Sprawl & Transportation posts from the Daily Score blog - Sightline Daily

Comprehensive Car-Free Hiking

Eric de Place — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:58:24

We're heading into Labor Day Weekend. That means hiking for a lot folks, so I'm reprising some of the ways that Northwesterners can hit the trail without a car. In my two prior posts on this subject, commenters have offered some terrific advice from around the region and beyond.

First up, a place of honor for Andrew Engleson over at Washington Trails Association. He's on the verge of creating a new blog genre: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail Without a Car (that's the 2,600-mile trail from Mexico to Canada); Hiking the Wonderland Trail Without a Car (that's the 93-mile loop around Mount Rainier); and Biking To a Hike. More please!

Speaking of biking to a hike, the central Puget Sound region is blessed with some pretty good hiking in the Cascade foothills, including the big parks of Cougar Mountain, Tiger Mountain, and Rattlesnake Ridge. These are all more-or-less accessible via bus or by bicycle (check out King County's terrific new regional bike map). I'm not saying it's a snap to get to these places sans vehicle, just that it's possible if you're committed.

Of course if you're truly hardcore, Rick Dubrow points out that you'll want to check out the Self-Propelled Outdoor Club, described here in an article with some ideas for the Vancouver, BC region.

And while we're on Vancouver, my favorite car-free hiking suggestion comes from Michael Newton who writes:

Vancouver's north shore has loads of hiking that's accessible by transit. We've got the advantage of having nothing but wilderness north of the city; if you skirt by Whistler, you could probably head north all the way to the Arctic Ocean without hitting another town! Cypress and Seymour Provincial parks, Lynn Canyon and Lynn Headwaters regional parks, not to mention numerous smaller parks and of course, the Grouse Grind.

You see, that is what I'm talking about. Arctic Ocean or bust! Who's with me?

Of course, car free hiking just isn't realistic many times. In that case, Eric H's advice seems spot on:

I don't have many more answers than you, but I'm always one to suggest organizations like the Mountaineers and Mazamas where you can find other people going out for hikes, maximizing carpool possibilities.

For readers who may not know, The Mountaineers are based in Seattle with branches in Bellingham, Olympia, Tacoma, the Kitsap Peninsula, and Everett. (And don't forget about the Spokane Mountaineers, not to be confused with the aforementioned Mountainers.) The Mazamas are based in Portland. Another option for Portland-area residents comes to us from Kevin Gorman:

I'm the director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge and one of the ways that we cut carbon and exposure people to the beauty of Columbia Gorge is by carpooling to our scheduled hikes. The hikes run until Father's Day weekend and can by found at www.gorgefriends.org. Most hikes originate at the Gateway Transit Center in Portland which is accessible by bike, bus, light rail and of course cars. Hikers are asked to share in the cost of the ride and most gladly do. I have rarely left the transit center without a full vehicle of hikers and some of our hikers don't even own a car. It's also a great way for people to meet other like-minded hikers.

Many readers have pointed out that you don't need to join a hiking club to carpool. Commenter Morgan even mentioned that he's exploring Meetup groups for the purpose. Plus, choosing a fuel-efficient vehicle can go a long way toward easing your carbon guilt and keeping some dough in your wallet. And I'll add that what's really important is making sure you choose a hiking vehicle that's not terrible; even mediocre mileage may be better than you think.

In a few places, buses may be an option. I've written before about the new I-90 bus that runs between North Bend and Snoqualmie Pass, providing access to hiking and biking trailheads. The website masterpiece, however, is Hike Metro, which provides stunningly comprehensive directions on hiking in the Seattle region, mostly at urban and suburban-area parks. Seriously, check it out.

These transit services, however, are far from perfect. Frequent commenter Eldan gets the problem exactly right, I think:

I think there's a bootstrapping problem here, and the hiker shuttle reflects this too. A bus that ran once an hour, didn't require advance reservations for a specific departure time, and didn't cost more than driving alone, could over time persuade a lot of people to leave their cars behind. But the week it started, and probably for its first few seasons of operation, it would run too empty to break even, either in $ or fuel consumption terms, because right now most skiers have cars and are used to driving themselves.

