Portland Transport

Month: December 2005

  • Walking, Health and Engineering

    Over at Blue Oregon, Leslie Carlson has written a great piece about the health benefits of walking and how opportunities for walking have been engineered out of our society. Read and comment there…

  • Steve Duin Takes on the Eastbank Freeway

    In today’s Oregonian, Steve Duin bemoans the apparent loss of momentum on doing anything about the Eastbank Freeway and the loss of opportunity for the community. We’re sympathetic to this issue, but what struck us is his passing reference to peak oil: “given the expiration date on our endless supply of oil”. So our question…

  • Transit Surfer Enhanced

    We’ve recently got hold of a file of GPS coordinates for all the TriMet stops. We’ve employed that to add a new feature to the Transit Surfer. When you view the arrivals information for a stop, you not only get all the lines that arrive at that stop, you’ll also get a list of lines…

  • A Natural Connection? Open Source Software and Alternative Transporation

    I’ve often thought that the philosophies behind open source software and alternative transportation were fundamentally in sync. They’re about making better use of our shared commons. In one case, the commons of ideas and their expression, in the other, the commons of our public spaces and transportation infrastructure. I got a little bit of reinforcement…

  • Trackless in Portland: Where’s My Bus?

    As an occasional transit rider, using the system isn’t completely intuitive for me. Any time I don’t know when the next bus is coming is a moment when I might get frustrated and give up.That’s why the new technologies TriMet has been implementing have made the system a lot easier to use, which makes me…