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Two things for Portlanders to consider while arguing about bike-share service areas
Bike sharing service areas are problematic in exactly the same way that public transit service areas are problematic. With Portland preparing next week to finally approve a bike sharing system, this problem is back on the city’s mind. It should be. The most important problem in Portland right now is housing affordability, and this is inherently…
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The federalist approach to transportation funding moves forward
In the aftermath of this month’s elections, lobby group Transportation for America (created to support reforms to federal transportation policy that would make it less hideous) announced today that it’s shifting resources toward the legislatures of “states that want to continue investing.” Great!
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Actually, let’s not bother to fix federal transportation funding
We probably need higher gas taxes in the United States. We desperately need a federal carbon tax. But do we really need higher federal gas taxes? No, we don’t. As Congress debates highway-funding stopgaps and Oregon’s most influential transportation experts get ready for an Aug. 4 forum about the future of U.S. transportation funding, maybe it’s…
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Did the great crime decline cause modern urbanism?
One of my big and untested (but unrebutted) hunches about the urbanism revolution, the drop in vehicle-miles traveled per person and so forth, is that it all flows from the rapid and mostly unexplained decline in crime rates that began in 1994. As cities became safer, the first to notice were the young, poor, mobile…
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5 Surprising Things our Low-car Voter Guide Taught Me About the Local Elections
This guest post is by Michael Andersen, editor of Portland Afoot, PDX’s 10-minute newsmagazine about buses, bikes & low-car life. Thanks to the heroic efforts of a handful of volunteers for Bike Walk Vote, there’s been quite a bit of attention in this election season to local candidates’ positions on bicycling and walking. But the…