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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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A Portland Plan Take on the Twenties Bikeway
There’s a great deal of controversy around the question of whether or not parking removal on NE/SE 28th Ave should be part of the solution for the 20s bikeway. At the moment PBOT is leaning toward not removing parking, which means no dedicated bikeway in this section of the project (roughly between Oregon and Stark…
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Western Conference Semifinals Open Thread
The Portland Trail Blazers have won a playoff series for the first time since the Clinton Administration, so it’s time for another open thread. (Plus, the calender says its May…) A draft revision of the Oregon Rail Plan is now available for public review. This plan covers all varieties of freight rail, Amtrak and inter-city…
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The Rise and Fall of the Suburbs
I’m in the middle of reading Benjamin Ross’, “Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism” Did you know that the evolutionary path of suburbs went from the Streetcar suburb (which became inner-ring neighborhoods in many cities, including Portland) to the Railroad suburb, very separate from its city, which in turn became the template…
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In Support of a Street Improvement Fee
On Thursday, I’ll be joining what I hope will be a large group of transportation enthusiasts and activists in attending PBOT’s Our Streets Town Hall. Motivated by a series of missed opportunities that have made our 2030 bicycle plan look more like a naïve aspiration than a realistic, achievable goal, and appalled by a recent…