Welcome to the Comment of the Week, where we highlight good comments in order to inspire more of them. You can help us choose our next one by replying with “comment of the week” to any comment you think deserves recognition. Please note: These selections are not endorsements.
I’ve noticed that our weekly bins of comments differ from one another. Some weeks BikePortland gets a lot of thoughtful policy comments, other times a nice bunch of stories about what readers have personally experienced. Obviously, the articles we post effect the tone and style of the comments they inspire.
This past week seemed a little loud to me, so I was happy to see Jim’s very calm comment early this morning.
He describes the meat and potatoes of how things get done in our town—often from the tenacious, boring work of neighborhood advocates. You get your ducks in a row, and then seize the moment when an opportunity arises.
Jim’s comment also gives me an opportunity to plug the “related posts” section which appears at the bottom of every new post. Some of these related posts are automatically generated, but often we hand-select a couple of them because they provide background for the current post.
The post Jim commented into was an old one, written last March. But he probably arrived at it from last week’s post, Mt. Scott-Arleta residents celebrate vibrant plaza on formerly violent street.
Here’s what Jim wrote:
I live in the area and I haven’t noticed any ramp up in police presence. I’m sure there have been some increase but I couldn’t call it big.
Hardesty is PBOT commissioner and closing the slip lane and adding traffic barrels is low hanging fruit that could be done quickly ; but we’ve been trying to get the slip lane closed for years with no progress.
In Portland, to get extraordinary action from a city agency requires cooperation from bureau(s) with an elected commissioner, of course at some level it is or looks political.
For me, I’m just grateful Nadine and Matchu and others could get someone’s attention and get something done.
Do we need more to be done to deal with the shootings and other crime? Of course we do. What has been done doesn’t deal with the root cause of the nationwide uptick in crime.
Thank you for the nice, low drama, comment Jim! You can read Jim’s comment and all the others in the March post about the plaza, and Jim also has another comment in our latest plaza article.