swainboat, flickr

“Is meat sustainable?” It’s a question too big to tackle in a single blog post, but the fact is that billions of people worldwide eat meat, in one form or another, and in the Northwest, farm sales of livestock represent nearly $3 billion in sales annually. It’s useful, therefore, to consider whether some forms of meat production are better for natural systems than others.

One promising technique attempts to use livestock grazing to reverse desertification, restore grassland habitats, and even reduce global warming. It may hold promise for the Northwest’s dry interior regions.

There’s a fascinating back story to the so-called “brown revolution” for arid lands that starts with Allan Savory, who founded the Savory Institute based on the principles he discovered while ranching in Africa. One good account comes from Spencer Beebe, who profiled the work on Ecotrust’s blog.

The guiding belief behind Savory’s work is that while overgrazing can cause desertification, there’s something to be learned from the fact that humans, grazing animals, and their habitats evolved together. For example, in arid environments today, sudden dry periods can halt the natural decay of plant material. But in prehistoric times, huge herds of grazing animals, such as buffalo or elephants, moved frequently across the landscape, in the process trampling organic material into the soil and breaking dry ground to allow water to seep in. The grazing herds also effectively “recycled” grassland forage by eating it, then returning it in the form of dung and urine. Herds moved on before they ran out of forage, which allowed the grazed area to “rest,” recover, and re-grow, thanks to water infiltration and the chewed and trampled biological material, before grazers returned to repeat the process.

By Dr. Karen Launchbaugh, University of Idaho College of Natural Resources, via a Creative Commons license.

Domesticated livestock and fences changed the natural dynamic, allowing private herds to graze in a single location with no recovery for the rangelands. The result was often desertification, reduced productivity and biodiversity, and increased poverty for grazing communities. The solution, Savory believes, is “holistic grazing management” that moves herds in such a way that allows more “rest” of rangelands before the herd moves in again.

Rangeland—the extensive, unforested land dominating the western half of North America—constitutes a very large portion of Cascadia. In the Northwest, the most common form of rangeland is sagebrush country, sometimes called the “shrub-steppe,” that provides habitat for sage grouse and many other creatures as well.

In Oregon, federal rangelands cover 14 million acres, fully 54 percent of the state’s land. Idaho’s rangeland covers 44 percent of the state, 9.5 million acres. By one estimate Washington’s rangeland totals about 5 million acres, representing 27 percent of the state, and British Columbia contains more than 23 million acres of rangeland––about 25 percent of its total land — and a beef herd of about 215,000 head.

On both sides of the border, government has an outsize role in controlling rangelands. In British Columbia, over 90 percent of the land is Provincial Crown (that is, government-owned) land. The government leases rangeland, with most grazing occurring on Crown land between the Canadian Rockies and the Coast Mountains.

In the US, support for grazing has been a federal function, going back at least to the New Deal-Era Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which directed the government to manage and protect federal rangelands, and to support grazing. That function now resides with the US Bureau of Land Management, which manages huge portions of Cascadia east of the Cascade Mountains.

Because rangeland management is largely the province of Cascadia’s governments, public policy can play a leading role in catalyzing sustainable grazing practices. Before that happens, however, policymakers will need to better understand the benefits of Savory-style range management.

At Idaho State University, GIS Training and Research Center director Keith Weber has found that intense livestock grazing over a short period of time on a small area actually benefits rangeland, a conclusion consistent with Savory’s “brown revolution.” (Weber is also co-author with Sharon Horst, a Savory Institute co-founder, of an October 2011 scientific article, examining the potential for livestock grazing management to improve arid and semiarid rangeland ecosystems.)

There may even be a climate benefit to better grazing practices. In a 2011 article in the Atlantic, Jim Howell, co-founder and CEO of Grasslands, addressed the connection between livestock and global warming, claiming that increasing the organic matter in the world’s grasslands by just two percent would sequester 2880 billion tons of CO2.

