Daily Score Blog

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

Walk Score, which has become the most widely-used measure of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in North America, has added a new trick: they're now incorporating transit data into their walkability ratings. So in addition to stores, restaurants, parks, and the like, Walk Score now treats nearby bus stops and rail stations as key ingredients of a walkable neighborhood.

What makes this extra nifty is that Walk Score has already partnered with a bunch of national real estate websites to incorporate walkability rankings into real estate listings.  So now, all those real estate sites will have data on transit access, too.

Sadly, Walk Score's new transit ranking only works in places where transit agencies have made their "transit feeds" -- the data on transit locations and schedules -- freely available to the public. So if you live and walk in Portland, OR, you're in luck. Same goes for a handful of smaller transit agencies around the Northwest -- Island and Jefferson counties in Washington, Tillamook County in OR, and Humboldt County California. But even though King County Metro and Vancouver, BC's Translink publish their transit data for Google's use, their transit feeds are kept private--so third parties like Walk Score can't get access to them.

So the good folks behind Walk Score have set up an online petition to ask local transit agencies to release their transit service data to the public.  (I've signed the petition -- and if you care about walkability and transit, you should too!)

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user kworth30: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kworth30/ / CC BY 2.0]

Doug MacDonald is a Sightline fellow.  He served as Secretary of Transportation for Washington State from 2001 to 2007 and now lives in the Greenwood neighborhood in Seattle.  He mostly rides the Metro 358, 5, 48 and 70 and the Sound Transit 550, plus whatever comes along in the downtown transit tunnel. 

It’s a fundamentally worthy public enterprise, facing the toughest of challenges:  sustaining service to its r­­­iders while it stands awash in a rising tide of red ink.  But King County Metro Transit—the largest transit agency in Washington State, providing more rides each year than the rest of the state’s transit agencies combined—needs a strong and focused board of directors to guide the system through this crisis.

Good luck finding that kind of leadership.  In recent years, the political oversight structures governing Metro have demonstrated little aptitude for making smart strategic choices, achieving greater efficiencies of service, and setting sound priorities.  As the gap between Metro's needs and funding has widened, it's been increasingly unclear whether anyone's truly minding that gap.

But before we dive into Metro’s governance problems, let’s talk about the agency’s biggest recent success:  its remarkable tally of ridership growth.  For the first half of 2009, Metro buses and electric trolleys fielded almost 380,000 boardings on its buses and electric trolleys on an average weekday.  That’s 60,000 more boardings a day than in 2005—an impressive 20 percent gain. 

Seattle always ranks high on lists of US cities with green buildings, with more than 80 large buildings and nearly 50 homes now certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Since the city began mandating green construction practices in its own buildings a decade ago, the techniques have spread to offices, condos, single family homes, educational centers, even clean-and-sober low-income housing.

Take the Hyatt at Olive 8, which will be hosting our lucky sweepstakes winner for two luxurious nights. It’s the first LEED-certified hotel in the city, with everything from low-flow showerheads to preferred parking spaces for fuel-efficient cars to spa treatments that feature locally-grown ingredients. It’s expected to use 23 percent less energy than a comparable conventional building, and 36 percent less water. Plus, it walked the anti-sprawl walk: by purchasing development rights that allowed it to build higher in the city, the project also helped preserve open space on Sugarloaf Mountain in rural King County.

Here are some other green building projects to check out while you're in town:

You look at your watch. You look at the bus schedule. You look down the street. The bus that will take you half way across downtown should arrive in another 15 minutes. So do you wait for it, or start walking? 

The answer might depend on the weather and what shoes you wore, or maybe you're looking for a mathematically-defensible solution. If the latter's the case, we at Sightline can help! Operating under the premise that there's no query too small to calculate and then graph, we bring you "Walk or Bus?" from Visualmotive.

This cool little chart requires that you know or guess at how far you're traveling, then lets you figure out which mode of transportation will be faster depending on when the bus is coming.

Will the deep-bore tunnel -- the current choice by the city and state to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct -- go over budget?

One way to answer that question is to look at what's happened with other tunneling projects in the Seattle area. In a new report -- Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunnel Projects -- Sightline examines the cost history of four recent tunneling projects: the Mt Baker I-90 expansion tunnel; the downtown Seattle bus tunnel; Sound Transit's Beacon Hill tunnel; and the Brightwater sewage tunnels.

Opinions about the likelihood of a cost overrun for the deep-bore tunnel tend to fall in a pattern. Those in favor of the deep-bore project downplay the chance of going over-budget, and point to a 22 percent cushion in current budget that is set aside for unforeseen problems. Those opposed to the tunnel tend to less sanguine, pointing to international research suggesting that major infrastructure projects rarely stay within budget, even when they include such line items. 

So the sophomore who juggles schoolwork with two jobs moved to an apartment off campus – a much cheaper, though significantly less convenient, alternative to the dorms.

“There are some people taking out extra loans,” said Skaug, whose tuition bill will rise 30 percent over two years. “Some of my friends have gone to community college to save money.”

All six of the state’s four-year schools approved the 30 percent tuition increases. That’s left students and their families scrambling to cover the ballooning costs. The Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that applications for financial aid are up 23 percent at community colleges and universities. Twice as many students are applying for help at some schools than in the past.

And the students are arguably getting less while paying more: many institutions are cutting teachers, staff, and course offerings. WSU, for one, is eliminating entire liberal arts departments.

Government budgets hammered by the down economy are leading to across-the-board cuts in services for cities, counties, and the state. If Initiative 1033, the new measure from Tim Eyman, is approved, those reductions become the new baseline for future budgets, locking in recessionary spending levels indefinitely.

