Let’s have a good week, shall we? Before we go too deep into it, here are the stories you should read from the sources you can trust…
By the way, have you ever checked out our friends at The eBike Store? They have a great selection of e-bikes and have been serving Portland since 2008. Stop by N Albina and Rosa Parks Way (across the street from Peninsula Park) and get great service, find that accessory you need, or test ride a bike today!
Here’s this week’s roundup…
Paint ain’t great: A study from Atlanta and published in a transport and health journal found that in some cases, the presence of paint-only bike lanes actually increased the rate of crashes. The results are intriguing, but read the details of the study for some interesting explanations of the findings. (Streetsblog USA)
Fatal crash in Salem: A DEA agent has been charged in the death of a Salem woman and her family is frustrated by how slowly the investigation is moving. (KPTV)
It’s a not a commercial, dude: The driver of a truck must have watched too many commercials because he tried to scale a mountain on a hiking trail — just like they show in the ads! — but he got very stuck. (Backpacker)
New book alert: City Limits, a forthcoming book by journalist Megan Kimble that will be released next spring, delves into “how our ever-expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities” and calls for a new, more sustainable path forward. (Penguin Random House)
Urban planning and growing older: When folks fight for more transit, safer streets, and fewer drivers on the road, they’re also helping ensure that older people can age wherever they want without being scared away by inaccessible streets. (New York Times)
Terrible traffic violence: The family of a Portland teen who was intentionally run down by the driver of a car in the Cully neighborhood late last month held a rally to demand justice. (KPTV)
Here come the Chinese cars: A quirk in the market has created massive demand for China’s cheap, gas-powered automobiles. So much so, Chinese workers are feverishly building huge ships that can carry 5,000 cars at a time to Europe and beyond. (NY Times)
Drugs and transit: A study from University of Washington set off a firestorm of headlines last week because it found harmless, trace amounts of some drugs in the air and on surfaces of some TriMet vehicles. (KGW)
The cost of cars: If you care about creating a world with less driving, don’t miss this excellent interview with the author of a new book about roadkill and the impacts of cars and roads on wildlife. (Bloomberg)
Thanks to everyone who shared links this week!
Thanks for reading.
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I heard a Podcast with a guy named Paul Donald who wrote a book called Traffication, which nicely addresses the issue of road building effects on the natural environment:
https://www.nhbs.com/traffication-how-cars-destroy-nature-what-we-can-do-about-it-book
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ZUDCUoCw0
Meanwhile, “tiny, trace amounts” of endocrine disrupting fluorinated and other “forever chemicals” are promiscuously contaminating our entire planet, and are probably responsible for an otherwise mysterious slowdown in human metabolism and correspondingly striking drop in average human body temperatures worldwide, even including remote cultures still living otherwise subsistence lifestyles. (See, for example, https://theconversation.com/peoples-bodies-now-run-cooler-than-normal-even-in-the-bolivian-amazon-148901)
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader at the moment to hazard a guess as to which “trace chemicals” have more significant implications for human health, or why the ones with the least such implications get millions of gallons of ink spilled in corporate media on their behalf, while the ones with the most go almost unremarked altogether by the same media outlets.
“Understanding why body temperatures are declining remains an open question for scientists to explore. Whatever the reason, though, we can confirm that body temperatures are below 98.6 F outside of places like the U.S. and U.K. – even in rural and tropical areas with minimal public health infrastructure, where infections are still the major killers.”
There is zero conclusion about anything in the article you linked.
No correlation found as of yet that causes the decline in body temperature.
What is your point with linking this article?
Are we supposed to NOT be concerned above Fent and Meth traces on Mass transit? What “forever chemicals” are you talking about since the article can find no link to any of them?
PFAS are often called “forever chemicals” because they persist in the environment and break down very slowly. They are widely used in, well everything from your goretex jacket to your teflon pan to your stain resistant carpet. They bioaccumulate, and have unknown health implications. I’ve never heard them linked to body temperature regulation before.
https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained
My friend Elizabeth Grossman, who sadly died a few years ago, wrote a book, Chasing Molecules, in the naughts, about estrogen disrupters, particularly the bis-phenol plastics. The disrupters are in the global ecosystems, you find them in blood samples of arctic seals, and of indigenous peoples who have never drunk from a plastic bottle. The US does a lousy job of regulating these chemicals; unlike Europe which requires that manufacturers prove something safe, we require the public to prove something is dangerous. Or at least that is how it was, I haven’t followed the story in 15 years.
“Body temperature regulation” is basically the quintessential function (among some others) of the endocrine and metabolic systems. It’s Physiology 101.