For comparison, a February 2009 author in Scientific American estimated that the annual worldwide production of meat generated the equivalent of 6.5 billion tons CO2. (The analysis applied to all meat, not just livestock. However beef is one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive forms of meat.) For perspective then, if Jim Howell’s estimate is right, better managed grasslands might be able to take up all the CO2 gases produced by 443 years of meat production at current rates.

It remains to be seen whether holistic grazing will take root with Cascadia, but the practice is already at the region’s doorstep. Grasslands, LLC is applying holistic grazing practices in South Dakota and eastern Montana regions where buffalo once held sway.

It’s important to acknowledge that some have objected to Savory’s principles; see here and here, for example. In addition, it may take years before results from the Grasslands LLC operations in the Great Plains might can support the “brown revolution” hopes.

In the meantime, however, the Savory Institute has won support from organizations as diverse as Ecotrust in Portland and ranching advocates in Idaho. Here’s hoping that the Institute’s grand experiments in the Plains are successful, and can translate to more sustainable meat production and healthier Northwest rangelands.

John Abbotts is a former Sightline research consultant, who occasionally submits material that Sightline staff turn into blog posts.

It’s an all-day event that promises to be highly engaging.

You can get more information or buy tickets here.

See you there!

Eric dP:

Joel Connelly deserves many kudos for being the first to draw attention to the fact that Tim Eyman’s proposed latest “two-third majority” anti-tax ballot measure is really just a stalking horse for Big Oil. You can tell, as Connelly points out, because oil refiners have already thrown a staggering $350,000 behind his initiative.

I really think it’s worth being clear about this: tax policy in Washington State is now being written by oil companies with headquarters elsewhere.

Amidst all the hullabaloo in Seattle about a possible new NBA arena, I enjoyed reading Brian Phillips’ open letter to Seattle SuperSonics fans from an OKC Thunder supporter.

Finally, I loved this time-lapse photography of a crane being assembled in my neighborhood. I’ve always wondered how they did that.

Clark:

How to dry your hands with just one paper towel.

A mathematician looks at America’s obesity epidemic and concludes…DAH-DAH-DAHHHHN…that we’re eating too much.  Who knew?  Actually, lots of people.  But the math makes it pretty clear that the real culprit is the phenomenal abundance of cheap calories. That makes the political fight against obesity a sticky wicket: if the root cause of obesity is abundant, cheap food, then is the solution…scarce, expensive food?  That’s not going to go over too well.  Unfortunately, the mathematician has no real solutions to the political dilemma.  So he, like everyone else, falls back on some smaller steps: urging food companies to stop marketing junk to kids, and admonishing those of us who want to avoid obesity to “cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.” Helpful advice, but still tough to swallow.

In case you missed it, here’s my favorite story from Sightline Daily this week, on food, willpower, and maps of late-night binging.

Pam:

It’s not news that obesity is a serious problem in the US, a problem that comes with a stiff price tag in health care costs. And there are plenty of connections between obesity and sustainability, from the foods we eat to our built environment. But this article had some other connections that I just hadn’t thought about, namely that our transportation costs have increased alongside our collective weight: “$5 billion annually for additional jet fuel needed to fly heavier Americans, compared to fuel needed at 1960 weights, and $4 billion annually for additional gasoline as cars carry heavier passengers.”  Obesity is also changing our transit systems, with wider seats in trains and increased testing for bus safety.

Meaghan:

Need a place to stay the next time you’re in Jordan? Try this cave on couchsurfing.com.

Alan:

My favorite item in Sightline Daily this week was this brief article. It’s about how and why poor people are more likely than better-off people to be hit by cars. Sobering but revealing.

Anna:

The Smiths said it: Meat is murder. But perhaps not the way you might think it is. Mark Bittman’s latest is about how we can all save lives (and not just animals’—by preventing climate disaster) by eating less meat.

How tribalism overrules reason and the pitfalls of cultural cognition.

Stereotype busing (or…not so much) in some clever renewable energy ads.