It's been a big week for walkability, with two steps forward for online mapping of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods:

1. Walk Score -- which has become North America's most prevalent gauge of neighborhood walkability -- is going open source, so that anyone can see how their rankings work and (just as importantly) suggest improvements.  This has a real potential to lead to some major breakthroughs, since it will let academics and others add their own insights and ideas to the Walk Score algorithm.  The Walk Score gurus also are working to improve their measurements of walkability by adding information on transit service, and are aiming to incorporate estimates of neighborhood greenhouse gas emissions and transportation costs to make the benefits of walkability even clearer.  Great stuff!
   
   
2. A newly launched website called Walkshed offers a slightly different take on walkability, by letting users choose the amenities that are most important to them.  Want to live within walking distance of grocery stores and transit, but don't care about bars or clothing shops?  Walkshed lets you find the neighborhoods that match your preferences.  And it also uses a very clever method to incorporate barriers to walking -- rivers, rail lines, or impassable highways -- in calculating the walking distance between two points.  The only problem for Northwesterners is that Walkshed is only available for Philadelphia...at least for now.

Ain't technology grand?

A bit of a kerfuffle has broken out over a recent car advertisement between the new Hard Drive commuting blog at the Oregonian and the Bike Portland blog. Here, for your consideration is the ad:

Very funny. The ad shows people crowded in a bus and one guy negotiating his Segway down a crowded sidewalk. The car being sold passes an old Volvo with a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker. Yes, the very fact that Sightline’s now jumping into the fray might mean we’re doing the devil’s work, spreading the advertisement further into the blogosphere. But setting that aside for a moment, let’s examine what this argument is all about. Does this advertisement hurt efforts to promote more sustainable behavior? Is it an aggressive promotion of cars as a better and more fun way to travel than more sustainable alternatives? Do ads like this contribute to a social norm that promotes driving over taking the bus? Or is it just a funny ad?

[Guest blogger Alan DeLaTorre is a PhD candidate at Portland State University who studies urban planning and aging.]

In 2011, the first Boomer will turn 65, an occasion that will herald an epochal demographic shift.  Just as babies boomed in the 1940s through 1960s, older adults will become North America’s – and much of the rest of the world's – fastest-growing demographic. This imminent population shift is beginning to force a long-overdue conversation about the unique housing, environmental, and health care needs of an aging population.

Unfortunately, it’s a conversation that many of us are ill-prepared to undertake. A recent AARP study, for example, found a massive disconnect between perceptions of aging and its reality. The vast majority of people surveyed expressed optimism that they would not only be in good physical health in their later years, but that they would always be able to drive.

Can you say, “denial”?

These issues came to life for me several years ago, when my father, a California school teacher, started looking for his future retirement home in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.  His criteria for the move, “I want to get away from the crowded [city] and find a place that is less hectic…somewhere I can grow things.”  At the time, I was co-teaching a class on housing and environments for older adults at Portland State University’s Institute on Aging. Every ounce of my professional training told me that his moving away from important services could become an issue for both of us. I also knew my father well: he had never grown anything in his life. So I suggested, as gently as I could, that he might want to reconsider moving away from services he’d need.

He didn’t buy it. 

My cries have been answered.

In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, "How Free Is Your Parking?" by Stuart Donovan.

It makes three points, briefly:

Here's a chart that almost speaks for itself:  sprawling cities require more driving -- and hence, produce more CO2 from cars and trucks -- than do compact cities.

The chart is from a new study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, comparing greenhouse gas emissions in 10 global cities.  The lessons are pretty clear:  compact cities in temperate climates, powered by low-carbon electricity, are the ones with the lowest carbon emissions.  It seems pretty obvious -- but sometimes you need a bunch of fancy math to teach you what you already know.

Squirreled away in the new census data is this: the Northwest has more bicycle commuters than farmers. Way more.

Check it out:

The chart shows the number of people whose primary occupation is farmer compared with the number of people whose primary mode of commuting is by bicycle.

Needless to say, this snapshot doesn't include the heap of people who work in the agriculture industry more generally but who aren't actually farmers. (And it doesn't count farm laborers, in particular.) There are not nearly as many folks who work in the bicycle industry.

Yet I think there's some symbolic value to my little comparison. For whatever reason, farmers occupy a quasi-mythic space in our consciousness in a way that cyclists obviously don't. And I wonder if a clearer understanding of how widespread and popular bicycling is might help change the persistently anti-bicycling policies that plague communities across the Northwest and across North America.   

One response to Sarah Mirk’s history of dead freeways article in the Portland Mercury included a link to a video created by Streetfilms, documenting the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE) in New York. That freeway was the child of planning legend Robert Moses. Streetfilms uses Portland as an example of what might have happened if the BQE had never been built. But, as I pointed out in my post about Mirk’s piece, any review of our regions history with road projects shows that we haven’t learned from the past; big road projects are still being proposed even though things turn out better with out them. 

I remember the first time I drove into Vancouver in the late 1980s. Interstate 5 melted away into Highway 99 and eventually, I crossed over the Oak Street Bridge into a four lane city street with no turn lanes. How odd that the freeway didn’t just plow through the city with convenient exits at strategic points. What were they thinking?

Instead, it was a game of trying to pick the right lane and making the lights until we finally arrived in downtown Vancouver. Well, this was no oversight, as former Vancouver City councilmember and Sightline board member Gordon Price outlined in the Great Debate over the summer. Vancouver shunned freeways and, according to Price and others, that resistance to the freeway slicing through the heart of the city forms a core of the Vancouver’s well deserved reputation for being sustainable.

I had not realized, until reading Sara Mirk’s brilliant history of Portland’s dead freeways, that Portland can boast a similar history of resisting freeways. In her Portland Mercury article, Mirk highlights Portland’s Dead Freeway Society, a bike group that rides and remembers this chapter in the city’s formation.