Planning Pool

So my cell phone contract expired about a month ago now, and I thought I’d give life a shot minus the long arm of AT&T.  I purchased a Skype number, so as not to fall entirely incommunicado, but my days are largely spent without the luxury of instant telecommunication.  Overall, things have gone smoothly, but my lack of a phone has led to a series of revelations.  Most apparent is the lack of payphones in Portland, which had me walking all the way to Union Station to make a phone call (a fair walk from where I was located).  Perhaps it’s my unhealthy love of noir detective stories, but the death of the payphone is troubling to me.

Sure, wifi will soon make even cell phones irrelevant, so bemoaning the loss of the payphone is a little … Continue Reading

The mayor of Portland has helped me to better appreciate my neighbourhood grocery store.

At his lecture yesterday evening on “Active Transportation in Portland,” Portland mayor and former transportation commissioner Sam Adams described his vision of a “20-minute neighbourhood”. It includes grocery stores, laundromats, and pretty much all the services that people need in a typical day. These need to be located close enough together to be reasonably accessible by active (non-motorized) transportation. Since two thirds of the average household’s daily trips are not the “journey-to-work” trips most frequently studied by transportation planners, substantial reductions in car-dependency can be achieved by cutting down on the number of automobile trips that neighbourhood residents make to “pick stuff up”.

Mr. Adams made the surprising suggestion that … Continue Reading