It was a big year for transit. Working together with many different groups, we won over a billion dollars for transit. The fight for transit in California is far from over but we're headed in the right direction
At the very beginning, we were a group of people who biked on the Great Highway Park to show that nobody was going to take our streets from us. We've grown a lot since then, but we still keep doing our Slow Rides. We've biked on Slow Streets throughout the city, returned to the Great Highway Park, and did our yearly cop-free Pride event. Getting out there, experiencing and sharing bike joy, and creating, even temporarily, a better world, is the core of what we do.
#PBOT's "traffic calming" projects are such kid-gloves weaksauce that doesn't pretend to control the kinds of drivers who are actually making our streets feel unsafe. Their machines are 5-7000lb lumps of steel being flung around at 30mph with 400hp and Portland has, after a decade of organizing by neighbors and careful work by professional #trafficEngineers, delivered like a dozen rubber bumps and some paint. #tacticalUrbanism is this stuff but overnight, & then iterate
@daihard yeah it needs to have a bypass so you can keep riding while oncoming drivers deal with each other only, instead of trying to beat you to it, or some other nonsense where they are in your way. It's not rocket science, but it does require a DOT to remember that bicycles exists, which is an advanced skill. #BikeTooter#TrafficCalming#Bollards#Bollards#Bollards
@enobacon@daihard I’ve seen this bollard and bypasses in the UK and France, and they work brilliantly. Would love to see them in the US where only potential damage to a vehicle is enough to make someone slow down.
Years ago, @vmbrasseur gave a talk at OSCON/osbridge about the importance of failure, as a way to learn, as a key to innovation, about how failure needs to happen or you become averse to change. I haven't really thought about how using that wisdom in my software experience has shaped my opinion about how cities should do public works & planning, #transportation, #zoning, #tacticalUrbanism, etc until this #StrongTowns video. Prototype, test, measure, don't guess. #JFDI
"The reaction from walkers, bikers, families, and nearby business owners was overwhelmingly positive."
“We'll have to see how we can apply pressure and what it takes to get the city leaders to listen or do something for safety.” (Try not letting #trafficEngineers over-inflate the costs with their convoluted excuses for trying to preserve car speeds.)
I'm making it a rule to always be asking for names, of who is making the decisions about what is or isn't within the realm of possibilities. I'm not getting answers that include names though... 🤔
@smb that's weird, both the throw-your-vote-away thing, and the party with an otherwise-sensible-seeming platform except weird hangups about embryos and about family being some particular shape of christian thing. The local group is independently following the strong towns principles and not franchising anything but the name AFAIK, that might be a good topic to bring up though.
$1.5M/mile, is that per lane-mile? To pave a street. People don't really need 10 different ways to cut through a neighborhood in cars, though. This #InducedDemand of leaving a wide-open self-serve free-for-all of asphalt and free parking, is not paid for by gas tax and user fees, it's a cost borne by the people who live there and everyone who would have to bike or walk through it.
and that $1.5M is basically PBOT's budget per day. So we can maintain only 365 miles of streets or something. The Transportation Systems Plan is just a complete fever-dream fantasy when we get to the real costs of driving, but they're going to keep trying to fill that bucket and promise that will be when you can have a sidewalk. 🙄
@enobacon Our latest piece of tactical urbanism is a basketball goal in the street next to our neighbor's old Rav4 that's had a flat tire for three months.
Mailboxes built of bricks to match folks houses. Every weekend, some joyrider in a pickup truck would take out one. And then repeat the laborious process of putting it back together…
After the 5th time, neighbor buried a heavy steel pipe 5’ down and built bricks around it.
Next weekend- mailbox still hit; neighbor happy his bumper fishing has gone so well. 😂