I used to have a low body temperature, for over a decade, usually 94 or 95 degrees – my doctors were never really worried about it. About a year and a half ago I wound up in the hospital with dangerously high blood sugar levels after a bout of Covid-19 beta followed by omicron (nearly 3 times normal blood sugars – can you say diabetes?), but after they got my blood sugars back to “safe” levels, my body temperature also returned to a “normal” 97-99 degrees, where it’s been ever since. Mind you, I’ve since changed my lifestyle and am taking lots of diabetes-related meds now, so perhapse they are regulating my body temperature too? Not that it means anything – I’ve heard from many doctors that they don’t get super-dooper worried unless your temperature drops below 92 or gets above 104 degrees – anything within that could be an illness, but it could just as easily be the body adjusting to stress, outside temperatures, sweating, and a whole array of other factors. As my doctors say, medicine is still more an art than a science…
I don’t doubt that we are now consuming record-levels of toxins into our water, foods, and the air we breathe. Somehow our living to 78 requires us to consume toxic levels of lead in our carrots, spinach and chocolate, mercury in our bread grains and pasta, and arsenic in our rice and chicken, at least according to Consumer Reports. But we are also consuming way too much fruit juice, corn syrup, salt, protein, carbohydrates, and numerous other food nutrients that our short-lived ancestors never even dreamed about – hence the high rates of morbid obesity and diabetes.
Apparently, there are “unknown health implications” of these chemicals, but chemical companies are so full of the milk of human kindness that they are completely voluntarily reformulating products that contain them, and at great expense, but only out of “an abundance of caution”.
We should all be very relieved! Nothing to see here, folks. Just move along. Thank you for a pitch perfect demonstration of capitalist propaganda.
The “unknown health implications” of endocrine disruptors can now soon join notorious company with similarly “unknown health implications” of lead, asbestos, innumerable chlorinated hydrocarbons like per- and trichloroethylene, countless organophosphorous insecticide”nerve gas” analogues, and the list goes on and on…
What the hell are you talking about???
Hmmm. So in a comment in which I explicitly pointed out the lack of coverage of an issue, and cited an article that passively MENTIONS a striking emergence of apparent thermal dysregulation in human populations worldwide, without drawing any connections to the abundance of scientific papers (eg, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27760374/) that DO draw connections between thermal dysregulation and environmental exposure to synthetic endocrine disruptors, you find evidence CONTRADICTING my hypothesis?? Apparently, corporate media can justly proclaim “mission accomplished” to their corporate owners and sponsors.
I was not CONTRADICTING your hypothesis. I simply read the article you linked which stated they have no idea what is causing temperature drop or even if it is bad thing?
Not arguing at all. I just have no idea what you are talking about?
If you think that endocrine disrupters are causing temperature drop that is great except there is no scientific study that actually shows that.
at present.
I also have no idea if trace amounts of drugs on trains have any effect on anything and no one is arguing they do either.
It was just a study that found substances, it clearly stated they found no harm at present either.
There does seem to be a lot of research studies on the topic you are referring to. What exactly does corporate media have to do with this or anything? Is there some attempt you know of to cover things up because I clicked on your links and they pop right up so apparently they are not banned.
Just attempting to understand what your point is.
Suppose, for example, that I owned the world’s largest online retailer and distributor, as well as cloud platform provider, and decided to add one of the two most widely distributed and prestigious national newspapers to my personal holdings as well. Do you really imagine that I would then still have to conduct an elaborate conspiracy to suppress or at least substantially diminish the frequency of negative media stories about my far flung business interests?
Quite apart from the ongoing, galloping consolidation of media franchises, which has increased geometrically since Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote their celebrated study on the subject more than 30 years ago (the number of mass media holding companies controlling a supermajority of audience share and advertising revenues has declined from an estimated 50 when those authors wrote “Manufacturing Consent” to approximately FIVE today), there’s also the simple question of expense, because investigative journalism is easily brushed aside by bottom line obsessed, cost cutting newsroom managers. And it does not take a wild act of imagination for it to eventually occur to an aspiring young journalist that their career won’t advance more rapidly if they gain a reputation for writing stories that paint their boss’s boss’s boss in a bad light. Nor does it require any similarly wild imagination for the same thought to cross the mind of ANY journalist who doesn’t already work for the Washington Post but might hold out hopes of ever doing so in the future. (After all, a major side effect of media consolidation is also that prestigious and well paying newsroom jobs are scarcer than ever.)
