Xiaozhuli, Flickr

British Columbia prides itself on a commitment to renewable energy. Yet many British Columbians are forbidden from stringing up the simplest of solar devices: the clothesline.

These laundry-drying bans are written into the bylaws of strata corporations, which govern most of British Columbia’s condominiums, apartments, duplexes, and townhomes. Condos are a big and fast-growing housing choice in the province. In just 20 years, the percentage of Vancouverites dwelling in them has nearly doubled from under 25 percent to more than 40 percent. A similar trend is evident across the province where, in 2008, investments in condos and apartments outpaced investments in detached homes for the first time. Moreover, from 2002 to 2008, investments in townhomes and duplexes more than doubled.  British Columbia may have more than 1 million residents who are subject to strata bylaws.

Multiply that by clothes dryers’ prodigious appetite for electricity and you’ll see that the potential benefits of unbanning clotheslines mount quickly. Of all common household appliances, electric clothes dryers are second only to refrigerators in energy consumption. They account for more than 9 percent of BC’s residential electricity consumption, according to provincial utility BC Hydro sources here and here. Unbanning clotheslines would allow British Columbians to leave their dryers idle more of the time. Some 54 percent of British Columbians already report line drying their clothes at least some of the time.

If just half of condo and apartment dwellers in the province trimmed even a quarter of their drier energy use by grabbing their clothespins more of the time, it would amount to energy savings of nearly 60 million kilowatt hours every year. That’s two thirds of residential electricity use in the city of Langley. What’s more, allowing condos to banish solar drying contradicts a fistful of provincial policies. It’s at odds, for example, with the province’s goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, achieve electricity self-sufficiency, become a net clean-energy exporter, increase the percentage of its electricity generated from clean and renewable sources, and increase the share of electric vehicles on the road. The BC Energy Plan aims to decrease average household electricity consumption by 1,000 kilowatts per year by 2020: households that completely switch to hang drying will be more than 90 percent of the way toward this goal.

In Barcelona, clothesdrying from balconies is an artform. Photo by xavi talleda, Flickr.

Given all the benefits of solar drying, why do condos ban clotheslines in the first place? Campbell Strata Management’s president Sanjay Maharaj, who works with scores of stratas, says, “to ensure aesthetics and make sure that the common areas and look of the building is kept neat and clean at all times.”

Well, there’s no arguing with tastes, but clotheslines can be beautiful. They can also be flags of freedom from dirty energy and expensive power bills. And whatever your personal sensibility, a rack of clothes drying on a condo balcony isn’t ugly like its alternatives: a strip mine; a coal train; a forest stricken with pine beetles; a town deluged, burned, or leveled by the worsened floods, fires, and storms that carbon-induced climate change is sending our way.

Of BC’s million or so strata residents, experts suspect a big majority live under prohibitions on line-drying of clothes outdoors, at least if the clothes are visible from outside the building. Sightline’s map shows nearly 30 specific examples of clothesline bans that I’ve found in British Columbia (drag the map to BC, if it’s not framed in your browser), but that number barely scratches the surface. Roughly 30,000 BC strata corporations are registered; most of them use stock bylaws written for their developers by few dozen law firms and strata management companies. (British Columbia has no homeowner associations, unlike the Northwest states and other Canadian provinces, so its clothesline bans are almost exclusively in its strata corporations. In this way, it is already ahead of the Northwest states on the path to the right to dry. South of the 49^th parallel, homeowner groups, condo associations, and local governments may all ban solar drying.)

I requested copies of the bylaw templates used by ten firms and received responses from half of them. All five firms either sent bylaws that include clothesline restrictions or indicated that they have included clothesline bans in the bylaws they draft. Three examples illustrate.

Clark Wilson LLP is one of Vancouver’s 10 largest law firms. The firm’s Strata Property Group has acted for more than 1,500 strata corporations. Its bylaw template, which according to partner Pat Williams is rejected by “very few” of the stratas it serves, includes a de facto clothesline ban:

A resident must ensure that no air conditioning units, laundry, flags, clothing, bedding or other articles are hung or displayed from windows, balconies or other parts of the building so that they are visible from outside of the building.

