Seattle

Mayors gather in Seattle to discuss climate

Today I’m heading down to the [deep breath] United States Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Summit, taking place in my hometown of Seattle. Around 100 mayors from across the nation will be there, discussing how to green their cities. NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is giving the keynote today, Al Gore will make a special appearance […]

Profit motive is eating the planet

The opening of the Propel Biofuels public pump was a smallish affair. The crowd of about thirty people appeared to consist mostly of investors, public relations personnel, some alternative energy enthusiasts, lots of press, and at least one lawyer. Because of the twelve-hour notice, and because it was in the middle of the week, only two protesters made it.

There is going to be a bigger protest this Saturday (October 20), same place, same time (high noon, at the pump located at Bernie's Auto Repair -- see map). Keep in mind this will not be a protest against Bernie, but against industrial agrodiesel. The pump is self-serve and open to the public. Bernie's is closed on Saturdays.

Consider dropping by for an hour or so to support those willing to publicly protest the for-profit takeover of the biosphere. It is remarkable how much impact protests can have. Imagine what a big one would do. Al Gore has called for civil disobedience. Some think Al Gore should be arrested. In any case, I'll be there along with my hybrid electric bike. Drop by and say hello.

It seemed to me that there were two main goals at the opening:

Commuters in Seattle avoid congested roads by driving less

Apparently, folks in Greater Seattle are responding to congestion by ... driving less! Which is, quite literally, no surprise at all. A comprehensive study of transportation patterns in cities across the globe found that high levels of congestion are linked with low overall energy consumption. When roads get congested, people adjust, and find alternatives to long, time-consuming commutes.

And that's what seems to be happening in Seattle. Highway congestion has grown in the region, as it has virtually everywhere in the U.S. But per-capita car ownership is on the decline, and total vehicle miles per capita has begun to level off. More importantly, the article cites evidence that growth management laws have concentrated much of the region's recent growth into already-urbanized areas -- the sorts of places where people don't have to make long treks to jobs or stores.

Seattle in 2020

The year was 2020 and Seattle had become the bicycle capital of the world. Visitors lined the streets to learn how we did it. Thanks to global warming, clothing had gone out of style, but thanks to genetic engineering we could alter our skin pigmentation to be any color we wanted. Racism had become a thing of the past and mustaches were popular again.

On Oct. 17, Grist is throwing a bash in Seattle — you’re invited

Our reader parties in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are the stuff of legend, but they’ve caused our hometown peeps to struggle with some rejection issues. Why all this jet-setting across the country and no love for the Emerald City? We heard your cries, hometown peeps. So we’re having a blowout right here in Seattle […]

The RTID package doesn’t give Seattle voters a fair choice

Those of us who live in and around Seattle will vote this November on a huge package that's being sold as "roads and transit." Stay with me -- it's complicated but important, and it could have implications for transit projects around the US.

Of the $18 billion in the package, about $10 billion will pay for 50 miles of new light rail; the rest will pay for roads projects, including 152 new miles of general-purpose highways (and 74 miles of HOV). Because our state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, tied the two unrelated proposals together, rejecting roads means rejecting transit, and vice versa. Pro-transit supporters of the package (and there are lots of them) pretty much stop there. How, they argue, could we turn down the first opportunity we've had in a generation to more than double the region's light rail system? Yes, there are roads in the package -- including bad roads, like the four-lane widening of a major suburban freeway -- but a lot of those will actually help transit. Expanding SR-520 from Seattle to Bellevue, for  example, will create two new HOV lanes. And look at all that light rail! Shiny, shiny light rail. How could you say no to all that light rail?

Well, let's look at what happens if this region does pass the joint roads and transit package. That will be our last chance to make a truly ambitious investment in transportation for a generation. It is, in other words, our last chance to do it right. As local Sierra Club chapter chairman Mike O'Brien told me, "It's not like we have pools of $18 billion just sitting around." If we pass this package, we'll have light rail, but we'll also be stuck paying for, and building, all those new roads -- roads that will just fill up, as roads do; roads that will contribute more to global warming than light rail takes away; roads that certainly won't be much help in easing congestion without a much larger investment in transit than the one in this package. And we'll send a message to transportation planners around the country: "It's OK to have transit, as long as you throw some new roads in there too."