Maybe buses make more sense in the winter when they're serving concentrated destinations like ski areas rather than dispersed trailheads. And all the major Northwest cities are within a short distance of good skiing. Unfortunately, Seattle's Cascade Ski Bus (pointed out by Matt the Engineer) is now defunct. But as Finish Tag notes, Crystal Mountain is now providing bus service from both Seattle and Tacoma. What about Portland and Vancouver? Can you ski-bus it to nearby slopes?

The Northwest has an unparalled urban-wilderness interface, but we don't have transit like some places do. Reader Adam tells us how they do it In New York:

I live in NYC and there are a surprising number of trails nearby and all accessible by bus from Port Authority or Metro-North. Bear Mtn. and Harriman State Park make for good weekend trips and only an hour's ride out of the city.

And the Big Apple isn't the only big city where this sort of thing is possible. Says Payton:

I'm lucky to live in Chicago, where I can still take an inter-urban train to get to some cute beach towns or even some campgrounds at the urban fringe. (Not much hiking, though.) Once upon a time, though, this was normal: Atlantic City, Asheville, Miami, Santa Monica -- plenty of resort towns grew up as weekend railroad escapes from the big city. Easy access to the countryside makes city life all the more appealing...

That's a good point to close on, I think. The greatest cities allow a change of pace once in a while; and the terrific quality of life in Northwest cities has a lot to do with the proximity to first-rate wilderness. It'd be nice to make that connection easier, not to mention cheaper and more responsible too.

Less Driving Means Less Dying

Eric de Place — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:36:13

I'm a bit late on this, but it's still worth mentioning. Via the NY Times:

Traffic deaths in the United States declined last year, reaching the lowest level in more than a decade, the government reported Thursday. Some 41,059 people were killed in highway crashes, down by more than 1,600 from 2006. It was the fewest number of highway deaths in a year since 1994, when 40,716 people were killed.

You can't attribute the entirety of the decline to reduced driving: law enforcement and vehicle safety both play important roles. But driving less and slower driving matter a lot too. So while I've complained that the recent gas price spike is mostly bad news, this definitely qualified as a silver lining:

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said the sluggish economy was likely a factor in the declines. He predicted that the combination of a slowing economy and gas prices approaching $4 a gallon throughout the U.S. could lead to further reductions in highway deaths in 2008. Many states have reported double-digit drops in fatalities during the first part of this year.

Nice to hear.

But still: does anyone else find it appalling that more than 40,000 people die on American roads every year? Every time I see these figures, I'm shocked.

A single year of driving yields 10 times as many American dead as five years of war in Iraq.

Tired of Waiting for Efficiency

Eric de Place — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:33:21

I'm always fascinated by the "1 percent solutions" to energy. It seems to me that in order to address both climate change and fossil fuel dependence, we'll need a few big structural changes, but we'll also need a lot of 1 percent solutions -- and maybe a bunch of quarter-percent solutions too. And the advantage of the 1 percent solutions is that they're often exceedingly easy; and so cheap that they actually put money in your pocket.

So I enjoyed Cindy Skrzycki's column this morning on low rolling resistance tires:

A study by the National Academies of Science in 2006 concluded it was feasible to reduce rolling resistance by 10 percent. This would increase the fuel economy of vehicles by 1 percent to 2 percent, saving up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually. Michelin said that over the past 15 years its energy-saving tires have reduced fuel consumption worldwide by about 2.38 billion gallons, compared with conventional tires.

Easy, right? The problem is, there's very little opportunity for consumers to evaluate the fuel-efficiency of tires (as Clark once discovered). Not only is there no rating system in place, but a national standard has actually been banned by Congress since 1996.

No kidding:

The congressional ban, first passed in 1996, said there could be no federal rule adding to existing grading standards that would require a certain level of fuel efficiency.

A 1998 Senate report explained that the prohibition covered "any rulemaking which would require that passenger car tires be labeled to indicate their low rolling resistance, or fuel-economy characteristics."