Nor is Jeff Bezos and the WaPo any kind of special case. If anything, to the contrary: the “interlocking directorate” phenomenon of corporate control made most famous by political scientist William Domhoff’s classic 1967 study, “Who Rules America?”, has only become more accurate and acute with every passing decade since his book’s first edition.
This went from Meth on trains to forever chemicals to burning wires to Noam Chomsky to Jeff Bezos and the control of western civilization by the Washington Post in a few comments…
In the words of a great philosopher, “the Brown Acid is specifically not that good”.
Luckily, TriMet only found that on 38% of the surfaces they tested.
Underappreciated wit right here.
Yes, what about all sorts of other issues that aren’t related to meth being found in 100% of the air samples and on 98% of the surfaces tested?
A brief exposure is one thing, but I would not want to be breathing that methylated air for a full 8 hour shift, day after day. I mean, it’s probably harmless, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Ummm, yeah I don’t want to breathe any witches brew of synthetic chemicals either. Which is why I take a detour around the part of my neighborhood where I can smell chemical odors from people who are reportedly burning the insulation off scavenged wires they found (or stole) in order to pay their ever increasing rents. But I don’t thereby draw the conclusion that I can best protect my health by playing whack-a-mole games sending cops after those deadbeats. Not when I know that deadbeats have always existed, but people burning wires to pay their rent in my neighborhood has NOT. Rather, I prefer more systemic, higher leverage approaches like rent control, instead.
The book my friend, Elizabeth Grossman, wrote before she wrote Chasing Molecules was titled High Tech Trash, about how toxic our electronics are. You are right to not breath those burning wires. Unfortunately, very poor people all over the world are paid to dismantle our electronic “recycling,” and end up burning and breathing toxins in the small fire pits they use.
Again… what are you talking about?
I am talking about a common thread across corporate media and corporate dominated society generally, which is to prefer a focus on antisocial behavior associated with low income and low wealth individuals, even when the evidence is extremely strong that analogous antisocial behavior by rich individuals and the financial entities they exercise a preponderance of control over commonly causes vastly larger harms to society.
For example, wage theft nationwide reportedly exceeds street theft every year by orders of magnitude (https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/) And finally, our current Multnomah County DA is promising to carry out an unprecedented crackdown on it locally. Imagine that, a complete reversal of the usual roles for a prosecutor, from locking up poor people on behalf of rich people to the other way around! And rightly so, since inequality DRIVES street crime, not the other way around, and especially the kinds of street crime people most fear, including violent crime, like murder (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/income-inequalitys-most-disturbing-side-effect-homicide/). So a crime that ITSELF EXACERBATES inequality should inherently be considered far worse, all other things being equal. But little wonder that they hate him so much that they are erecting building sized billboards overlooking prime downtown real estate to denounce him!
But even our new DA’s reforms are not nearly enough, because the very rich largely DEFINITIONALLY “don’t commit crime”, literally, because they mostly control the laws and legal outcomes effectively enough to exclude their own actions from even being technically classified as “crime” in the first place. For example, most recently and (what should be) notoriously in the Supreme Court case that effectively made it next to impossible to prosecute bribery of top state officials (see https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-andrew-cuomo-corruption-buffalo-billion-b7bf592ab8edbac94c1c8349d134769f and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-RXmmEG1Vk&feature=youtu.be )
I don’t want people in jail; I want TriMet cleaning their vehicles so less than 98% of the surfaces are contaminated with drugs, and taking more effective measures to keep riders from sparking up the ol’ meth pipe in the back of the train. I don’t care if those smoking up are rich or poor. I want them to stop because I want transit to be a viable option for as many folks as possible.
Yes, there are other bad things in this world. They should be fixed too. This story happens to be about drugs on trains. Ask Jonathan to pick stories about embezzlers or wage theft so we can talk about those things next Monday.
It’s not whataboutism, the amount and the substance matters. A tiny bit of mercury in your food all the time might be a problem, a tiny bit more CO2 isn’t (unless we’re talking global warming).
Guy specifically said, “endocrine disrupting fluorinated and other “forever chemicals””, that sounds like an actual effect, unlike headline grabbing fear mongering about trace amounts of a well known drug (well below any kind of effective dose). Do you want to dispute that? That would be something. The claim might be true or not but it isn’t whataboutism.
Drugs on trains?!? But what about PFAS pollution changing body temperatures in remote isolated populations?!? And fluoridated water?!?
Classic whataboutism.
Well, now we know the answer to “What do $100 bills and Trimet seats have in common?”
I read the article last week – I didn’t see anywhere how much of that would be simple transfer.