A better message would be: "People want transit, so why do you keep giving us *$%! roads?"

Expect bicycle deaths in Seattle to climb

Not good. I happened upon this accident scene a few days ago. Apparently, a right turning truck hit a young bicyclist, killing him instantly. He had been in Seattle for only a few weeks and was the same age as my daughter, who rides a bike on a distant college campus. The sight truly unsettled me and made my bike trip through the heart of downtown more nerve racking than usual.

I want to use this tragedy to send a message to our amiable yet bumbling local politicians who have pledged to do their share to fight global warming. Your diversion of tax dollars into biodiesel has been a complete waste of funds and your bike plan is woefully inadequate to protect the burgeoning numbers of Seattle cyclists. Seattle's Burke-Gilman trail began life as a recreational park. It has become a dangerous, heavily traveled bike commute arterial. Just the other day a pedestrian leaped out from behind a bush a few feet in front of me. I missed him, but it is only a matter of time. As the number of bikers climb, so will deaths, unless steps are taken that will prevent them. Plastering signs all over the place may be inexpensive, but it is also largely ineffective.

Bicycles, and the rapidly rising numbers of electric assisted bikes, hold far more promise for reduced emissions than any other idea on the table, bar none. The loudmouths trapped in their steel 200 horsepower wheelchairs screaming that funds should be diverted from bike to car infrastructure need to be ignored. If you were smart you would turn Seattle into a model, world-class example of how to accommodate bikes, instead forcing your well-meaning citizens to play a bicycle version of Russian roulette every day.

Another agrofuel protest hits City Hall

Candace Heckman, writing for the Seattle P-I Big Blog, put up a brief post about the protest yesterday by Duff Badgley and his rag-tag group against local biodiesel-refiner Imperium Renewables. Imperium is getting downright defensive:

Imperium spokesman John Williams said this afternoon that the company is actively looking at "feedstocks" other than palm oil, and that for the next year-and-a-half, the City of Seattle would not be buying biodiesel made from palm.

This blog post "makes it sound like at some point we might sell palm biodiesel to the city. We haven't, we don't and we won't."

Get the violins and hankies out:

Williams said his company is being unfairly targeted ... [ahem] Although, Imperium is not in the position to completely swear off palm as the company grows into a global corporation.

Imperium has no choice. It has to make a profit. It has to try to pay back its investors. It is pointless to harp at Imperium. The power lies entirely in the hands of the consumer who can choose not to purchase food crop based agrodiesel.

The problem is with our local politicians. They have mandated its use, subsidized its profit margin, and to ice the cake, have allowed millions of dollars of retirement funds to be invested in Imperium. This was all done with money taken from consumers via taxes. Adding insult to injury, these same consumers have to buy back this environmentally destructive fuel from the government at whatever cost every time they take a bus or ferry.

Our politicians may have good intentions, but the road to hell is starting to look like a parking lot.

Seattle enviros face a Hobson’s choice in November

This November, those of us who live in and around Seattle will vote on a $17.7 billion transportation package that would expand light rail (by 50 miles) but also include billions for road expansion -- including roads that will primarily serve sprawling developments to Seattle's south and east, making the package a Hobson's choice for environmentalists. (The state legislature tied the roads and transit votes together last year, on the theory that road supporters will only support transit if it's accompanied by pavement, and vice versa.)

A lot of the debate around whether the package is good or bad, environmentally speaking, has centered around whether the roads part of the package (known as the Regional Transportation Investment District, or RTID) consists mostly of "good" or "bad" roads. There are a lot of elements to this debate, the first of which is: What constitutes a "good" road? Are new HOV lanes "good" (because they serve people who are carpooling) or "bad" (because they're still new road miles), and could they have been created by converting preexisting general-purpose lanes to HOV lanes?

Another issue is whether roads that are designated primarily for freight, but can be used by single-occupancy cars, count as "good" or "bad." Further confusing matters is the question of whether already-clogged roads produce more or fewer greenhouse gases when they're expanded to accommodate more traffic, because traffic moves more smoothly (at least for a little while.)

Given all those variables, it's not surprising that Seattle's environmental community is split on whether RTID/Sound Transit is a good or a bad thing.