#Portland's new Deputy City Administrator of Public Works will start July 1, in transition to the new form of government adopted by the charter reform measure. Public Works will include Water, Environmental Services, and #Transportation bureaus (which will be run by a City Administrator rather than elected commissioners of our current system.) #pdxBikes
Tactical network-level changes like cut-thru traffic diversion and bus-turn-only road diets are badly needed if we want to actually connect a usable low-stress #bikewayNetwork and not waste the next decade on more non-progress like rebuilding Hawthorne or flashing beacons on 82nd. Drop in hardware, take feedback, and iterate, not this narrow, overpriced, too-little-too-late stuff like around Tilikum, Naito, and soon SW 4th. #tacticalUrbanism like Jersey City, Paris, Seville, Amsterdam 50yrs ago
For far too long, Portland's electeds have been allergic to the word "bike", operating under the delusion (or was it just a lie?) that transit would be the means for people to get out of their cars. But Portland doesn't run its own transit except the streetcar, and the last-mile problem of our sprawling low-density neighborhoods keeps transit from being functional without bikes, for the majority of the population. Until most kids can bike to school, this city is going to stay stuck in traffic.
hundreds of millions of dollars of federal "investment" going to freeway overpasses and seven-lane car-centric intersections with painted bike lanes are not "reconnecting communities". You're just putting a veneer of modernity on the wall of cars that separates kids and other non-drivers from independence, keeping the vast majority of people enslaved to #motoNormativity. #ClimateDenial#transportation#carSupremacy#ODOTGTFOpdx#legalizeBikes
So my husband gave me and our daughter an epic Christmas present - tickets on Amtrak's Coast Starlight train from Portland, Oregon down to Los Angeles. Here's what to expect if you want to try it, in my latest for the Perceptive Travel Blog: