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Kyoto and City Mayors
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Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is in the news again, thanks to the release of Commission recommendations on how to meet the goals of his Climate Protection Agreement. The goals are very ambitious: reduce Seattle's CO2 emissions to 7% below the levels recorded in 1990, all within 10 years, "an amount equivalent to taking more than 148,000 cars off the road".

For a city of 569,000 people with a commuter population that's possibly three times as large, that's a tall order. Meeting that goal will require significant infill development (the recently passed zoning changes are a good start) and investment in mass transit. But the mass transit investment will be worthless if it's too hard to to live in the city without using a car. That means making space in downtown, Belltown, South Lake Union, and anywhere you're going to develop for amenities full-service grocery stores, drugstores, perhaps a hardware store or two, and livable public spaces. Now, "liveable public spaces" doesn't mean we have a forest at 5th and Pike. Personally, I would like to see more Savannah-style town squares in this country, but I know that's a tall order.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 08:53 25 March 2006