Victoria’s Gibraltar Management has offered customized strata management services since 2005. It offers several bylaw templates, and according to founder Marv Walker, they all restrict clotheslines.

Campbell Strata Management, which serves nearly 100 Vancouver strata corporations, is another representative example. Managing broker Maxine Campbell said she is “not aware of any stratas that we manage that allow clotheslines or clothes umbrellas.”

The company’s president, Sanjay Maharaj, offered his assessment:

At the end of the day, it is up to the Strata Corporation to see what they want in their by-laws and the owners have a say on this through a 3/4 vote.

Mr. Maharaj is right, in legal terms. In practical terms, though, he’s overstating how much “say” owners have. The difficulty of achieving a quorum (one third of owners), let alone the necessary 75 percent super majority of those present, is practically as hard as scoring a double hat trick; it’s not literally impossible, it’s just not something you see very often.

Once strata bylaws are written, then, it almost takes an act of parliament to change them. And that’s more or less what British Columbia ought to do next: an act of the provincial parliament, the legislative assembly, to recognize the right to dry and make null-and-void strata bylaws that abridge it. Ontario and Nova Scotia have already found the political will to become right-to-dry provinces. Surely British Columbia can do the same.

Jon Howland is a Seattle-based teacher, debate coach, and Sightline volunteer. Alan Durning edited this post.

Read more on clotheslines:

• Pt. 1: Unbanning Clotheslines
• Pt. 2: Oregonians Already Have a Right to Dry
• Pt. 3: Clothesline Bans Void in 19 States

Long one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in the Northwest, it has for many decades struggled economically. In recent years, some areas of the valley such as Columbia City have gentrified rapidly even while nearby neighborhoods were rocked by the economic downturn, experiencing high rates of foreclosure and unemployment.

It was in that complicated geography that the Puget Sound’s first light rail line arrived, bringing with it both the promise of new investment and, for some, the threat of economic dislocation. To evaluate the changes Puget Sound Sage just published a new report: Transit Oriented Development That’s Healthy, Green, and Just.

I highly recommend it, in large part because the report invites a valuable equity perspective into a conversation that has not often focused on social justice. I also recommend it because it’s well-grounded in data and research.

I even learned a few things, such as this fascinating demographic comparison:

From Puget Sound Sage, "Transit Oriented Development that's Healthy, Green, and Just"

The new light rail line is, of course, hardly the sole driver of change in the Rainier Valley, but it serves as a useful orientation because it is particularly tangible, recent, and significant.

Puget Sound Sage finds that like most large infrastructure investments, light rail has increased property values and raised rents. Now whether that’s a problem for you or not depends in large measure on what your own economic situation is like. For the 44 percent of the neighborhood’s residents who rent, it’s potentially a threat.

On the other hand, large-scale transit investments like light rail also bring with them a number of positive developments, such as increased private sector investment, renewed public sector interest, and economic activity. And all of that provides some opportunity to make the outcomes of transit oriented development more equitable, but only with proper policy guidance.

The central public policy question—and one that Puget Sound Sage frames up admirably—is whether the benefits of light rail and transit oriented development actually accrue to the specific people who live in the neighborhood. No doubt for many locals, gentrification may prove to be a very good thing. But for others, there’s strong evidence that higher housing costs lead to financial distress and displacement which, as the report shows, may undermine the benefits for the transit investment in the first place.

It’s not a simple problem and, as such, it’s not a simple thing to fix. The report outlines a number of principals and specific solutions—including applying a racial justice framework to transit oriented development planning—but I won’t spoil those for readers now. You should go read the full report. It’s worth it.

Photo: Mark Strosberg, under a Creative Commons license.

Photo: Mark Strosberg, under a Creative Commons license.

At this point, most serious researchers agree that the average city-dweller produces fewer climate-warming emissions than a typical suburban or rural resident. City-folks tend to drive less, and walk or use transit more, than those of us who live in suburbs or out in the country. And city dwellers also tend to have less living space per capita, and are more likely to share walls or ceilings with their neighbors—all of which tend to reduce energy consumption per person. (And just to be clear: there’s no finger-pointing intended here, since my own neighborhood easily qualifies as suburban!)

