Those who follow me on Twitter have been subjected to a lot of little quotation gems from Paul Mees’ 2010 book Transport for Suburbia recently. There’s so much to say about his book that I hope to do a series of posts on it, but since it’s apparently not a widely-read or -known book, I […]
Category Archives: Transportation Alternatives
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 […]
Drawing the wrong lessons
I was reading an interesting Atlantic Cities article someone linked to on Facebook: Survival Lessons from an Ancient City. It made me think of Strong Towns (which isn’t mentioned in the piece, sadly) but it also made me think about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of efforts to extend light-rail systems to far-flung suburbs, as […]
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 can’t be arsed to support a cycletrack on SW 12th
True to my blogging history, let’s start with a linguistics digression: “can’t be arsed” is my favorite British phrase. It means “can’t be bothered”, but is somewhat less polite. I can’t be arsed to support a cycletrack on SW 12th. I can’t really be arsed to oppose it, either, because who wants to oppose bike […]
Why I’m an Options Ambassador
PBOT’s Transportation Options division is recruiting for new outreach volunteers — Options Ambassadors — for 2012. A few weeks ago Andrew at PBOT asked me if I would be willing to share why I volunteer with Options as part of their recruitment. I think my response is slated for a brochure or email because I […]
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 […]
Back to blogging, with better transpo nerdiness
Last month I finally completed a long-planned project: switching webhosts and updating my website to use a modern version of WordPress, to resolve the issues I was having with my old webhost not providing the features I need or any useful support to help me get those features. (For those who are curious, I switched […]
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 […]