Cities & Planning

Transit is at a crossroads. The pandemic upended a period of growing ridership and service that saw Seattle lead the nation in both the rate of ridership gains and car-free household formation. It …

Councilmember Strauss introduces legislation to regulate 70,000 additional trees – but will the effort to boost canopy coverage to 30% slow down housing creation? After three years of work on the i…

Draining the lake allowed agriculture to thrive, but left the region vulnerable to floods.

Orange Sky Australia positively connects people experiencing homelessness through free laundry, showers and conversation. Join our community to help the homeless.

Any frequent reader of The Urbanist knows that we have a long and painstakingly catalogued list of gripes with Seattle. From the completely avoidable pedestrian carnage to the collapsing school dis…

If you travel around Capitol Hill, the Central District, and Madison Valley, you’ve likely seen construction on E Madison Street in preparation for King County Metro Transit’s RapidRide…

RapidRide G Line will have lots of capacity during the day, but evenings and connections get dicey. Next year, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and King County Metro will cut the rib…

It ain’t much, but that’s all the Board’s going on too. This week, the Sound Transit Board of Directors will be deciding on preferred Ballard Link alignments and station locations…

Floating solar panels are an emerging concept, promising as well. Both developed and developing countries are planning to invest in the same.

When interest rates go up, the price of bonds goes down. As Tyler and I discuss in Modern Principles, the inverse relationship between interest rates and prices holds for any asset that pays out over time. In particular, as Patrick McKenzie points out, when interest rates go up, the value of a loan goes down. […]

A single Nanogrid from Sesame Solar can power up to six homes.

SAGAMIHARA, Kanagawa -- Against the backdrop of rising energy prices due to the effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a workshop that teaches peopl

Hundreds of millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation. Will the first UN conference on water in nearly 50 years make a difference?

Imagine one of those old-timey lumberjack photos. The kind where two men in plaid are working away at a tree, holding opposite ends of a huge, human-length saw. That is a vintage crosscut saw. Some avid crosscut seekers spend hours mining websites like eBay and Craigslist. But they also search in person on saw hunting

Transition Network encourage communities to come together and rebuild our world. Step up and address the big challenges we face by starting local.

On March 7, the Woodinville City Council held its first of four meetings with Cascadia Consulting Group, a firm the city is working with to draft...

A decades-old neighborhood project in Tucson provides food to residents as well as shade to cool streets in the third-fastest warming city in the US

Ensia is a solutions-focused nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet. Published by the Institute on the Environment.

Earlier this month, Kyneton opened the taps on a $7.5 million recycled water upgrade to its regional treatment plant.

Panels on reservoirs can keep enough water for 300 million people from evaporating.

About 80% of the energy requirements of a fully electrified society with heat pumps everywhere possible already exist. Electrification and heat pumps radically reduce the requirement to build new wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and geothermal primary energy sources.

Kenya’s government plans to build 137 solar minigrids across remote locations in the East African country. The project received $150 million in funding from the World Bank.

This weekend King County Metro starts service on the RapidRide H line, running between Downtown Seattle and Burien. The seventh RapidRide line and the first launched since the RapidRide F in 2014, …