The connection between urban form and greenhouse gases is strong enough that many policymakers concerned about climate change are looking for ways to trim back on rural development, in exchange for a little more housing in city and town centers.

A little while ago, at the request of King County (which contains Seattle and its closest suburbs), Sightline took a look at one increasingly popular mechanism for doing just that: Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR. In a nutshell, TDR programs allow willing owners of rural lands to sell their development rights—which means that the rural lands will remain rural. In turn, landowners in areas where the county wants to encourage development can purchase those rights, and thereby gain the right to boost housing intensity to higher levels than local zoning rules would ordinarily allow. At their best, TDRs are a winner all the way around: rural landowners get some income for protecting their land; purchasers get a financial boost from higher development intensity; farmland or open space gets spared from development; and taxpayers and utility ratepayers save a little cash from having better-planned development. And, with a little luck, the county that runs the TDR program might help trim greenhouse gas emissions in the process!

That’s the theory, anyway…and, in fact, our study found that the greenhouse gas reductions are almost certainly real:

Sightline’s analysis of King County’s TDR program and a variety of public data sources suggests that a single TDR exchange could reduce climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions by about 270 metric tons over 30 years, compared with development patterns that might otherwise occur. This is a significant reduction, representing half of the average [per capita] emissions from one US resident for the same period.

Combining energy savings on transportation, electricity, and home heating, we found that shifting a home in the distant exurbs of King County into a compact city or town center can make a real dent in household emissions. And the greenhouse gas reductions were still substantial, even when we assumed that cars and home appliances would grow more efficient over the years.

The largest reason that emissions fell in urban areas was that city dwellers drive less. We used two very different models of household transportation energy by neighborhood—based on completely different methods and data sources—and they came to the same conclusion: people in far-flung neighborhoods with few businesses or stores nearby logged more miles in their cars than folks in compact town and city centers.  See, for example, this map of transportation emissions in western King County, based on a transportation model from the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

But the devil is in the details.  In fact, we looked at some specific cases where King County had used TDRs to boost housing density in areas that were technically inside the urban growth boundary, but still pretty far out in the suburbs. The models we were using showed that some of this new housing would have been associated with even greater transportation emissions than the average King County home!

So you just can’t say that all TDR transactions automatically reduce emissions. Some definitely do—especially when they boost housing in the yellowest parts of the map above. But some are arguably worse for the climate than doing nothing at all.

What this all points to, in my mind, is that TDR programs can help cities and counties pare back on greenhouse gas emissions. But like any tool, they should be used with care. From the climate’s perspective, using TDRs to boost single-family housing at the urban fringe often represents a wasted opportunity.

Sightline GIS intern Erik Cortes conducted mapping and other analysis for Sightline’s report on Transfer of Development Rights programs.

Minneapolis bike share. Photo by Christine Winckler.

Those people at Walk Score just don’t know when to stop: today, they’ve announced new Bike Score rankings.

No surprises with the victors: Minneapolis takes the top spot (Bike Score: 79) while Portland and San Francisco settle for second and third (both have a Bike Score of 70). Seattle comes in at number seven (Bike Score: 64).

The block-by-block algorithm takes four criteria into account: bike lanes (how good is bike infrastructure), hills (how good is the geography), destinations (what can you bike to), and mode share (how many people are actually biking). See the full methodology here.

It seems like a great way to size up a city’s bike-ability: look at the lay of the land and see where good infrastructure takes you.

There’s not much else to say. It’s a great addition to their line up. You should just go check it out yourself.

Anna:

Jon Stewart gives the best explanation I’ve seen of cognitive dissonance and how it plays out: Two rats in a bag!

And in related cognitive dissonance news: Want partisans to listen to ideas that contradict their views? Give them an ego boost.

Our other big pollution problem: Antibiotics.

The Heartland Institute went too far lumping mass murderers and terrorists with everybody who’s concerned about climate change. A bunch of their backers are pulling away.

