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Canola Conundrum
We’ve previously discussed that growing canola in Eastern Oregon is potentially a viable source of seed oil for biodiesel production. But apparently it’s not a slam dunk as far as the Legislative E-board (the body that hands out funds between legislative sessions) is concerned (“A dust-up crops up over biofuel study”). There are concerns that…
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Vancouver: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This morning’s Tribune has a summary of last week’s Metro-sponsored trip to Vancouver, B.C. The article highlights a lot of Vancouver’s achievements, but there’s one bit of ugly that hasn’t been remarked on. Traffic speeds. In the neighborhood business districts we visited the speeds were routinely 50kph (30mph) and the streets were generally engineered so…
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Vancouver Bike Box
One of the incidental pleasures from our Vancouver, B.C. trip was seeing this bike box on Dunsmuir Street in the hear out downtown Vancouver. This is a tool we have not embraced yet to any significant degree in Portland (I think we have a pilot somewhere), but is common in the Netherlands. At intersections, bikes…
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Financing Cleaner Trucks
Yesterday’s Daily Journal of Commerce has an article on nonprofit Cascade Sierra Solutions, which is planning to open five technology centers on the I-5 corridor between California and Washington. The organization will install and finance energy savings and emmissions reduction equipment on trucks. The stores will offer more than 40 fuel-saving products at manufacturers’ group-rate…
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Deep Questions from the Big Look
The Big Look Task Force has posed a series of questions to different organizations. While they didn’t specifically invite Portland Transport to submit answers, that never stopped us before. Here’s a subset of the list that readers might want to share their perspective on: In the absence of the federal funding which underwrote much suburban…