That's very helpful. Thanks, Congress.

Luckily, there's good news just around the corner. Congress has shifted gears and is now demanding a consumer-information program in place by next year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should have a rule in place by the end of 2009, though it's not clear when consumers will actually see the information in a standardized way.

Affordability and the City

Clark Williams-Derry — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:33:09

Interesting article: Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center city is once again becoming home to the well-off rather than the poor.

Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

That certainly rings true for Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, too. In fact, Ehrenhalt discusses Vancouver, with its "forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers," at some length. So apparently, the problems of urban housing affordability aren't just local ones; they're international in scope. (At least we're in good company.)

The article also makes a trenchant observation: the recent North American view of the city as a dumping ground for people who are too poor to escape is something of a historical anomaly. More typically, cities have been magnets for wealth, not repositories for the impoverished. Recent trends are, as much as anything else, a return to historic norms.

Still, Ehrenhalt argues that the urban resurgence is being driven by some ahistorical demographic shifts: later childbearing, professional couples choosing fewer (or no) kids, more empty nesters in good health. Those kinds of shifts are likely to persist -- which will mean plenty more people will opt for urbanity over suburban living. And high demand will likely mean higher prices for homes close to downtown.

So my question in all of this is: given that people with lots of disposable income are choosing to move closer to downtown, is there a good way -- or, indeed, any way -- to retain decent, affordable housing for middle- and lower-income folks close to downtown jobs?

I used to think that the best answer was simply to build more housing close to downtown, in part by getting rid of unhelpful restrictions on development. Build enough housing, I figured, and supply and demand would meet at a more amenable price point. But I'm no longer sure how much that will help; Vancouver's center city has grown enormously, but prices haven't moderated. It could be that downtown development is a virtuous cycle with a vicious edge: as the city gets wealthier, its amenities get better and better, attracting even more wealth -- and making it harder and harder for middle-income folks to find a decent, affordable place to live that doesn't require a long and fuel-wasting commute.

I'm not sure that there's a simple solution here. I think it's worth a look around. Has any city -- from Paris to Chicago to Vancouver -- found a good antidote to high housing costs near the city center? If anyone knows of effective, tried-and-true models for urban housing affordability, I'm all ears.

Then again, this is not the worst sort of problem for a city to have. Consider the alternative. For decades, wealthy folks avoided downtown, and many urban centers became concentrated enclaves of deep poverty. The results -- economic segregation of the inner city -- fostered far worse social ills than housing affordability presents today.

Of course, some folks are opposed to gentrification in any form; but it's worth remembering that back in the 1970s and 1980s -- when cities had far less little wealth and economic vitality -- life for downtown residents was pretty lousy. Idealizing that past is a mistake. In comparison, current trends in downtown revitalization -- despite the affordability problems -- are in many ways a breath of fresh air.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user hfabulous.]

Death Near the Highway

Eric de Place — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:48:02

Cue my self-righteous indignation. The next time I hear someone carping about "elites" wanting to minimize highway-building, I'm going to remind them that highways are a direct threat -- not just who use them, but even to those who live near them.

In a first-rate article in the Seattle P-I today:

Residents of a broad swath of South Seattle from Seward Park to West Seattle face elevated cancer risks because of air pollution, according to a soon-to-be released government study.

The risks are significantly elevated in pockets of industrial pollution – and skyrocket within about 200 yards of highways, says the long-awaited study by state and federal scientists.

And:

The risk is far higher.. in South Seattle areas next to highways, the study found. Those places can be expected to produce as many as 3,600 cancer cases per million people exposed over a 70-year lifetime.

For context, when the risk exceeds 1 per million, environmental agencies have typically acted to reduce the risk. So 3,600 is a scary figure. Check out this map:

This particular study was just for south Seattle, but some of the findings can probably be generalized. Those bright-red high risk corridors along highways are likely to be just as problematic in north Seattle, not to mention Portland and Vancouver, as well as in wealthy suburbs and poorer enclaves, and so on. Highways generate tremendous amounts of dangerous pollution.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that folks who live within 200 yards of a highway have lower average incomes than those who live farther away. So highways aren't really a problem for elites as much as they're a problem created by elites -- and dumped right into the laps of the poor.

