tax reduction. As a bonus, it throws in a business and occupations tax reduction on all capital investment. It’s not goofy. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping we might get about a decade ago, when energy and climate issues weren't front-page news.

Today, I hope we can do better: a comprehensive, auctioned, regional Cap and Trade system with built-in buffers for working families.

I’m guessing that the political chances of WPC’s proposal are somewhat slimmer than the odds for my preferred climate pricing policy. So rather than engage in a fight over the rhetoric, I’ll use it as a springboard to answering four questions that I’ve had from readers and from people at my speeches on climate policy.

***Update 4/24, 4:00 p.m.: The original version of this post was wrong.

***Update 4/30: I wrote a very important addendum to this post.

There's a lot of confusion about the VMT provision in Washington's new "Climate Action and Green Jobs" legislation (HB 2815). That's to be expected because that section of the bill is rather confusing.

It calls for reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled. But reduce them from what level? And, is that a reduction in total VMTs, given population growth?

Well, readers, you're in luck. Armed with my readin' and countin' skills, I'm going to try to figure out what the new law means. Buckle your seat belts.

First off, here's the aim:

• decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 18 percent by 2020;
• decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 30 percent by 2035; and
• decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 50 percent by 2050.

But reduce VMTs from what baseline? The answer, says the bill, is 75 billion, minus the miles from trucks, which are apparently exempted. But wait: 75 billion is not a per capita figure! (At least, I don't know anyone who drives 75 billion miles a year.) So what does this mean?

Here's my best guess, based on the rumors one hears from policy wonks: the figure is connected to 2020. Mind you, the law never actually says this, but it happens that 75 billion is roughly the total VMTs that the state forecasts for 2020 (which, by the way, represents a 33 percent increase from where we are now). So, apparently, the "reductions" are to be from that 33 percent predicted increase.

Confused yet?

It gets weirder because, as Clark has astutely observed, the increase isn't actually materializing. So the reductions come from a projection that we may never reach. My head is spinning.

Okay, back to business: what's the baseline? The bill says 75 billion, but that's nonsensical since it's not a per capita figure.   

So who knows what the 75 billion is supposed to reference. But I'm going out on a limb here, and assuming that the intended baseline must be for the per capita figure that's forecast for 2020 at which point the state says we'll have 75 billion total VMTs. In 2020, we're officially projected to drive, on average, nearly 9,800 miles apiece, as opposed to around 8,700 now. So I'm going to assume that the per capita reductions must come from that projected 9,800-ish figure. 

It's a big assumption, but I'm stumped otherwise.

Moving on. Let's say that the state achieves the per capita reductions -- the ones relative to projected per capita VMTs in 2020. Would that be an absolute reduction, or not?

There's lots of buzz about green-collar jobs these days (sort of like blue-collar jobs, but with a sustainable edge) -- whether you're listening to Obama, McCain, or Clinton; Gregoire, Kulongoski, or Schwarzenegger.

You hear this kind of thing a lot: A study conducted by the RAND Corporation and the University of Tennessee found that producing 25 percent of all American energy fuel and electricity from renewables by the year 2025 would produce the following: "$700 billion of new economic activity, carbon emission reduction by 1 billion tons, and 5 million new jobs."

Fine and dandy, but, some might ask "where are those five million new jobs? When will we see them?" Some skeptics have begun to ask whether it's not bordering on hype.

Big projections are just that -- big projections. But there's nothing like local industry reporting 2000 new jobs here and 500 jobs there -- right in our neck of the woods -- and a steady stream of investment dollars, to keep skeptics pondering the possibilities.

So, we're happy to report a real-live green-collar workforce is materializing in the Northwest, and it's likely the wave is just gathering strength. With more policy measures encouraging green-tech investments and training programs it could swell to something much bigger. Looking at Oregon's green-collar boom, Ted Sickinger of the Oregonian calls it a "small tsunami."

Some real numbers from Oregon and Washington: 

Always the critic. This 2-paragraph Globe and Mail squib has a shockingly high error-to-fact ratio.

B.C. life expectancy rises to more than 80

B.C. residents are living longer than ever before, and now have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, according to new statistics.

The province's vital statistics annual report shows that people born in 2006 can expect to live an average of 80.9 years, compared with 77.4 years for people born a quarter century ago.

Well, sorta...

Apparently we're not the only ones who've noticed:

U.S. drivers are doing something they haven’t done for nearly two decades — consume less gasoline....

There are indications that a fundamental shift in consumer driving habits may have started in December, when total miles traveled in the U.S. dropped 3.9 percent compared with the same month a year earlier. Miles traveled in the Midwest were down 5.8 percent.

The Kansas City Star made an interesting map of the regional driving trends.  Federal figures showed a 3.5 percent decline in driving in the US west, comparing December 2007 with December of 2006.  I'm not sure I buy it, but it's it's worth a quick click-through at least to look at it.  But at a minimum, it confirms the trend that we've been seeing -- higher gas prices are starting to change our outlook on transportation.

