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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…
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Updated: OTC/LCDC move away from State Planning Goals, towards building roads in response to development
Update: 1000 Friends has put their official comments to the workgroup (PDF, 245K) online. A primary purpose of the Transportation Planning Rule (TPR), which implements Statewide Planning Goal 12 (Transportation), is to assure that land uses and transportation systems are planned together “to reduce reliance on the automobile so that the air pollution, traffic and…
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The Future of PDOT
When Commissioner Adams was assigned the Portland Office of Transportation (the real name for the bureau we affectionally call PDOT), he took charge of an agency with two key staffing vacancies. The director position is open, vacated as part of the Mayor’s ‘Commissioner of Everything’ period. Perhaps equally important, the Division of Transportation Planning is…
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Is there an American Transportation Policy?
In 1991 the Congress declared the end of the decades long public works program we know as the Interstate Highway system. Inspired by the German autobahn and horrified by the efficiency of the Nazi war machine, President Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a high speed network of roadways between cities to allow fast deployment of armies in…
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Our Streetscape Future: Turning Japanese?
The following is a dramatization of actual events. Actual dialog and concepts presented have been compressed and highlighted for loggification purposes: So I’m sitting there at the sushi bar with Portland’s Consul General from Japan, asking him for advice on my upcoming fellowship study (which isn’t easy to do in Japanese – especially as the…