As Josh noted earlier, state Rep. Ross Hunter (D-48) has proposed closing the state’s $2.8 billion budget shortfall, in part, by raising “sin taxes” on things like cigarettes and imposing sales taxes on “luxury” items like bottled water. Also on Hunter’s hit list: Elective cosmetic surgery, which would be subject to state sales taxes under the plan.

Here’s the problem: 91 percent of people who get cosmetic surgery are women—many of them older women who cite the fear of age discrimination as a primary reason for getting plastic surgery. On average, they make just $55,000 a year. A tax on elective cosmetic surgery, in other words, is a discriminatory tax on women. Not just discriminatory but judgmental—the implication being that women who get plastic surgery are making bad, dumb decisions and deserve to be stigmatized.

It’s a classic Catch-22. Women are punished if we fail to conform to an unrealistic ideal—namely, that we be eternally thin, hairless, lithe, busty, tan, and young. Simultaneously, we’re shamed for being shallow and vain when we get the breast implants, tummy tucks, labioplasties, facelifts, nose jobs, spray tans, and Botox injections that are required to fulfill that ideal. Read more…

City Council member Tim Burgess put up a damning-with-faint-praise post on his blog yesterday afternoon about Mayor Mike McGinn’s State of the City Speech, which I (and many at city hall) described as disorganized and “a bummer.”
Praise because Burgess said McGinn “did a good job creating context for future initiatives he might propose” Read more…

As has been widely reported, in the wake of a brutal late-January beating of a teenage girl, both King County Metro and Mayor Mike McGinn have vowed to do more to improve safety in the downtown transit tunnel.

The story makes a new study of women’s perceptions of transit safety particularly timely. In many parts of the world, women rely on public transportation more than men do; yet study after study shows that women are far more likely than men to feel unsafe on public transit. (That finding tracks, incidentally, with this post from the BikePortland blog, about the reasons men are far more likely than women to ride bikes). And, it turns out, that fear is well founded (shocker, I know, for any woman who rides Metro transit buses): Harassment, in particular, is a huge problem for women transit riders across the age, race, sexual orientation, and disability spectrum.*

Some of the study’s findings:

• Two-thirds of the US transit riders surveyed believed that women have specific needs with regard to transit, but only one third believed that transit agencies should do anything about it. Meanwhile, just three percent of US transit agencies had any programs targeting women or addressing needs such as prevention of sexual harassment and groping. Related: Of the transit managers surveyed, 75 percent were men.

• Although women overwhelmingly said they were more afraid for their safety at transit stops than inside the bus or train itself, most transit safety resources are focused on the vehicles, not the stops. Women also believed that the cameras commonly installed at stops would help them only after an incident, not during the incident itself, and said they’d rather have more security officers than more technology. Yet most transit agencies are moving in the direction of more technology and fewer people. Eighty percent of transit agencies relied on CCTV cameras at buses and bus stops, compared to just 40 percent that used uniformed or nonuniformed security officers.

This lot, at the corner of MLK and Hudson Streets in Columbia City, sits slightly more than two blocks away from the nearest light rail station.

As you might expect for a piece of property so close to rail, zoning on this lot allows residential buildings as high as four stories. Read more…

Thanks to the election of Scott Brown, the Senate version of health-care reform will almost certainly include $50 million for abstinence-only education!
Teen pregnancy rates—on the decline since 1990—are back on the rise. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the increase can be directly linked to the Bush-era focus on abstinence-only education.

Mayor Mike McGinn marked his first meeting as a member of the Sound Transit board last week by making a lengthy campaign speech for his upcoming light-rail expansion proposal.
McGinn’s speech was surprising, only because all the other new board members’ introductory speeches were standard-issue, such-an-honor-to-be-chosen affairs. In contrast, McGinn’s remarks sounded like the beginnings Read more…

State Rep. Judy Clibborn (D-41), head of the House Transportation Committee, outlined some of her reasons for opposing last year’s “transit-oriented communities” bill in an interview with Seattle American Institute of Architects urban design committee chair Rick Browning.  (That bill, which died in committee, would have increased density around light-rail stations.)
In the interview, Read more…

The federal Department of Transportation has reversed Bush-era rules that favor buses over rail for federal dollars, the New York Times reports:
Administration officials said they were reversing guidelines put in place by the Bush administration that called for evaluating new transit projects largely by how much they cost and how much travel time they Read more…

As we alluded in Morning Fizz, there’s been a major backlash to the city’s efforts to police illegal park-and-rides around light rail stations. Today, a prominent local environmentalist has published what could be the beginning of the backlash to the backlash.
After PubliCola broke the story about crackdowns on the paid private lots last Read more…

As we’ve reported previously, there’s a big debate just getting underway about which route makes more sense for the proposed First Hill Streetcar—Boren and Madison (as originally proposed) or 12th Ave. (as supported by a group of Capitol Hill residents and businesses.) The streetcar was promised to residents of First Hill—after downtown, the Read more…