Seattle.BloggersPub

(Also see the entire carless series.)

Cars are boxes. They’re boxes on wheels with couches inside. They’re extensions of our living rooms, mobile privacy pods, where the driver gets to choose the music, company, temperature, and schedule.

So, for a newly car-less family like mine, one main change in shedding our box—the “car-coon”—is spending less time in private space and more time in public.

The effects include both gains and losses.

No Box means no insulation from unpleasantness: Amy saw a bus rider start screaming at the driver one day, and Gary actually had to call the police (on his car-less cellphone) when a rider got especially belligerent. My own pet peeve is the tobacco smoke I must breathe while traveling certain sidewalks—sidewalks where smokers take refuge from Washington’s workplace cigarette ban.

He was such a good basketball player.  How does a guy who continues to lose, continues to fail, continues to be hammered by the media, continue to turn up in high profile positions?
This makes me wonder even more? Zeke’s got the touch of doom.  Another instant classic from Page 2.

Even a fender bender can have a big impact on your week, and your wallet. But more serious crashes are taking their toll on the Northwest–car crashes are the leading cause of death of northwesterners under the age of 45, killing about 5 people a day in the region and injuring many more. These individuals tragedies add up to staggering proportions–2,000
deaths a year in the Northwest and an economic drain of more than $8 billion
per year.

We’ve created a counter that shows the high personal and economic toll of our car-centered lives adding up in real time for the Northwest:

Car crashes, by the numbers

Even if your life has never been affected by an accident (and you’d be one of the few), it’s a strong argument for building cities that give people other options than driving (the more you drive, the higher your risk), and provide access to transit (mile of mile, the bus is 10 times safer than driving). Here are some of the ways we can get there.

No regional angle here, really, but astonishing nonetheless — according to a new report by Environmental Defense, American cars and trucks gobble up about 45 percent of the world’s highway fuels.

Time and again, I’ve heard that the United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but consumes about a quarter of the world’s total resources (lumber, minerals, energy, etc.).  When you do the math, this means that we Americans consume roughly six times as much stuff, person for person, as the remaining 95 percent of the planet’s human inhabitants.

But for personal car travel, the situation is much more stark.  Between our large, low-mileage vehicles, our sprawling urban areas that make driving a necessity rather than a choice, and our great wealth, Americans’ daily travel habits consume more than 15 times as much highway fuel as the average for the other 95 percent of the planet.

Nice column today by the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly on the astroturfing of the Washington state initiative process — with a special look at I-933, a stealth attack designed to undermine, oh, pretty much any action taken by state or local government:

The Washington State Farm Bureau is the official sponsor of I-933.
But money to pay signature gatherers, $200,000 at last count, has come
from an outfit called Americans for Limited Government.

Who are Americans for Limited Government? Where does Americans for Limited Government get its money? We have no way of knowing.

Sponsors would have you believe that this is a land-use rebellion by
poor widows and orphans prohibited from subdividing the wetland that is
their chief asset in the world.

Bullpucky! It’s a top-down initiative paid for by a powerful out-of-state interest.

Anybody out there know who Americans for Limited Government really are?  (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

Kidnapped Israeli settler, Eliyahu Osheri (photo: Haaretz)
Things just became a whole lot more complicated for the Israeli government as the Popular Resistance Committee, involved in the attack which captured IDF officer Gilad Shalit, also kidnapped a young settler near Ramallah possibly on Sunday. There are unconfirmed reports that the boy may already be dead; […]

We didn’t want to be indoors last night, since it was hotter inside than out. A hot kitchen in a hot apartment with no air conditioning seemed an unbearable thought, so we lit some binchoutan (Japanese charcoal) and set up the shichirin, a small table-top grill, outside on the balcony.

My tiny table barely fit all of the plates, but we ultimately grilled some whole wheat bread, asparagus, onions, scallions, red bell peppers, green beans, and even some tofu. For dipping, I put together three options: an improvised harissa mayonnaise, and some yuzu miso, and some fleur de sel.

Hiromi put together the insalata caprese. I was the one drinking the fruity white wine, while she drank Red Hook IPA.

As the sun set, the red glow of the shichirin kept going strong.

I’m on Pacific time, so even though it’s way past my bedtime here in DC, I’m still up so I’ve been catching the news on MXNA and various email lists. Flex 2 and Flash Player 9 are finally out and in the wild. This is a pretty awesome day, and I’m sure CFUnited will be buzzing tomorrow.

But for right now, the first thing you need to do is head over to Flexcoders.net and list yourself as a Flex developer. I hear from Tariq that he’ll have numbers up in the near future so all of us can brag about when we were number 37 on flexcoders.net after it hits 1 million.

Secondly, go grab Flash Player 9 and tell your friends to get it.

The next thing to do his hit the brand new Flex.org site which has a ton of Flex information. For tips, you’re still better off with Cflex.net but it looks like Flex.org is going to be a great central resource for Flex info. While they need to work on their blog list (Where’s !?), I’m sure the kinks will be worked out in the next few weeks. And it’s the place to find all of the info on downloading the FREE Flex 2 SDK as well as purchasing Flex Builder 2.

Huge congrats to the Flex 2 team and everyone at Adobe. I’m excited to see what kinds of applications start showing up now that we’re live and it’s a big, big day for Rich Internet Applications. Next stop - Apollo.

Traffic congestion–and the lost fuel and time that comes with it–costs billions of dollars each year in the US. That much is clear. 

How many billions, though, is a bit of a mystery. According to this book, Street Smart, the total annual cost of congestion in the United States is about $108 billion. Or perhaps $63.2 billion.  Or maybe it was just $12 billion. 

It depends, apparently, on what you’re looking at.

“Density without ripping out single-family housing.”  That’s how one proponent described new rules that would allow some Seattle homeowners to turn detached garages or other backyard structures into apartments.

It’s a great idea.  Putting an apartment in your back yard can let your neighborhood accomodate new residents without changing its character.  From the street, the neighborhood looks the same; the only change is that more people get to enjoy it.

And adding residents has a couple of nifty benefits.  First, the rules could help keep housing affordable, both by increasing the supply of rental housing (which helps hold down rents) and by giving some homeowners an additional source of income (which can help them meet their mortgage payments).

And second, denser neighborhoods — at least as a general rule — are able to support local stores and services. Higher residential density helps make transit cost effective, and also increases the number of local patrons for shops and restaurants.