Clark:

Back when I was a wee lad, a more productive economy meant a more prosperous middle class.  Whenever technological advances made it possible to squeeze more value out of an hour of labor, employers would pay more for a worker’s time—and everyone saw some benefit from rising productivity.

But starting in the mid-1970s, the ties that bound wages to productivity began to unravel, first slowly and then catastrophically. Today there’s virtually no connection between a more productive economy and a more prosperous middle class.

Which leads to a big question: where’s the missing prosperity? In a new report, the Economic Policy Institute tries to solve the riddle of why wages aren’t keeping up with productivity.  They identify three separate culprits, which have differed in importance over time:

1)      Inequality of compensation—compared with the old days, a smaller share of workers captures the benefits of productivity gains

2)      Shifts in labor’s share of income—A larger portion of the economy’s gains are being captured as profits (by the people who own factories, equipment, stores, etc.) rather than as wages.

3)      A divergence between consumer prices and output prices—This is a somewhat technical shift…but in short, things that consumers buy are getting expensive faster than the things that workers make. (The price of microprocessors and machine tools—things that consumers don’t buy a lot of—are going up more slowly than, say, food, clothing, and shelter…which drives a wedge between real productivity and real earnings.)

For even more geeky goodness, you should check out EPI’s most recent edition of The State of Working America.

Top speed: 25mph. Range: 30 miles. Power source: electricity. Number of wheels: 1.  That’s right, a Portland-area plans to start marketing an electric-powered, self-balancing unicycle.  Segway owners eat your hearts out.

The invisible borders that define American Culture.

Alan:

Gain a powerful sense of scale about everything from Planck units to the scale of the observable universe, all from a scroll bar. Click on objects to learn more about them.

The most interesting thing I read in Sightline Daily all week was this post from Atlantic Cities about what heavy car traffic and inadequate infrastructure for walking and cycling does to children’s sense of safety and awareness of their surroundings.

Eric dP:

I enjoyed reading the new Bernie Sanders-Keith Ellison bill, called the “End Polluter Welfare Act.” The list of subsidies – no, strike that – rip-offs from taxpayers is breathtaking to behold. And enraging, in part because it presumably has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting even a vote.

Speaking of being enraged, it was fortuitous that by way of Sightline’s friend Kathyrn Malý, I stumbled upon a quote from MLK that I’d long forgotten. I’m not sharing it apropos of anything in particular, yet it doesn’t seem there’s ever a bad time for this reminder:

As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1956

It was with that thought in mind that I came across Ernest Callenbach’s parting words, recovered posthumously from his hard drive:

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable… We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us… And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

And those contradictions just about sum up the Obama era for me.

Trains carrying coal have been traveling through Western Washington on their way to Canadian ports for decades, yet the Northwest Clean Air Agency and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency have no record of coal dust complaints.

For decades, really? In the context it’s made—in support of plans to export huge volumes of coal—that’s a claim so deceptive it’s about an inch away from a lie.

The federal government closely tracks cross-border coal shipments of coal. Here’s what the past 15 years looks like:

The coal plans for the Cherry Point facility alone are so huge that they render the past decades of coal shipments virtually unidentifiable.

Now, strictly speaking, it is true that the trains have been carrying coal through western Washington to Canada. But until the last couple of years, the volumes have been positively tiny. When I say “tiny” I mean that for many years just a few dozen rail cars with coal passed that way, or maybe a single short coal train. Not more.

To compare the recent “decades” of coal shipments in western Washington to the plans afoot for Cherry Point is disingenuous at best. The truth is that if the Gateway Pacific Terminal gets built, the region will be shipping roughly as much coal every 5 months as it has in all of the last 16 years combined.

Given the minute amount of coal that’s historically been transported, it’s no wonder that local air agencies have no record of complaints so far. It is worrisome, however, that as shipments have climbed in the last few years, so have complaints about the coal trains.

In fact, as King 5 News has documented, coal is finding its way off the trains that travel along Puget Sound’s beaches. And contrary to the assertions of railroad interests, the Northwest public is right to ask hard questions.