Cures for Transportation Woes

Eric Hess — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:03:23

A few weeks ago we released a little video about rethinking the transportation landscape. It looks like we’re not the only ones trying to picture things a little differently. Just this week, leaders in Oregon, California, and Washington all took steps to tinker with local transportation habits.

In Seattle, Mayor Greg Nickels took a cue from Portland and New York by instituting a few “car-free” Sundays where, throughout August, three city streets will be consecutively closed to cars. The program is part of Seattle’s “Give Your Car the Summer Off” project in which the city is encouraging citizens to drive 1,000 fewer miles this year:

"Neighbors will have three to six hours to experience our streets in a new way and to see how livable a city can be when people drive less," Nickels said. "This is our chance to experiment and to evaluate how these events work for people. And we'll be fighting global warming at the same time."

Down in California, San Francisco is proposing a plan to require businesses to help their workers commute via transit or vanpools. The goal of the effort is to reduce emissions, part of the city’s “Transit First” program encouraging commuters to consider transit as their first option. The chief sponsor of the legislation, Ross Mirkarimi, noted, “It's a modest action that could have a huge impact.”

And finally in Oregon, Governor Kulongoski is raising some big questions about transit and roads. He’s trying to get the city to think of transportation fixes in terms of least-cost solutions. The answer, he says, isn’t more roads, but it might be transit options and incorporating congestion pricing on city streets and highways:

"Under the old way of thinking, the solution to a traffic bottleneck would be: Build more lanes and invite more cars onto the highway," Kulongoski said. "Under a least-cost model, we look for solutions that cost less and have a smaller negative impact on the environment."

In addition, the city is looking to phase out tax credits on gas-electric hybrids in favor of new credits for all-electric cars or plug-in hybrids (with PGE opening new plug-in stations in Portland offering FREE charges for a limited time). Kulongoski not only sees these moves as a way to ease congestion, but to reduce pollution and save commuters (and the city) money as well.

We’ve written a little about transportation issues in the past, so it’s great to see some local folks starting to paint (or at least setting up a new canvas for) a different picture of the transportation scene. Or, to borrow a term from Alan, to start working on a cure for that terrible case of “car-head” we have.

Photo courtesy of burning image via flickr under the creative commons license.

Inside WCI: Scope

Eric de Place — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:17:13

Last week when the Western Climate Initiative's latest draft appeared it mystified most folks who aren't insiders to the process. That's a shame because WCI is hugely important. So over the next few days I'm going to embark on a series of posts that I hope will clear up some of the misunderstandings. Along the way, I'm also going to explain what Sightline wants to see improved.

Maybe the single most important question in cap and trade is the question of "scope," the question of what we should include under the cap. How do we decide which carbon pollution counted? And who must obtain the tradeable carbon permits that are equal to the cap?

WCI gets a couple of things right. First, they will regulate all six of the major greenhouse gases. And they've opted for an "upstream" approach: regulating carbon at the handful of points where it enters the economy (pipelines, refineries and so on) rather than further downstream where hundreds or thousands of fuel users would be implicated. It's the coal plant, not the residential electricity meter, that gets treated.

But other questions have been stickier. Some sectors are getting a pass, at least for now, because they are technically infeasible to cover. For example, emissions from agriculture and forestry are difficult to count and there are multitudes of small-scale emitters who have little capacity to participate in a cap and trade program. Fortunately, however, the vast majority of the West's carbon pollution is relatively easy to count, and the polluters are large and sophisticated companies that are accustomed to regulatory requirements. (Think utilities, oil refiners, and smelter operators.) The right thing -- for the climate, for the program's cost-effectiveness, and for equity among businesses -- would be to include as many sources of carbon pollution as is technically feasible.

But that hasn't happened.

