I haven’t written anything about advocacy in nearly a year, because I stopped having anything very useful to say, and also I nearly stopped riding my bike. And then I saw that Liz had nailed it, and I felt the need to let everyone know: it has been nailed. She speaketh the truth, and she […]
Category Archives: Civic Action
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 […]
Stale bureaucracy
I occasionally say smart things on Twitter, and even more occasionally, one of them is worth saying in more than 140 characters. Yesterday I had the following conversation with @bjamin: The project Ben was alluding to is the I-5/Broadway/Weidler interchange plan, which is part of the N/NE Quadrant project. Public attention to the project has […]
Why I opted-out of Opt In
As a citizen advocate, I spend a lot of time telling my local governments and government agencies what I think. I’m familiar with the various stages and forms of public involvement processes — sitting on committees, going to project meetings, asking questions, raising concerns, writing comments, addressing decisionmakers. So originally I was a big fan […]
PSU/PBOT Traffic and Transportation Class: Reflection
What I come back to most whenever the subject of my class last fall comes up is how amazing it is that I was able to learn so much information and meet so many significant figures in the Portland transportation scene in just ten short weeks (Oct 1 – Dec 3). Getting into the class […]
My project on Portland Transport
I didn’t notice this at the time, but Chris Smith posted our presentations from the December 3rd Traffic and Transportation class session on his blog at Portland Transport. If you’ve been waiting for me to get my act together, wait no longer — the PDF is available there. A few entries later is David Sweet’s […]
Margaret Mead on manipulation
Later, when I seriously turned by attention to the whole question of manipulation, I began to understand that one should not use either a person’s strength or his weakness against him. As I see it now, the only course that is ethically justified is an appeal to strength — not in order to throw one’s […]
Warm advocacy fuzzies
I don’t do a lot of writing about my advocacy stuff on this blog. If you think the bike-riding stuff is boring, imagine what you would think about stuff that doesn’t even involve riding a bike, but instead involves a lot of meetings and emails and often-tedious government agencies and regulations about bikes, and you’ll […]
Where to comment on Change.gov
Your Vision I had a hard time finding this and ultimately got the link from a friend, so I figured I would share in case anyone else is as lazy as I am but still wants to take the time to tell Obama their thoughts.