Eric H:

Have we hit “Peak Pop“?

cafemama, flickr

Why don’t women bike to work more often? You hear many theories: we’re less willing to ride in traffic, we can’t arrive at a showerless office all sweaty, we never bothered to learn how to fix a flat, our schedules are over-extended, we work longer hours to make the same money as men, those of us with kids spend twice as much time on average caring for them, and many of us squeeze in shopping and errands on the way to and from work.

There’s no single satisfying answer, although convenience is a recurring theme. Sometimes,though, the reason can be as stupid as a garage door. When I evaluated all the things in my life that keep me from hopping on my bike more often, that’s what it boiled down to. I used to keep my bike in the back yard, but after I bought a trailer to haul around our 3-year-old, it was too cumbersome to hoist all of that up the steep stairs to our house and then squeeze through bushes and trees to get to our covered back deck. The other option was our garage, which has an old wooden door that’s falling apart. After some reflection, I realized that I hate to open it because every time I do I’m afraid that I’m going to do irreparable damage and then I’ll have to pay a lot of money to replace it. So there my bike sits, held hostage by a lack of handiness and disposable income.

According to new 5-year estimates from the commute section of the American Community Survey (2006-2010), I’m not alone. Even among Northwest cities with significant numbers of female bike commuters, the percentage of women who primarily biked to work in the week before they were surveyed ranged from a low estimate of 1.8 percent for Seattle to 7 percent in Corvallis, Oregon.

Women bike commuters chart in NW

For a larger version of this chart, click here.

Keep in mind, these estimates don’t offer an accurate picture of overall bicycle use because they don’t capture trips to the grocery store or to a friend’s house or any other non-work-related trips. They’re based on the nationwide ACS survey that asks people to report how they traveled to work most often in the previous week. Because of the sample sizes, the estimates also have sizeable margins of error (represented by the gray bars in the chart above) that made the results meaningless for any city that didn’t have a fairly substantial number of women bike commuters. Even estimates from Spokane, Olympia or Salem weren’t accurate enough to be included. In general, the larger the city, the more reliable the estimates are.

Still, the results are pretty interesting.

First, look at the huge disparity among the different cities. What prompts 1 out of every 14 women commuters in Corvallis to hop on a bike vs. 1 out of every 55 in Seattle? Obviously, the city’s size makes a huge difference, both in terms of the distance one has to travel to work and the amount of traffic you have to contend with. And when women were asked in a 2011 survey what would prompt them to start or increase their cycling, the number #2 answer (behind convenience, which won by a landslide) was better bike infrastructure. That included better engineered bike routes, winter weather plowing and maintenance, dedicated bike lanes, places to shower afterwards, and accessible and secure parking near their workplaces and schools. They also cited the need for bike shops and mechanics that cater to women, or at the very least that don’t give people like me the I-can’t-believe-I-actually-have-to-wait-on-you attitude that one not-infrequently encounters in Seattle bike shops. Another survey focusing specifically on low-income women in San Francisco raised access to a free or low-cost bicycle, the distance they have to travel to work, and the ease of using cars as significant barriers.

When you look at what percentage of a city’s total bike commuters are women, Seattle also brings up the rear. According to these estimates, only 30.7 percent of the city’s bike commuters were women, meaning that men outnumber them on the road more than 2 to 1. Portland, Corvallis and Eugene had roughly 35 percent women, while Boise and Bellingham came out on top with 40 percent (bearing in mind that the estimates for the smaller cities have a fair amount of wiggle room).

For a larger version of this chart, click here.

If women are an “indicator species” that demonstrate how bike-friendly a city truly is, then clearly some Northwest cities have more work to do. But all the bike infrastructure in the world won’t change the persistent inequities between men and women–in terms of income, division of labor within a family and the responsibilities for childcare–that can make regular bicycling more challenging for women. While you can often find time you never knew you had for things that you decide to prioritize, I’d happily pay to get my garage door fixed if someone could just make an extra hour magically appear every day.

flickr, Vagabond Shutterbug

Earlier this year, I shared my stroller-on-the-bus hell story. The villain in the tale was surprising: King County Metro, otherwise a hero in my book. Like many transit agencies across North America, Metro says kids cannot stay in their strollers on board buses—and that policy is a giant problem for families with babies and toddlers. Unpacking a stroller, folding it, and hauling everything onto a transit vehicle even one time is enough to convince many parents never to attempt a bus ride again.