The single biggest problem with scope is that WCI is excluding oil companies -- even though transportation fuels are the single largest source of emissions -- until the second "compliance period," which doesn’t start until 2015. (A "compliance period" is a unit of time over which the regulated firms must match their climate emissions to the number of carbon permits that they have obtained.) Seven years is a long time to wait to address the central climate threat of the West. And it gets worse: because each compliance period is three years long -- meaning that polluters have three years to match their emissions to their carbon permits --we might not see meaningful reductions until eight or nine years from now.

That's hardly the only problem.

We see the very same problem with WCI excluding natural gas used in homes and businesses until the second compliance period. In this case, however, the delay is even more frustrating. Natural gas is already a highly regulated industry -- much like the electricity sector -- and so it’s extremely difficult to see why it couldn’t be included in the first round.

What’s left in the program? In the first compliance period, WCI will cover the electricity sector, large industrial plants, and a few others. But even for these sectors, WCI is dragging its heels: the first compliance period won’t start until 2012. So not until sometime between 2012 and 2014 will even this small share of polluters make WCI’s first reductions. (In a follow-up post about "offsets" I’ll explain why these sectors may not actually make any reductions even at that late date.)

It’s getting hard to believe that WCI’s latest proposal takes seriously the urgency of reducing emissions post haste. In fairness, WCI is taking a go-slow approach in part because policymakers want two years of emissions reporting data before starting the market program. There’s maybe some sense to this, but it has at least one signficant problem: if any carbon permits are given away for free on the basis of emissions (an approach sometimes called “grandfathering”) then it may encourage polluters to increase emissions in the near-term. If they report high emissions during the reporting period they'll get awarded more cash-value permits when the program start. We'd be effectively paying companies to pollute more.

What else is wrong? WCI proposes to entirely exclude all biomass combustion from the program. It’s hard to make sense of what this might mean because “biomass” can refer to everything from corn ethanol to algae to Indonesian palm oil to local canola. Biomass shouldn’t be treated any differently from other sources of carbon. What's more it’s an invitation to “fuel-switch”: to run electricity plants off wood waste rather than natural gas; to heat your home with wood rather than gas; and so on. Both release climate pollution, of course, but we'd only be counting the emissions from one. In some cases, fuel-switching might be a good thing, while in other cases it’s clearly not. But a serious cap on carbon would treat all fuels the same way: based on their carbon emissions.

There’s one additional problem that I’ll deal with more fully in a subsequent post. The “thresholds” are too high for regulation under the program. Rather than 10,000 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent recommended by most public interest groups, WCI has opted to set a threshold of 25,000 tons, which will effectively exclude a large share of emissions, particularly in Canada's oil and gas industry. It's yet another free pass to the oil companies. But more on this issue later.

Okay, that's about enough on scope for now.

Last week when the draft came out, I said it was “basically pretty good.” That's true in the sense that the West is moving toward a cap and trade program -- an important ingredient in responsible climate policy -- but I’ve been getting grouchy. The more carefully I study the proposal (as well as the politics), the less happy I am with it. But more on that in the rest of my "Inside WCI" series. Stay tuned.

We're Driving Less

Clark Williams-Derry — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:36:59

Here's the word from the US Department of Transportation:

[Vehicle travel] on all public roads for May 2008 fell 3.7 percent as compared with May 2007 travel...marking a decline of 29.8 billion miles traveled in the first five months of 2008 than the same period a year earlier. This continues a seven-month trend that amounts to 40.5 billion fewer miles traveled between November 2007 and May 2008 than the same period a year before, she said.

So it's official: high gas prices (coupled with a slack economy) are encouraging us to drive less. And if you look at the chart to the right, the recent downturn comes after a fairly long period of slow growth in vehicle travel. It looks like the gradual rise in gas prices has been tempering the growth of driving since at least 2005.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that total gas consumption has fallen even more steeply than the number of miles driven. After all, SUV sales are down; sales of efficient cars are up; highway speeds are slowing slightly; congestion is down (because fewer cars are on the road); and there's anecdotal evidence that people are choosing the more efficient car when they have more than one vehicle in the driveway. All of these factors tend to decrease gasoline consumption, above and beyond the decline in vehicle miles traveled.

