Anyone wanna buy a blog? Comes with 13,000 unique visits per month! It’s been 18 months, 452 posts, and 3467 comments since I created this monster.  Time for a break, the cranium needs a rest, and so the Hugeasscity Foundation is sending me on an indefinite sabbatical. Coincidentally, today a friend loaned me a […]
CNT had already developed a model for predicting vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for their Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, so it was pretty much a plug and chug to get the household greenhouse gas emissions produced by driving, as mapped in the image above. The relationship is clear: more urban = less driving = less […]
Say you’re riding home on your bike on a nice sunny evening, and you’re a few blocks from home on 24th Ave behind the post office at 23rd and Union, and you see a man and a woman huddled together against the chain link fence, and while he is busy lighting up some kind of […]
Not only do we spend bazillions subsidizing car use, we also have to cover the expense of trying to lower the carnage rates by reminding people to do the simplest of things. Buckling a seat belt has got to be one of the world’s all time no-brainers. If we can’t trust people to “click it” […]
The Option of Urbanism by Christopher B. Leinberger. (Yep, I’m late to the party, but life has its distractions…) This is the same Leinberger who made a splash last year with his Atlantic article entitled “The Next Slum?” wherein he predicted that “drivable suburbanism” will not hold it’s value over time. Unlike some who would […]
And the editorial pages of last Friday’s Wall Street Journal were serving up the good stuff. First there was this cap and trade critique by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who, after ranting for a while about imperialism, bragged that “the world’s first commercial-scale clean coal power plant is under construction in our state.” Apparently Mr. […]
At this morning’s announcement event for a new “Climate 2009” executive order, Washington Governor Chris Gregoire was introduced as “the best climate change governor in the nation.” It’s hard to know how to interpret that. Just last week, on the waterfront just a few blocks south of today’s event at Pier 66, Gregoire spoke at […]
Johnson said she hopes Ashworth Cottages shows other developers that such projects are feasible. “It has to make economic sense to get other developers to do it.†“It’s not about making the most money on every job. If it was, you probably wouldn’t do sustainability to begin with,†Pryde said. But that was 2007. And […]
UPDATE: didn’t mean to lock down the comments — they’re now back open, no need to register. Two evenings ago I started working on a new post, hit the save button, and was redirected to the hugeasscity homepage. Went back, and found that my draft was not saved. Tried again. And again. Same deal. Busted. […]
Masses of lushness bursting from everywhere. How is it possible for so much plant matter to be created so fast out of nothing?
Strolling through Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park on a nice day you get the feeling that you’re in a real urban neighborhood in a real city. No other park in Seattle does it better.
WHEN SOUND TRANSIT Light Link Rail makes its debut this July, outside of downtown Seattle, not a single significant new private development will be there to greet it. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely recognized to be an ideal land-use pattern for achieving sustainable growth. But while our “T†is finally arriving, so far the “D†[…]
(Sad that it has come to this — posting a Dilbert. Shux, my bad.) The trust thing: Capitalism requires it to operate, but it cannot create it, and in fact, when allowed to run amok, will devour trust until it chokes to death on it. Social trust is built upon cultural institutions that lie outside […]
What it is: Long on data, short on analysis. The list below is a sampling of HAC-relevant media that has come bouncing across my personal echo chamber in the last day or two. Who has time to take it all in, much less interpret what it means? (And one bonus tangent: Every item below came […]
[ Governor Gregoire speaking at the tunnel legislation signing ceremony today at the Seattle Aquarium ] Mayoral candidate Michael McGinn said that yesterday, in reference to the plan to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct with a deep bore tunnel. Today Governor Gregoire is scheduled to sign the bill that authorizes the tunnel. The conventional wisdom […]
I’ve ridden my bike under this thing more than 800 times and somehow have remained lethargically ambivalent about it. Sure is big and fancy all glistening in light and shadow. When it was completed back in 2001, some folks — most notably Peter Steinbrueck — were not so equivocal. The main gripe was that it […]