United Nations Photo, Flickr.com, under a Creative Commons license.

Buying nothing new this year definitely has me rethinking my relationship with stuff. I’m throwing less away and stretching the life of things I already own—patching, mending, darning, gluing, duct taping, etc. So, the idea of “repair cafes” got my attention.

A couple of times a month in Amsterdam, people can bring their stuff to a community center where volunteers who like to fix things will give it new life—for free. The organizers (who serve coffee and cookies and call it a cafe) see it as a way to reduce waste, save money, and subvert our “throwaway” culture. Repair seems like a key component to reducing, reusing, and recycling. But, is repair dead? Dying? Or reviving?

In some sense repair as a way of life seems long dead. In a lot of the old fables and fairy tales I read my daughter these days, there are tinkers, cobblers, tailors, junk peddlers, and rag-and-bone men. Medieval Europeans just didn’t throw stuff away. Neither did my grandparents who’d lived through the Great Depression. But in more recent history—even as recently (ah-hem) as my childhood—back in the late ’70s and through the 1980s, there were still people who made a living in my little hometown repairing things. I remember the quiet, old guy with thick glasses and coveralls who repaired televisions, radios, tools and the like. He had a busy main street store front where, one by one, he revived the electronics piled up around him. There was a shoe repair shop. You could buy nifty iron-on patches for your denim pants at the drug store. My favorite of all, was the toy repair lady. She had a mile-high beehive hairdo and a tiny upstairs workshop in a creaky old building. She reattached a limb and put new hair on my favorite doll—a doll way too important to throw away.

How quaint that seems now, in our world of big box stores, online retailers, and planned obsolescence. Stuff breaks and falls apart all the time. But why fix it? Just throw it away and get a new one! Sure there are still some repair shops—for laptops, shoes, bikes, cars—but they are fewer and farther between. And that means getting stuff fixed up today is often prohibitively expensive. In fact, outside really big ticket items, it’s cheaper to buy new. (Take handheld devices like iPods and digital cameras for example: around $200 to fix; $250 to buy the shiny, new, faster, better, updated version.)

But, I’m heartened by what seems like a small but meaningful repair revival—for some, a necessity in this economy, and for many, a conscious backlash against our hyper-consumerist times. People are getting excited again about re-purposing, “up-cycling,” sharing, and tinkering! The Dutch repair cafes are one example (and the idea may be spreading) and national publications like Good Magazine devote a lot of ink to up-cycling, tinkering, and fixing; there are real, live, local happenings too.

For instance, a simple community project like the West Seattle tool library has spawned some amazing local repair clubs.

The West Seattle Fixers Collective is “fixing the world (or at least West Seattle).” They host DIY fix-it events that look like a good way to get your electronics repaired and a nice way to connect with neighbors too. (They’re two-for-two fixing KitchenAid mixers!) This is from their website:

The unpredictable projects range from re-sewing umbrellas to repairing home appliances, such as; kitchen mixers, laptops, espresso makers, desk lamps and even a few antiques. Members share a common interest of refusing to throw things out. They take true ownership of their belongings by taking them apart and figuring out how they work. They also get enjoyment by fixing their belongings themselves or helping others fix their broken possessions. Join them if you share these interests or just love tinkering.

And the West Seattle Spokespeople have been sponsoring free bike repair at Fixers’ meetings.

Yet another related Seattle community collective, RENEW,  meets up to divert and re-purpose stuff headed for the landfill.

(I’m thinking we should start calling West Seattle “Little Amsterdam?”)

There’s some action in Oregon too (probably more than I know).

For ten years, residents of Ashland, Oregon, have held an “abundance swap” in early December as an alternative to shopping for new holiday gifts.

The City of Portland’s Be Resourceful site lists community resources for sharing and repairing, including bike and shoe repair places and the North Portland Tool Library, Northeast Portland Tool Library, and  Southeast Portland Tool Library. There are several “swap and play” spaces where, as the name indicates, Portland families can not only get together to play, but can also swap outgrown toys and clothes. There’s also an online forum where Portlanders can share stories about their own resourcefulness.

