PDXistence’s Recent Comments

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  Wants aren't needs

  This touches on a pet peeve of mine: you keep hearing people talking about producing new fuels to meet America's energy "needs", when so much of our consumption is in the name of meeting our WANTS. We lived for thousands of years without the internal combustion engine - how did we come to think of it as a vital part of our lives?

  A big reason for this is the loss of the walkable neighborhood. Most places in America you simply need a car to survive.

  I count myself lucky to live in a very walkable neighborhood, where I have a grocery store, pharmacy, hardware store, library, bank, and plenty of restaurants, all within a half-mile radius. And I'm not talking urban density here, not exactly. Rather my neighborhood (in the Mt. Tabor/Hawthorne area of Portland, OR) is the 1910 version of the 'burbs: quiet streets packed with comfortable single-family homes, and interspersed by commercial boulevards. It's a great place to raise kids, yet I can meet my needs (and wants) while hardly every needing to - much less wanting to - get into a car.

  (A big part of this, I should mention, is that I work from home - another great way to cut down on carbon emissions!)

  The only problem is the commercial streets that make a 'hood like this so walkable tend to get popular, which makes the rents go up, which drives out the little mom & pop stores that supply the necessities, and replaces them with pricey, impractical boutiques. A seemingly inevitable process that is another pet peeve of mine :).

  A really useful innovation would be to re-engineer car-dependent cul-de-sac 'burbs to be like small, walkable villages. This would mean rezoning them to allow for commercial development, and allowing - perhaps even encouraging, through tax breaks - people to start little mom and pop stores in what were originally intended to be suburban homes.  
  On Finally some mainstream focus on efficiency posted 2 years, 2 months ago 12 Responses

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  Portland, its police, and bikes

  Portland is every bit as great a bicycle city as it's reputed to be. However, it should be noted that, with increased bike traffic on Portland streets, police enforcement targeting bikers has also increased. Many feel the enforcement has increased to a disproportionate degree, and that the enforcement often has a harassing tone to it.

  For instance, police frequently set up stings at stop signs on popular bike routes (i.e., on Portland's wonderful "bike boulevards": side streets which are designed to discourage car traffic while encouraging bikes, and which are often packed with bicyclists during rush hour), and give out tickets of over $200 to bikers who don't come to a foot-down complete stop. This even when the bikers are making right turns at the stops, and even when the bikers slow enough to make sure the way is clear. Essentially using a technicality to extract $242 a pop from safety-minded, conscientious members of the community that the city uses to tout its eco-friendliness.

  It's a good lesson for residents of other cities who want their communities to become more bike-friendly: even as bicycles relieve traffic congestion, make people healthy, and prevent pollution, they're viewed by many as encroaching on what is traditionally considered the car's territory. Police, especially those that chase down bikes from behind the wheel, or on motorcycles, can be the least welcoming to bicyclists, and the most fiercely protective of car territory.On 15 Green Cities posted 2 years, 3 months ago 51 Responses