The fact is I can smell/taste meth/fentanyl in the air when people who have used recently come aboard (just like pot and cigarette smoke) – I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there were trace amounts of a good many other substances on those trains transferred from people’s clothers.
There seems to be a consensus that about 80% of US currency has detectable illegal drug residue.
I’d be surprised if they didn’t find a trace of drugs on the train, or in a bar, or a public restroom. “The media”, on average, are the worst pearl clutchers. Splashy headlines and a short disclaimer in the last paragraph.
Headlines are often written at deadline by junior people who didn’t report on or write a story.
I’m not sure it’s not more nefarious than that. “The media”, specifically small scale local stuff, push a particular narrative. The kind that appeals to the Nextdoor (.com) crowd. The same exact way they have a consistent anti-cyclist bias (which we’ve seen reported before on Bike Portland) when it comes to car violence. Perhaps that in itself is just to get more eyeballs. But that would point to more than just laziness to meet a deadline.
I’m not concerned about trace amounts on surfaces for the most part. But remember that people used to feel comfortable taking small children on public transit, and they will touch everything and then put their hands in their mouths. My wife works in a pediatric ICU, and they have seen patients come in with acute exposure from surfaces after visiting a family member’s house. In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor concern, but it’s enough to keep families off of public transit. Activists who downplay the concerns entirely are sending the wrong message, because there is a small risk for people with small children.
That said, my main concern would be getting “hot boxed” with some Fent addict on a train. I’ve been on MAX trains that have had to stop to “air out”, and I’ve seen first-hand reports from riders and transit operators that they felt second-hand smoke effects in these situations.
I hope that activists who are okay with open drug use on enclosed public transit vehicles are willing to volunteer for a double-blind study where victims are exposed over varying distances and the effects measured. If this is really nothing to be concerned about, they should be fine.
And parents are hugely protective of their small children, often seeing small risks of things like exposure to toxins as unacceptable. The organic food industry is built around this. (Not a criticism, I eat organic food too.)
Whatever the actual risk (which I assume it is miniscule to a healthy adult), this just adds to the perception that transit is dirty and risky, and no place for a child.
TriMet needs to get ahead of this, not downplay it as I assume they will.
TriMet has definitely not downplayed it. They did a statement the day the study came out that said “it’s time to end public drug use”. I regret not having a post about all this yet.
I saw the statement, and it led to this longer response:
https://blog.trimet.org/2023/09/07/its-time-for-a-crackdown-on-public-drug-use/
There have been constant complaints about drug use on TriMet vehicles for some time now, and this finding just shows how pervasive it is. One blog post is not a sufficient response; it will take attention and follow-through and staying the course for a sustained period of time. It will cost money to increase and maintain physical security, and make their train cars and stations feel more welcoming and less filthy.
Time will tell how this all shakes out and whether TriMet can regain the trust of riders and bring them back into the system.
This afternoon as I waited for my bus downtown I got the trifecta of smells, sewage, pot, and what I believe was meth (I’m not sure as I’ve never been next to someone partaking but the smell was foul).
I too saw the article about the surfaces of the buses and trains being contaminated. I immediately thought, well they fired their nightly cleaning crews a number of years ago to save money, and the trains and buses have been filthy ever since. So what’s some residues of drugs going to matter along with all the other garbage I routinely see and sit on because I’m just too tired to care??
FWIW, I saw a pair of fare enforcement officers don their PPE and pull a guy off at the Zoo station on Saturday. I hadn’t seen that in a long time. And yes, as Shadows mentioned, the trains were absolutely filthy. Trimet really has to make some changes if they want to attract people who have other options.
The hilarious thing about that Streetsblog piece is that the cited manuscript found a lower IRR for buffered bike lanes than for protected bike lanes. I guess buffered paint is worth more than protection. That is if one gives any kind of credence to low n case-controlled studies that used Strava “data”.
Yeah, that study gets zero credibility in my eyes. If you’re relying upon Strava, which is a subset of a subset of a subset of cyclists, for your data you’ve almost certainly failed before you even start. Even in the go fast GPS user cycling crowd (which is kind of the starting point of the Strava users subset) only a fraction use it.
I’ll happily toss that one aside as useless noise in the conversation over safety data and stick to research that was done by people who actually have common sense.
Guys, just ride the buses and trains and streetcars, please, anywhere they go, ride them. It is so good, nothing bad ever happens waiting for one, I promise you won’t get hit by a car, stabbed on the platform or harassed by your neighbors who ride them with you. Once on board, there are drugs for free, don’t you know so many people who smoke fentanyl and meth then ride the bus, these are your neighbors buddy, so just ride the bus with them. Be a man like Rene and ride the train with your bike to work with all your friends who do cocaine dude. Don’t worry at all bro the people who said to not ride the bus and train due to a virus said the drugs are fine dude, its all good, a tiny bit of fentanyl will kill you, slight exposure will make you need narcan, but bro, this is totally trace, so its really really fine, please buy a monthly pass bro and just ride all the time, especially at night.
Ah bro, don’t move away bro, we have everything dialed here, you’re gonna get to live in an office building soon, and we don’t have any cops, and if something bad happens it takes 30 mins for an ambulance to show up, but have you had Detroit style pizza, bro bro, its the best 3 day ferment bro, its made by someone from Detroit because things were so great there they decided to make it here. Oh bro, I get it, you’ve got kids, but our schools are mid-notch bro and the facilities are prime dude, they’ll definitely all collapse in an earthquake, but look on the bright side, we have the shortest school year in the country, so hopefully it will just be a planning day when that hits. Don’t be a headline reading doomsayer about Portland bro, there is nothing but good here, ride the bus to the Ritz Carlton bro, its the best, please bro, take the bus.
The rapturous applause from urbanist/YIMBYs over the Ritz Carlton and its multi-million dollar condos was so deliriously detached from the reality of working class Portlanders that F. Scott Fitzgerald spun in his grave.
Saw it in Denver with the Ritz and Four Seasons, it is truly spectacular how much people celebrate it as a marker that their city has made it. Then in the same breath, they will celebrate not having a single big box store in the city.
When I first moved to Portland in 1997 TriMet still allowed smoking on the last 6 rows of MAX. Of course, that was smoke-free in comparison to Amtrak at the time, or the airlines up through the 80s. I still remember the clouds of smoke on airline flights…
You will not get a contact high, much less overdose, from the trace amounts of fentanyl being discussed here. If that were possible, the acute public health risk would be so extreme you wouldn’t need a study.
Yes, a “tiny bit” of fentanyl will kill you – about 2 mg. The surface quantities detected were on the order of 1 nanogram at most. That’s 0.000005% of a lethal dose.
Dang, so trimet is even lamer than I thought. You’re sure making it sound like I would have to lick a lot of train seats to even get a little bit high.
Worth noting: it’s 1 ng/cm^3. So to achieve a lethal dose, you would need to ingest all the fentanyl over an area of 20 million cm^2, which is about half an acre. It’s a truly inconsequential amount being detected.
Wait… how many cubic centimeters in an acre?
It’s square centimeters, the article refers to the part of the study where they are looking at surface doses. And it’s about 40 million square centimeters to an acre (40,468,564.224)
It is hard to feel like I’m on the winning side when when my advocates keep moving the goalposts, and this Streetsblog article does just that no matter how confounded the variables get.
Build it (or not) and I’ll come, so long as traffic isn’t constantly roaring by. That might make people feel safer too.
This “overlanding” trend has gone on a little too much. Suprised truck-bro didn’t have a Roof Top Tent on his rig.
One thing about drugs on transit is that if everyone had housing, they would have some place other than transit to do drugs.
And before the inevitable pearl-clutching replies about drug overdoses, I’ll note that COVID-19 killed twice as many people as illegal drugs last year, and we’ve apparently collectively decided that’s no longer a problem for society.
I agree. With all the crime associated with covid patients, I’d expect it would be a bigger deal.
Yes, if Paxlovid were made illegal tomorrow, you’d suddenly see a lot more “crime” associated with COVID patients. Funny how that works.
You think that Fentanyl should be legal and available for all?
You think we should keep pursuing the same failed strategy of prohibition and incarceration?
There are other ways. We could try a strategy of prohibition and rehabilitation/treatment/mental health, using the threat of incarceration to incentivize participation.
Sure, why not? After all, it worked so well with alcohol. Oh wait…
Since when are we incarcerating or prohibiting drug use?
What failed policy are you talking about in Portland?
Drugs were legalized in Portland and no one was arrested and we have 100 deaths a year and a lot of damaged individuals that may never recover.
Are you seriously putting alcohol and heroin in same category as Fentanyl?
If you are then there is no need to take you seriously…
“Funny how that works.”
Again we agree. It would probably drive covid patients to steal catalytic converters and take a dump in the elevator at the Bob Stacey bridge.
Steven Tyler, Robert Downey Jr., and Keith Richards are all famous drug addicts. To my knowledge none of them has ever been found defecating in public. Apparently what you’re describing is the result of grinding poverty, not drugs. Who knew?