The Missoula Urban Demonstration Project (MUD) has a tool library and community classes and resources for becoming all-around more self-sufficient.

Vancouver, BC, also has a tool library. They offer bike maintenance workshops. There’s also U-Fix-It Bike Works, a program for BC youth.

I’m on the lookout for other BC fixers—and more groups in Washington and Oregon too.

At the other end of the supply chain, “repair ware” designers are thinking about how we can once again make products that are durable and simple enough to repair at home. And mindful companies like Patagonia are making pledges to make quality stuff that won’t self-destruct right away, but also to repair their goods so that they don’t end up in a landfill prematurely.

There are lots of other good ideas out there.

What’s your repair story?

Courtesy of Kelli B.

Back in February, Treehugger posted a visually tantalizing slideshow of bike storage options. We featured it in Sightline Daily’s news digest, but something about it ate at us: many of the solutions were utterly impractical.

As even an occasional Northwest bike-rider knows, our bikes get wet. Sometimes, really wet—not to mention muddy, gritty, grimy, etc. Certainly past the point of wanting to hang them over an expensive couch.

Still, the article piqued our curiosity. How do real people park their bikes? We put a call out to readers to submit their bike storage photos. Here’s what we got.

Have your own bike storage solution? Email erich@sightline.org and we’ll add your submission to our Pinterest board.

Proving Treehugger’s solutions aren’t totally far-fetched, Jesse K. sports a custom-made bike shelf:

Courtesy of Jesse K.

And Kelli B. used recycled materials for a good-looking bike shelf:

Courtesy of Kelli B.

Others take advantage of backyard space by building bike sheds. Huck B’s whole family helped build this beauty (more shots here):

Courtesy of Huck B.

Sightline cyclist-in-chief Alan Durning dedicates a backyard shed to his bikes:

Courtesy of Alan Durning.

Some ditch the roof. Jeff Y. built a bike rack, which Jeff’s letter carrier calls a “bikeport”:

Courtesy off Jeff Y.

Jeremy F. makes good use of a tarp to keep his recumbent bike dry:

Courtesy of Jeremy F.

In sunny Santa Monica, the weather’s not a worry. Jessica L. keeps it simple, and her bike survived a rare rain event.

Courtesy of Jessica L.

Her colleagues at NRDC don’t have to worry much about the weather either:

Courtesy Jessica L.

Speaking of workplaces, here’s how Sightline (and other building tenants) store staff wheels:

Courtesy of Eric Hess.

Seattle Bike Blog has a bike-savvy landlord. This storage solution at its HQ came pre-installed:

Courtesy of Tom F.

Apartment and condo dwellers can keep bikes out of the house by taking advantage of parking garages. In Vancouver, BC, car-free Carolyn D. makes use of the two parking spots that came with her apartment:

Courtesy of Carolyn D.

Vince H. carves out space in his building’s garage:

Courtesy of Vince H.

No shared garage? No problem. Personal garages work too. Charlie W. neatly fits six bikes in his.

Courtesy of Charlie W

Rick R. stores his bikes in half of his half-garage:

Courtesy of Rick R.

Former Sightline intern Mackenzie B’s bike chills out on the floor of her garage:

Courtesy of Mackenzie B.

Corey F. replaced his water heater tank with a tankless version, freeing up precious basement space for bikes!

Courtesy of Corey F.

Former Washington State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald keeps his bikes at the ready in his furnace room:

Courtesy of Doug MacDonald.

Ethan M. keeps some bikes in the garage…

Courtesy of Ethan M.

And others inside the house:

Courtesy of Ethan M.

House dwellers and apartment renters alike need not worry: there’s plenty of room for bikes indoors. Prolific bike-writer Elly Blue shares a pic from a friend:

Courtesy of Elly Blue.

Heidi G. mounts her bikes on a frame:

Courtesy of Heidi G.

Brad B. has outfitted his hall:

Courtesy of Brad B.

Mary F. combines two of her loves: bikes and books fill a crowded study:

Photo courtesy of Mary F.

Sightline’s Pam MacRae dries her ride in the hall:

Courtesy of Pam MacRae.

