44 mm 072715

Monday Mailing

Year 21 • Issue 44 27 July 2015 1. 4 Big Recycling Myths Tossed Out 2. Keen Footwear Launches Tour to Save 3 Million Acres, Including Oregon's Owyhee 3. Biologists Haul Sockeye on Trucks to Avoid Unusually Warm Northwest Rivers 4. Private Land Logging Buffers Considered by Oregon Forestry Board 5. Quake, Tsunami Experts Advise Nervous Northwesterners on Preparing for The Really Big One 6. Sprawl Kills 7. 2015 Transportation Planning Excellence Award Winners 8. The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips 9. Walkonomics: What Makes the Best Route?

10. NADO Research Foundation Launches New Website of Resources for Planning and Economic Development in Rural Regions and Small Towns 11. The Old Suburban Office Park is The New American Ghost Town 1. 4 Big Recycling Myths Tossed Out America's recycling system is in crisis.

Quote of the Week: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. ~Winnie the Pooh Oregon Fast Fact: The State of Oregon is better off because of the service provide by each of you.

That's the picture the Washington Post recently painted in a damning story on the state of recycling in the United States. First, the mixedmaterial "blue bins," designed to decrease the hassle of sorting, are contaminating the recycling coming into facilities—meaning recyclable materials end up getting chucked into landfills along with trash. Second, thanks to lighter packaging, dwindling demand for newsprint, and low oil prices, the commodity prices for recyclables have decreased—so China, which used to buy most of our recycled materials, no longer has incentive to do so. According to the Post, this means that recycling is no longer profitable for waste management companies, and municipalities are stretching to pick up the cost.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Keen Footwear Launches Tour to Save 3 Million Acres, Including Oregon's Owyhee Keen Footwear is going on the road and it won't be their hiking boots they wear out.

The miles will be put on a refurbished 1970s-era RV, painted bright yellow, to draw attention to five places the Portland footwear company thinks deserves protection. Oregon's Owyhee Canyonlands is among them.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 1 of 5

3. Biologists Haul Sockeye on Trucks to Avoid Unusually Warm Northwest Rivers Five sockeye salmon swam in tanks at the Eagle Hatchery this week wearing the scars of their shortened trip to Idaho.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists took the unusual step of capturing the migrating adults in a trap at the Lower Granite Dam southwest of Pullman, Wash., the last of eight dams Idaho salmon swim through on their way from the Pacific to the Sawtooth Valley. That's because the Columbia and Snake rivers are as much as 6 degrees warmer than usual.

Northwest rivers are so warm that salmon and steelhead are dying in tributaries such as the Willamette and Deschutes rivers in Oregon. Oregon fisheries officials said Thursday that they are limiting fishing for trout, salmon, steelhead and sturgeon statewide to protect the fish from stress To access the full story, click here.

4. Private Land Logging Buffers Considered by Oregon Forestry Board GRANTS PASS — The Oregon Board of Forestry is considering how much to increase the numbers of trees that must be left standing along small and medium streams on private timberlands to shade the water and keep it cool for salmon.

A study known as RipStream has shown logging buffers on small and medium-sized streams under the Oregon Forest Practices Act don't do enough to maintain shade, allowing water temperatures to rise more than twice the standard of 0.54 degrees set by the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission.

The choice for the board, which is scheduled to vote Thursday in Salem, is that the more trees left standing, the better the chance of meeting the temperature standard, but the lower the profits for timberland owners. It has the latitude to weigh the economic costs against the ecological costs.

Current rules set buffers of 20 feet, with some logging allowed within them. Buffers up to 100 feet are being considered.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Quake, Tsunami Experts Advise Nervous Northwesterners on Preparing for The Really Big One The next big Cascadia earthquake will probably hit Southern Oregon. The idea that everything west of Interstate 5 will be "toast" is "pure hyperbole." But Oregonians should consult engineers concerning seismic retrofits to prepare for "The Really Big One." These are some of the comments made by quake and tsunami expert Chris Goldfinger and two of his colleagues during a "live chat" Friday on OregonLive. The geologists answered readers' questions online during a forum that attracted more clicks – 5,000 and counting – than any live chat in OregonLive's 18-year history.

The discussion, which continues, is the latest result of an article in this week's New Yorker magazine about the inevitability of a magnitude-9 earthquake off the Northwest coast. The story (condensed version here) reported that scientists expect the quake will cause the worst natural disaster in North American history. FEMA predicts the Cascadia quake and tsunami will kill nearly 13,000, injure 27,000, leave 1 million homeless and leave 2.5 million in need of emergency food and water.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 2 of 5

6. Sprawl Kills Sprawl makes for an unfortunate living environment, not just because it is fairly reliably drab and dull. Sprawl actually kills. Traffic fatalities are one of the leading causes of death in cities across the globe—according to the World Health Organization, 1.3 million people are killed by vehicles each year—and it’s worst where there’s most sprawl.

“That’s what the research shows: Urban sprawl is bad for traffic safety, period,” Ben Welle, a Senior Associate for Health and Road Safety at the World Research Institute, told me on the phone this morning. “Urban sprawl is directly linked to fatalities across all people using the road.”