Well, guess what? Dozens of Metro drivers on dozens of Metro buses already welcome aboard moms and other caregivers pushing their kids in prams: no stroller folding necessary. No rogue pram guerrillas, these drivers do so in accordance with their orders from above. So do certain drivers at the county transit agency in neighboring Pierce County, which also bans loaded strollers.

Contradiction? No. Sound Transit, the Puget Sound regional express bus service provider, has strong pro-stroller policies on most of its vehicles, including not only its light-rail cars but also most of its buses. (Exceptions are the tall, narrow-aisled, Greyhound-like vehicles it sends up and down I-5.) And Sound Transit contracts with King County Metro and Pierce Transit to operate its buses.

All that Metro and Pierce Transit need to do to catch up with North America’s stroller-friendly leaders is to tell all of its drivers to do what some of its drivers already do: follow Sound Transit’s stroller rules.

Specifically, Sound Transit, like greater Vancouver, BC’s TransLink, lets strollers roll aboard buses and trains. Strollers are allowed in the priority seating area at the front of the bus. Drivers have discretion to ask that a stroller be folded if it is creating a hazard. TransLink sets size limits. Both agencies prioritize the front seats: disabled riders get first dibs, followed by elderly riders, and finally caregivers with strollers.

Such rules are reasonable and, in fact, standard. Agencies with pro-stroller policies still set limits. A 2011 Transportation Research Board report indicates that 65 percent of transit agencies with stroller policies require strollers to park in a specific location. Sixty-three percent of agencies require strollers to be collapsible (but not necessarily collapsed).

Examples of pro-stroller policies dot the map of North America. Just north of King County, Snohomish County’s Community Transit allows loaded strollers aboard, although its policy is not well defined on its website. In 2006, Tri Delta Transit of Contra Costa, California, retrofitted its bus fleet to create stroller areas on board. San Francisco Muni recently began discussing lifting its stroller ban to “keep families from fleeing the city.”

Safety is often cited as a key reason for banning open strollers on buses. Yet many agencies address safety concerns with simple policies. The Chicago Transit Authority allows children to stay in strollers while riding transit, but they must be seated and secured; other agencies specify that strollers must have brakes activated.  In Montreal, caregivers must face strollers towards the rear of STL buses. And the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District specifies that the caregiver must keep a hand on the stroller while the bus is moving.

Photo by Alyse Nelson.

Transit agencies in King and Pierce Counties have examples of pro-stroller policies all around them. They would do well to copy from the playbooks of other transit agencies: set clear size limits, designate stroller space, and prioritize use of that space for different groups of riders. Then, let unfolded strollers roll aboard.

That’s all it would take to start giving moms, dads, and other caregivers the kind of treatment that makes transit a viable option for them.

Guest blogger Alyse Nelson is a city planner for a small town in Kitsap County, Washington. She spends some of her spare time researching for Sightline on topics such as pedestrian carts, cargo bikes, and family-friendly courtyard housing.

chiot's run, flickr

We’ve been cleaning out the fridge for nearly a year now, and we’ve compiled our list of moldy, past-their-prime laws into a handy new report.

It’s all in there, from freeing taxis and food carts to legalizing car sharing and clotheslines. Plus, we’ve cataloged three success stories, where outdated rules have been brought into the modern age.

Download the full report, or get the two-page summary to take to your next cocktail party.

There’s lots more work to be done. We’ve made it through the crisper and cheese drawers, but there are plenty more shelves to inspect. Know of a regulation that stinks to high-heaven? Sent a note to Eric de Place, eric@sightline.org.

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 dryer 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, clothes drying 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 a 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.