Peter R. makes his foyer a busy bike scene:

Courtesy of Peter R.

And then there are the really creative solutions. Matt G’s bikes hang out. Literally:

Courtesy of Matt G.

Lastly, Paul T. in New York takes advantage of high ceilings with a bike pulley system:

Courtesy of Paul T.

As a display piece or hidden from sight, each bike needs a place to stand by, awaiting the next chance to roll. And bike owners everywhere have figured out ingenious storage.

Feeling inspired? Email your own bike storage photo to erich@sightline.org and we’ll put it up on Pinterest.

• What: Report release: A Sustainable Rainier Valley: Moving Racial Justice to the Center of Transit Oriented Development Planning in Seattle
• When: May 14, 5:30-8:00pm
• Where: The Filipino Community Center (5740 ML King Jr Way S, Seattle, WA 98118)

Get more info and RSVP.

The Chicago Tribune is “Playing with Fire.” In a weeklong series on flame retardants, a team of journalists eviscerates Big Chem, its star witness, and the astroturf groups that are “part of a decades-long campaign of deception that has loaded the furniture and electronics in American homes with pounds of toxic chemicals linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility.”

Earlier this year, we examined the testimony of Dr. David Heimbach, star witness for Big Chem, suggesting Heimbach’s testimony was either deceptive or uninformed. Our fisking gave him the benefit of the doubt. The Tribune dug deeper. Its reporters studied Heimbach’s testimony from the past three years and found he wasn’t simply uninformed. He lied.

In 2009, 2010, and 2011, Dr. Heimbach testified on three separate cases involving severely burned infants—each the result of candle-started fires. The Trib notes Heimbach’s impassioned testimony of the babies’ deaths “made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty. But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn’t true.”

No patients matching Heimbach’s descriptions died at Harborview Medical Center, where Heimbach practiced, according to the King County medical examiner’s office. Hospital records show a six-week-old baby named Nancy Garcia-Diaz died at Harborview in 2009, but she did not die under the circumstances Heimbach described.

In his most recent testimony, Heimbach stated the baby was resting in a crib on a fire-retardant mattress and on a non-retardant pillow. Describing the baby’s burns, Heimbach said the upper half of her body was burned. Public records show “there was no crib—she was resting on a bed — and no pillow.” A representative from the Snohomish County fire marshal’s office said the presence of flame retardants played no role in the pattern of her burns. What’s more, the cause of the fire was an overloaded extension cord, not a candle.

Dr. Heimbach isn’t even able to defend himself consistently. Heimbach acknowledges his three testimonies aren’t about different babies but about a single child. He described his inconsistent testimony as “an anecdotal story rather than anything which I would say was absolutely true under oath, because I wasn’t under oath.” Then he suggested he intentionally changed the facts to protect patient privacy. But, as the Trib notes, “the most crucial parts of his testimony—the cause of the fire and the lack of flame retardants—had nothing to do with privacy. Instead, they served to bolster the industry’s argument that chemical retardants save lives.”

Nancy’s mother, whom Heimbach most recently libeled by contending she placed a candle in her daughter’s crib, said, “Nancy’s memory is sacred to us. My daughter deserves respect. She lived such a short time and she suffered a lot. This is horrible.”

The debunking of Dr. Heimbach is just part of the Tribune series. It’s the part that’s on the cover of today’s Seattle Times. It’s worth your time to check out the whole series and then catch up on Sightline’s research on toxic couches. Let’s hope the unmasking of Dr. Heimbach’s lies will help California adopt a fire-safety standard for furniture that actually works.

Valerie Pacino is a Sightline intern and a Master of Public Health student at the University of Washington.

Read more about toxic couches:

• Pt. 1: An Obscure California Regulation Fills Homes with Toxics
• Pt. 2: Puppies, Kittens, and Toxic Couches
• Pt. 3: Putting the Chemical Witness on the Hot Seat
• Pt. 4: Toxic Money
• Pt. 5: Have Toxic Couches Finally Met Their Match?
• Pt. 6: Toxic Couches: the Infographic