Of course, the DOT responds to the news by...calling for more money for roads!

"Less driving means less money for the Highway Trust Fund," said Acting Federal Highway Administrator Jim Ray. "The status quo cannot and will not work in the 21st century."

That's right: we're driving less, gas costs are through the roof, and people are turning to transit in record numbers. But according to the DOT, the real problem is that the Highway Trust Fund is running out of cash. (How on earth are we going to pay for all those new roads that people can't afford to drive on?)

Do Gas Taxes Cover the Costs of Roads?

Clark Williams-Derry — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:26:09

I thought this was interesting. The Texas highway department – Texas, no less! -- says that roads simply don’t pay for themselves.

… no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon. This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less. To conclude, in the SH 99 example, since the traffic volume for that road doesn't generate enough fuel tax revenue to pay for it, revenues from other parts of the state must be used to build and maintain this corridor segment. The same is true across the state, meaning that, as revealed by the tax gap analysis, overall revenues are not sufficient to meet the state’s transportation needs.

There may be some political shenanigans at play here that, not being a Texan, I know nothing about. (Haven't I heard that Texas is trying to build a massive toll-road corridor?) Still, the idea that roads don't pay for themselves -- and instead, must sap money from other funding sources -- seems like quite an admission from a highway department. Perhaps there are lessons here for road construction projects all across North America, not just in Texas.

Walk Score: Every Big-City Neighborhood in America

Eric de Place — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:45:17

It's here! The largest 40 cities in America, ranked by their walkability. Plus, every single neighborhood in those cities -- all 2,508 of them -- rank-ordered for your walking pleasure.

** In a surprise upset, San Francisco edges out NYC for top honors in walkability. Who else made it into the Top 10?

** The Northwest's most walkable neighborhood is in Portland. It's the Pearl District, no suprise, ranking as the 15th best neighborhood for walking in the nation. (Seattle's best showing, Pioneer Square, is 18th). See the rest of America's best walking neighborhoods.

** But Seattle is the Northwest's walking leader, earning a higher overall score than Portland. (The Emerald City ranks 4 slots higher than the Rose City.) Still, both Northwest metropolises do well by national standards. Who doesn't do so well?

** Plus, there are all kinds of new goodies at the Walk Score site. You can take a photo tour of a walking oasis in an unwalkable city. Or you can learn the secrets of walkable cities. You read the Walk Score blog. And then you can help improve America's Walk Score.

Today's release from Walk Score is truly path-breaking. It's the first time this stuff has been quantified and compared on such a large scale. And it's a huge step toward creating great urban places. Walkable neigbhorhoods are easier on our pocketbooks; good for our waistlines; great for kids, older folks and others who don't drive; and helpful to the whole planet. All of us here at Sightline extend a big fat "Congratulations!" to our friends at Walk Score. Walk on, you guys!

Readers, you already knew all about Walk Score, right? We've written about it here and here, among other places. And we loved it when they roled out an early release of the Seattle neighborhood rankings last month.

Car-Free Hiking

Eric de Place — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:59:03

Via Signpost, a terrific new development from Washington State Parks: a hiker shuttle up Snoqualmie Pass. I'm feeling lazy, so I'll just quote liberally from Andrew Engelson:

The new "Bus-Up 90 Shuttle" will run Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and starts at Cedar Falls, which is near Rattlesnake Lake outside North Bend. The shuttle runs to Hyak, east of Snoqualmie Pass. The ride will be air-conditioned and the shuttle has room for backpacking gear, plus a trailer to provide transport for bikes. The shuttle is primarily intended for folks intending to hike or bike down the John Wayne Trail, a 20.5-mile gravel path that follows the old Milwaukee Railroad.

The shuttle will also provide return service and apparently can make stops at trailheads along the western I-90 corridor if you pre-arrange it. There will be three departures daily from Cedar Falls and Hyak.

Schedule and directions are here.

