Bike Boulevards and other Bits in the News

It was a great way to start National Bike Month to see bike boulevards on the front page!

But is there already at Council a current and subtext of bike as symbol in the culture wars?

At the meeting Monday, some city councilors cautioned that the bicycle infrastructure proposed in the report should not come at the expense of other services to the community.

"As much as I'd like to have bicycle infrastructure today, that's at a sacrifice of having enough police, firefighters, whatever else," said Councilor Daniel Benjamin of Ward 6.

Fernandez responded by saying general funds, which pay for police and firefighters in Salem, historically have not been used by the city for cycling infrastructure.

"I don't think council would ever be asked to sacrifice general funding for bike boulevards," Fernandez said. "We have a tradition of not using general funds for these projects."

If Councilors are positioning bike transport as parasitical on police and fire departments rather than as a cheap way to relieve congestion and improve healthy living - well, we've lost the framing.

It's bike month

We have to get to a place where we do start thinking in terms of human capacity for all road users rather than vehicular capacity solely for car users. We need fewer cars on the road and more people using the roads!

September 2013

The general issue of bikes makes it to the front page every few months, but genuine "traction" has seemed elusive, so it will be interesting to see if this time things do actually gain a meaningful foothold.

If you hadn't got the word - the bike boulevard advocates are making a field trip to Portland to visit, use, and analyze bike boulevards there.

Woodlawn neighborhood, 1894 Portland Paving Map
(The yellow indicates graded, but not yet graveled, sections;
everthing else is dirt/mud. Note also the streetcar line!)

The trip is the afternoon of Sunday, May 17th. The trip assembles at Upcycles on 909 NE Dekum St., in the Woodlawn neighborhood, at 1:30pm.

Update - in the comments, Susann mentioned a KATU story. Here's a link:

Some cyclists ask for protected bike lanes http://t.co/7pNhkuu1Ex #LiveOnK2 pic.twitter.com/KSQAfM5ehf

— KATU News (@KATUNews) May 4, 2015

Also interesting: Tesla.

Electric cars are still cars, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of them as they reinforce the autoist paradigm of the drive-alone trip. (Also, what's old is new: Here's a note on Sally Bush and her electric car.)

However!

Tesla clearly has bigger ideas than just cars, and since batteries and storage are a central part of the electric car, it makes lots of sense to leverage that expertise in other areas.

Tesla's luxury electric cars really could be a Trojan Horse for meaningful changes in our energy paradigms. If you're not paying attention to Elon Musk and his crazy ideas, you might be missing out on a genuine Edison-level transformational figure. It's not necessarily important that he has "the right answers" now; it's that he's something of a Schumpeterian inventor who may be changing the market in fundamental ways. Maybe he will have the right answers, or maybe a competitor will. But the facts seem to be that there's some real transformation going on and his work is at the center of it.

And finally - it's almost certain to be a theme this spring, summer, and fall: Drought and climate change.

Nearly two-thirds of Oregon now in severe drought http://t.co/QU98QH26tO pic.twitter.com/Cy5VjwhmyN

— Statesman Journal (@Salem_Statesman) May 1, 2015