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Ride Like a Mensch
Yesterday, I was riding along a local street, cruising a downhill section and approaching an intersection with all-way stop signs. Already at the intersection was a car stopped at the cross street. There seemed to be a family inside-two kids, mom and dad, with grandma in the back seat. Arriving at the intersection I came…
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Crosswalks: A Matter of Culture?
Or, what I did on my vacation. As a neighborhood activist, I have frequently heard the question, “why don’t we stripe more crosswalks?” The stock-in-trade answer of the traffic engineers in Portland is that drivers are not sufficiently aware of crosswalks and they give pedestrians a false sense of security. This has always struck me…
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The Portland Bicycle: Heretical Suggestion about Tires
Another entry in our series to design an entry-level commuter bike for design and manufacture here in Portland. A re-cap on the target market: – beginning rider – short trips, or used in conjunction with a bus for longer trips – ridden in street clothes – $300 or under Today’s topic is tires. Flat tires…
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Do Trucks Pay Their Fair Share?
Editor’s note: The City of Portland has just released the discussion draft (PDF, 5.5MB) of their Freight Master Plan. Last month in a commentary titled “Road funding scheme ignores constitution, physics,” Orval Etter charged that the Oregon Department of Transportation hasn’t been charging trucks their fair share for the costs of roads. The Oregon Constitution…
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A Report from our Japan Correspondent
Background: As part of my ongoing, seemingly single handed crusade to look at multitasking of sidewalk spaces for multimodal use I was awarded a grant from the Architectural Foundation of Oregon (AFO) to study the ped/bike zone of urban streetscapes in Japan. So… I am writing from my hotel room in Kobe looking out at…