Rock on. This type of shuttle is long overdue. There are a huge number of hikers traveling up I-90 every weekend (one of the greatest things about living in Seattle is the extreme proximity to wilderness trails). I'd love to see this shuttle expanded and extended. In a perfect world it would run from Seattle to Bellevue and to the major trailheads; and it should run year-round for skiers and snowshoers too.

So, great news for hikers in the central Puget Sound region. But what about other places in the Northwest? In past discussions of guilt-free hiking, readers have had a bunch of good tips for low-carbon trailhead access in British Columbia, Oregon, New York state, and beyond. Does Bellingham have transit access along Chuckanut Drive? Can Portland hikers bus it out the Columbia Gorge? Let us know what you know!

In the meantime, your moment of zen comes from commenter Michael Newton; it's hoisted from a previous post:

Vancouver's north shore has loads of hiking that's accessible by transit. We've got the advantage of having nothing but wilderness north of the city; if you skirt by Whistler, you could probably head north all the way to the Arctic Ocean without hitting another town! Cypress and Seymour Provincial parks, Lynn Canyon and Lynn Headwaters regional parks, not to mention numerous smaller parks and of course, the Grouse Grind.

Wow.

Photo is the Pacific Crest Trail's Kendall Katwalk, one of the dayhiking destinations served by the new shuttle.

Update 7/17: I hope I didn't over-sell the virtues of this shuttle. As several commenters have pointed out, it's kind of expensive, and it has a fairly limited route and schedule. It's great for using the Iron Horse Trail (which is awesome, by the way), but maybe not yet perfected for hiking uses. Still, it strikes me as a big step in the right direction. I'd love to see more like this.

Driven To Extinction

Eric de Place — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:44:24

Here's an interesting ranking. For each major US city, the list-happy editors at Men's Health calculated the negative effects of driving. They aggregated scores on transit ridership, air pollution, fuel consumption, and driving miles. (Presumably, the data are for metropolitan areas, not city limits.) Northwest cities do exceptionally well: Seattle ranks number one, Portland ranks third, and Spokane is eighth.

Men's Health doesn't appear to include a methodology on the web, but I'll take a stab at the explanation. First, a minor point. Seattle and Portland benefit from a felicitous geographic situation: prevailing westerly winds tend to keep our air some of the cleanest in the country, so we do relatively well on air pollution scores. But second, and more importantly, the list illustrates that urban areas control their own destinies. Smart policy matters, even if it's relatively small-caliber.

Little things add up: the Northwest leads in bus service, commute trip reduction programs, carpools, vanpools, parking cashouts, bicycle infrastructure, transit-oriented development, and other innovative strategies. And it's here that next-generation tactics get their first airing: congestion pricing, pay-as-you-drive car insurance, and so on. These are not the kind of things that make their debut in Arlington, Texas -- dead last in the rankings.

If this sounds like stuff that transportation wonks dream up, that's because it is. (And that's probably a good thing.) When it comes to transportation, Northwest cities don't have much that's big-ticket and flashy. So while there aren't many ribbon-cutting ceremonies or photo-ops for politicians, it's still true that a hundred good ideas, implemented locally, can add up to an emerging success story.

Gas Spending Blues

Eric Hess — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:26:54

As you may have noticed, we love maps, especially interactive ones. I just came across a nifty new little tool from the Center for Neighborhood Technologies that shows annual spending per household on gasoline in 52 major metropolitan throughout the US:

The maps provide data for the years 2000 and 2008, enabling comparisons for the eight-year period between annual household gasoline expenses, monthly household transportation expenses (including vehicle purchase price, insurance and maintenance) and monthly household transportation expenditures as a percent of income. Across the 52 metro areas studied, residents spent a combined $107.4 billion more on gasoline in 2008 than in 2000, an average increase regionally of 155%.

As we might expect, the difference between walk- and transit-friendly urban areas and car-friendly suburbs is staggering. City-dwellers spend $2,100 less per year, on average, than out-ring suburbs. A household in NW Portland averages $0-$1,600 per on gasoline, whereas a household in a suburb like Lake Oswego, OR spends $3,000 to $3,800. The message? We're spending a far greater percentage of our income in 2008 on transportation than we were in 2000 – and gas prices are hurting those of us with fewer choices about how to get around far more than the city dwellers who have the freedom to walk or bike or take the bus.

