I just finished a book called Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World. It’s an interesting book; I learned a lot from it, although I don’t agree with everything that he says (he has both a weirdly rosy view of certain cities, and a weirdly pessimistic view of the broader situation). The […]
Category Archives: Portland
Gratitude inaccessibility
I’m having a problem with the inaccessibility of gratitude, currently. It’s a bit ironic and also funny, because gratitude is one of the few happiness/mindfulness practices you could say I’m “good at”, meaning that I practice it a lot and don’t normally find it difficult (see last year’s entry on this topic). I have so much […]
Identity crisis
Part of my not doing advocacy anymore was a desire to understand why I didn’t want to do it anymore, to understand how my relationship to riding had changed from a time when advocacy felt like an essential part of my choice to ride. I had a sudden flash of insight this week while I was […]
What comes out of the spaces
Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. —Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love Space. Quiet? Yesterday I wrote the first sentence from […]
Road $$ is not cycling $$
There’s a problem with transportation funding framing. The problem is exemplified by the notion that we have enough money to build and maintain roads, but not enough money to build out bike facilities. Frankly this doesn’t make any sense, and no one should be allowed to say it ever again without being strictly challenged on […]
Why I never want to hear “Sorry, I didn’t see you” again
Here’s what people usually say when they almost kill you in traffic: “Sorry, I didn’t see you.” Here’s why I never want to hear it again: 1) I assume you didn’t see me, because I assume it wasn’t your goal to run into, hurt, or kill me. Most people don’t set out into traffic with […]
Mees 3: Have your cake and eat it too?
The quote that first caught my eye from this chapter was: However, the same citizens who are most concerned about sustainable transport are often the fiercest defenders of leafy, low-rise neighborhoods. This is a particularly pertinent note for Portland, especially right now in light of the discussion around the code allowing developers to build apartment […]
Mees 1: “Density as destiny” is a convenient story
One of the most interesting points that Mees makes early on is that the story of “density as destiny” where transit is concerned is convenient for a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum. Road-builders who’d like to keep building roads can say that they have to, because density is insufficient for effective […]
Car2Go: less horrible, possibly useful
Car2Go seems to have fixed most of the problems that I mentioned in my previous post about their website and I was actually able to successfully use it recently. I was going to pick up my bike from the shop, and I had a time crunch because I had to be home by six. At […]
PBOT needs to be solution-oriented
In Saturday morning’s Oregonian neighborhoods section, there’s an article about the safety and traffic conditions on NW Cornell. It contains the line: The society would like to see a stop sign or a crosswalk signal, but Costello isn’t optimistic. “I had a PBOT engineer tell me that realistically, it’s not going to happen until someone […]