Category: Roads

  • Love Affair with Cars in need of Couples Therapy?

    This comes from a regular reader: The Pew Research Center has released a report that finds that fewer Americans now enjoy driving than did in 1991. 69 percent now enjoy driving, down from 79 percent in 1991. You can read the executive summary or the entire report at Pew’s website: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=16 A couple of the…

  • Auditor to PDOT: Fix Road Fixes

    Yesterday’s Oregonian reports that the City Auditor has told PDOT it’s not spending its road maintence dollars as effectively as possible. It’s the old adage: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Apparently PDOT is spending so much resource rebuilding the really bad roads that it underspends keeping the new ones from…

  • Happy Birthday to the Interstate Highway System

    As an article in last week’s Economist (sorry, you probably have to jump through some registration screens to see this) reminds us, it was 50 years ago this month that President Eisenhower signed the bill creating the Interstate Highway System (hanging a carrot of 90% Federal matching funds in front of states). The impact on…

  • When the Money Runs Out

    There was a transportation panel at last week’s Illahee symposium, “Oil Water and Oregon”. Of course the gas tax came up. As the gas tax loses buying power to inflation and greater fuel economy, the funds available for maintenance continue to get squeezed. One panelist opined that the message voters were sending in voting down…

  • New Idiom in Traffic Signaling

    The City of Portland is trying a new approach to “left turn yield to oncoming traffic”: City of Portland installs new experimental Left-Turn Signal with Flashing Yellow Arrow. The City of Portland’s Office of Transportation will be activating a new flashing yellow arrow left-turn display at NE 82nd and Tillamook on Tuesday, June 6th at…