WRI has just released a report that examines traffic statistics in cities around the world, and the findings are fairly unambiguous: Sprawling, car-centric cities kill more people than dense, pedestrianand mass transit-friendly ones. “Compact Stockholm and Tokyo have the lowest traffic fatality rates in the world—fewer than 1.5 deaths per 100,000 residents,” it notes.

To access the full story, click here.

7. 2015 Transportation Planning Excellence Award Winners The Transportation Planning Excellence Awards Program (TPEA) is a biennial awards program developed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and co-sponsored by the American Planning Association. The program provides a unique opportunity to recognize and celebrate the outstanding transportation planning practices performed by planners and decisionmakers in communities across the country.

An independent, expert panel of judges reviewed each nomination, and identified eight Award Winning projects that went well beyond standard practice to demonstrate an exceptional level of innovation and creativity.

We recognize all applicants for their efforts in applying to the program and appreciate the work that is being done to advance transportation planning across the county. The following list of award winners represent excellence in transportation planning and may serve as models for their peers.      

 

Moving Forward Update 2035 Regional Transportation Plan Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments, Colorado Springs, Colorado Mt. Hood Multimodal Transportation Plan Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland, Oregon Bus Stop Accessibility Study Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission, Roanoke, VA Humanizing Infrastructure: Design for the Replacement of I-95 Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania 4th Street/ Prater Way Bus RAPID Transit Project Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County, Reno, Nevada Chattanooga-Hamilton County/North Georgia Transportation Planning Organization Community-Sensitive Performance-Based Planning Chattanooga, TN Minnesota's 20-Year State Highway Investment Plan Minnesota Department of Transportation, St. Paul, Minnesota Project Connect North Corridor: Taking Transit Where No Transit Has Gone Before!

Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Austin, Texas

Page 3 of 5

8. The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips I am a freak for the American road trip. And I'm not alone, as some of this country's best writers have taken a shot at describing that quintessentially American experience. “There is no such knowledge of the nation as comes of traveling in it, of seeing eye to eye its vast extent, its various and teeming wealth, and, above all, its purpose-full people,” the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles wrote 150 years ago in Across the Continent, arguably the first true American road-trip book.

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.

To access the full story (and map), click here.

9. Walkonomics: What Makes the Best Route?

Most smartphone map apps give you several direct routes to get from Point A to Point B, but the quickest or most convenient path isn’t always the most enjoyable. Those interested in finding the most beautiful, walkable route to their destination can now try Walkonomics. The app, created by United Kingdom programmer Adam Davies, allows users to find more beautiful paths through seven cities across the globe using both open and crowd-sourced city data.

Walkability-related data and apps have existed for a number of years. Websites like Walk Score rate individual addresses based on a number between 0 and 100, telling you how walkable or cardependent an area is. But according to CityLab, Walk Score has yet to incorporate “more fine-grained and diverse data about the quality of the pedestrian experience.”

Walkonomics attempts to provide just that. Not only does this free iOS and Android app allow people to check the pedestrian-friendliness of most streets in Central London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Buenos Aires, and Glasgow, but it also allows them to chose either the quickest or most beautiful routes between destinations in these cities.

To access the full story, click here.

10. NADO Research Foundation Launches New Website of Resources for Planning and Economic Development in Rural Regions and Small Towns The NADO Research Foundation has developed a new website Planning for Prosperity in Small Towns and Rural Regions that contains materials developed over the past four years by NADO and its partners through the HUD Sustainable Communities Initiative capacity building program. On the website, you’ll find links to publications, webinars, workshop materials, and other information on a variety of topics and themes including economic resilience, entrepreneurship, community engagement, downtown redevelopment, food systems, and many other areas. While designed initially to assist the SCI grantee communities, these materials should be helpful to planners, economic developers, elected officials, and local residents working to improve and strengthen their small towns and rural regions. Click here to visit the site. Please direct any questions to NADO Program Manager Brett Schwartz at bschwartz@nado.org.

Page 4 of 5

11. The Old Suburban Office Park is The New American Ghost Town The shrubbery stirs in the breeze, which carries the odor of crushed asphalt.

Yellow paint is chipping off the curbs.

A single orange traffic cone sits in the revolving door that no longer revolves, at the front of an office building that’s no longer an office building.

The building in North Bethesda has eight floors. It is 98.7 percent vacant. There is one life form within its nearly 210,000 square feet — not counting the lobby fern on life support — and she wears a security uniform, sits at the front desk and listens to the muffled whine of a faulty alarm for hours at a time, every day between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m.

“It’s quite annoying,” say Lum Tumentang, the guard. The building engineer sometimes stops by and turns it off, but it inevitably trips again. There’s one or two IT people who do IT stuff one flight up, but they’re not here right now. The building was built in 1989, and it shows: a mountain of tinted glass and beige concrete in commercial dullsville. Over the past decade, its value dropped by 64 percent. The largest tenant, the National Institutes of Health and its contractors, started packing up two years ago as leases expired. By 2014, the owner reported cash-flow problems, foreclosure arrived this past January, and that was it for 6116 Executive Blvd.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 5 of 5