If one were to compare a map from the CNT tool to a map of walkable neighborhoods (courtesy of walkscore.com), it might look something like this:

I don't mean to suggest that folks living in the outskirts are to blame for this; housing costs in the city are expensive and are often not economically feasible. And as we wrote a few weeks ago, these economic trends are starting to erode housing prices in the suburbs. But smart policy can encourage denser, walkable communities in the 'burbs too, and we might see a little more yellow on the map.

Congestion Pricing on the Columbia River Crossing

Clark Williams-Derry — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:24:32

This isn't exactly a balanced article -- but since its biases match mine, it's great! Portland Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder is proposing a congestion charge for the Columbia River Crossing:

Burkholder believes congestion pricing for some busy roads could manage roads for highest productivity; cut pollution, fuel use, CO2 and congestion; and generate revenue for public transportation and high-performance transportation infrastructure and services.

I think that congestion pricing should be on the table, regardless of whether the Columbia River Crossing is rebuilt. So it's heartening to see the idea gaining currency.

I am starting to wonder, though, if the price of gas is starting to take a bite out of congestion all by itself. Here's a map of Puget Sound traffic from yesterday at the height of rush hour -- with uncongested lanes in all but a few spots on the region's highways. I know it's summer, but I haven't seen the Seattle roads so clear, and traffic moving so smoothly since...well, since they closed off big chunks of I-5 last summer.

Remember that, when lane restrictions were supposed to cause massive gridlock all the way down to Tacoma? The congestion never materialized -- traffic, in fact, was a breeze, and commutes were the best that many people had ever experienced. To me, that proved that people can adjust their travel habits, if they're given the right kind of information and incentives -- a lesson that I think the Columbia River Crossing planners would be smart to keep in mind.

Hybrid Whiplash

Clark Williams-Derry — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:09:06

A few years back, I had a fair amount of skepticism about whether buying a hybrid car was really and truly the best buy for the climate.

My argument at the time: hybrids came at a pretty steep price premium. A low-end Prius cost many thousands of dollars more than a comparable Corolla. I ran the numbers, and decided that a green-minded consumer who just wanted a new set of wheels would probably be better off buying a cheaper car that got decent-but-not-awesome mileage, and investing some of the savings in something even more effective at reducing emissions: new insulation, say, or super-efficient appliances and furnaces. Then both you and the planet might come out ahead.

But a few months back, I basically abandoned that line of thought. What changed? Mostly gas prices. As the cost of fuel has risen above $4/gallon, the cost savings from a gas-sipping car have risen in tandem. Plus, hybrids are proving that they maintain their value very well; maintainance costs are low, and worries about expensive battery replacements are subsiding. Car rating service Intellichoice.com concluded that the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid were the cheapest cars of their class available, considering the total cost of ownership over 5 years. So if hybrids are the best buys in their own right, the climate benefits are just gravy.

But now, I see that Edmunds.com has come to the opposite conclusion, and that hybrids aren't even close to being the cheapest cars on the lot. The Prius, according to Edmunds, clocks in at #26 -- not terrible, really, but not stellar either. And the Edmunds report even assumes that gas rises to $5 per gallon.

And apparently Consumer Reports has yet another take; they rated the Prius as the third most economical new car, behind 2 versions of the Honda Fit. Of course, Consumer Reports limits their consideration to cars that meet their other criteria for quality and safety. (See here for a list of Edmunds & Consumer Reports top 10 most economical cars). Still, by their reckoning, hybrids fare pretty well.

If I dove into the numbers, I might figure out what's going on here. Are there different assumptions about mileage, or maintenance costs, or financing? Hard to tell. But for the moment, I'll consider the issue unsettled. At current and or/foreseeable gas prices, and factoring in the total cost of ownership, hybrids are either the very cheapest cars to buy; close to the cheapest; or not too shabby, all things considered. Your mileage may vary.