Is it a competitive streak, a sense of home-team loyalty, a clannish pride? Something about local climate triumphs gets us fired up -- and smart policy advocates in our neck of the woods are tapping into that spirit to build momentum for important regional policy measures.

I know because I just spent a few weeks poring over dozens of newspaper articles covering climate questions to better understand how journalists in the Northwest and beyond are covering policy solutions. We were looking at who's quoted and what spokespeople are saying -- in favor and against climate policy.

The good news is that there's a steady stream of coverage, particularly here in the Northwest where climate legislation is in play in city and county governments, state capitols, and on a regional level. The bad news: a lot of coverage plays up the political wrangling involved in any kind of big new policy direction, emphasizing partisan differences and a drawn out process.

But one theme that struck a chord for me as a momentum-builder was the invocation of local pride -- and local opportunities. Washington governor Christine Gregoire's constant refrain sums it up well: "The future of our economy, the future of our great state is at stake."

There was some hubbub a couple of weeks ago when researchers produced a carbon emissions map of the US. Using direct CO2 emissions, we saw this first-of-its-kind map:

Unfortunately, the map looks a lot like a population density map. That's for obvious reasons, since the larger share of cars, buildings, and industry tend to be where the people are. But by turning major cities red, it leads one to the wrong conclusion. Looking at the map, you might think that the northeast was the nation's big carbon problem, while the dessert West and the Rockies were doing something really right. And I suppose that's true on one level: there's not a lot of carbon being emitted in the wide open spaces of the West.

But check out what happens when the researchers added population density to calculate per capita carbon emissions. It's a completely different perspective:

On this reading, the real problem is the West. The nation's cool spots are the relatively densely-settled eastern areas.

Now, we all know that per capita emissions don't matter a whit to the atmosphere. All that matters is the total amount of carbon. But without understanding the population-based side of the equation, we're unlikely to understand how to fix our emissions problem. The key, as it turns out, is not for our economy to function like it does in West Texas or Wyoming, but more like it does in cities.

Links to bigger version and explanations are here.

Yikes!  Rental rates are rising the way housing prices were a few years back:

Apartment rents averaged $1,026 in King County and $1,071 in Seattle in March -- up 2.5 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively, from September and about 8.5 percent in both cases from March 2007.

In my view, rental costs are a far better bellwether of housing affordability than the more commonly cited indexes based on the cost of purchasing a home.  Rent matters much more to low-to-middle income families; the lower down on the income ladder you are the more likely you are to rent rather than own.  And for years, housing markets have been wacky -- "irrationally exuberant," as they say -- so rental rates have more closely reflected the true value of housing as shelter, rather than the speculative value of housing as get-rich-quick scheme.

Obviously the increase in rental costs is a real problem for lots of working families.  Coupled with the  rampant inflation in food and fuel costs, it's adding injury to insult. But the question is, what can be done about it?

Seattle's rent increases seems to represent genuine supply scarcity; vacancy rates are plummeting as prices rise.  And high demand for the available rental homes may be driven by another force:  people are looking to move closer to work (ie., to Seattle proper rather than distant suburbs) to save on transportation costs.  In fact, NPR is reporting that, nationwide, homes with long commutes are plummeting in value faster than homes closer to the city center.

Economists say home prices are nowhere near hitting bottom. But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.

The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

All of this points towards an action item that the city can take to ease rental woes:  make it easier to build more housing -- rental and otherwise -- in close proximity to downtown, or with easy access to concentrated job centers.  Increasing the rental supply can help take the edge off rising demand.  That may not be a complete solution to rising rents, but it's a start.

Ok, this is weird.  Washington's transportation department thinks that vehicle travel is going to go up up up.  See, for example, this graph...

Total Vehicle Miles Traveled 1980 - 2030 (projected)
(Miles in billions)

The solid red line to the left represents historic traffic volumes -- technically, vehicle miles travelled, or "VMT" in planner-speak.  The dashed line to the right is a prediction of future VMT growth.

But look:  there's something awfully suspicious about these predictions.

If you close one eye and tilt your head to one side, you'll see that the dotted line is much steeper than the solid line. In the real world, traffic growth has slowed way down in recent years, and looks like it's on the verge of flattening out.  A closer look at the numbers (pdf link) tells the same story:  the recent slowdown in vehicle travel has been pretty remarkable. As oil prices have soared, the growth in vehicle travel has slowed; and travel per capita has actually fallen.

But the reality of rising fuel costs hasn't sunk in to the planning department.  Instead, they're predicting a massive, immediate increase in the growth rate of traffic, starting next year.  Yep, if you believe their predictions, traffic will grow four times faster over the next 5 years than it did over the last 5 years, at a pace 50 percent quicker than the long term average.

Huh?