I find following and participating in comment-conversations mighty tedious without the long-standing option to subscribe (receive latest comments by email). I don’t have a smart phone or know how to implement the tricks some folks have mentioned for getting around this. If there is a workaround that non-computer nerds can avail themselves of, I’m all ears. Mostly I would like to know if this is a money thing, or something else? We’ve lost it before, and then it was brought back. Jonathan has not replied to my email queries about this issue.
Thanks for any insights.

We’re told* that in 2015 a record number of (new) automobiles were purchased in the US, and with gas so cheap this surely must mean that everything is hunky dory, that automobility is here to stay.

But what if the way we spend our money isn’t a good proxy for where things are headed, for our capacity to withstand shocks to the system, for the limits to growth? What if our public (political, biophysical) prospects can’t be deduced from our private (economic) priorities? People may have all kinds of conscious and unconscious reasons for buying a new car that fail utterly to take into account the future prospects of automobility or climate instability or gasoline price spikes. What if these purchases, collectively, resist easy extraction of a historical meaning?

Or what if, more or less consciously, we all know what’s coming, that the age of fossil fuels is very nearly over, but we’re afraid and unwilling to acknowledge this because we are terrified of the uncertainty, of what it might mean, of what will replace it? What if by buying a big shiny car instead of thinking about these unknowns we can convince ourselves that, in fact, the collapse isn’t looming? Like George W Bush exhorting us all to go out and buy stuff after 9/11. Because in our economic system when lots of stuff is bought we have learned to infer from this that everything’s hunky dory, because if things weren’t hunky dory we wouldn’t exhibit so much Consumer Confidence….
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Celebrating Nike’s $10 million sponsorship package reifies the currently lopsided funding priorities we have not just in this town but all over the place, where anything to do with cars is automatically funded without any public conversation much less a vote, but when it comes to high-vis bike infrastructure (Sunday Parkways, Bikeshare – now BikeTown) we’re apparently out of luck, and the search for a corporate sponsor raises few eyebrows (how many thousands of taxpayer dollars were spent cozying up to that sponsor?).

Were any of you bikeportland readers in Seattle to protest the WTO in 1999? Do we even remember what those protests were about? One of the things they were about was corporations’ need to create, infiltrate, and dominate the emotional and physical landscapes we inhabit, convince us that their brand and the lifestyles we seek are one and the same. A few of these companies have become very good at it and very wealthy in the process. But in the post-manufacturing era there is fierce competition for this dominance. The remaining opportunities are few and getting fewer. Nike isn’t the only one who’d like to brand us, our aspirations, our (formerly) public spaces.
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I use (used) this a lot. Like the ability to explore archived conversations. The old version was not great; the new version is so terrible it is almost worse than no search function (sorry to be so blunt). Folks have made some suggestions for how to piggy back onto google to search this site:
https://bikeportland.org/2015/10/05/suggestions-for-bikeportland-164451#comment-6566572
https://bikeportland.org/2015/10/05/suggestions-for-bikeportland-164451#comment-6566652

But I would like to think that there would be a (fairly straightforward/free?) way to upgrade the internal search function here so that we could get back at least to the level of service (LOS) we had before the recent switch.

Thanks very much!

Bike theft is a topic that gets lots of air play these days. We probably know the basic facts, but, curiously no one has so far produced a statistic that would help us understand the probability of having a properly U-locked bike stolen (here in town, or anywhere). Gerald Fittipaldi recently ventured that upwards of 95% of bikes stolen on the PSU campus were *not* locked with a U-lock, but beyond that all we hear are anecdotes. One would think that the Bike Theft Task Force would have some figures.

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I suppose this would be classified as an announcement.

Rich Newlands of PBOT’s Clinton Greenway project will be coming to the Richmond Neighborhood Association meeting next Monday to ask the neighborhood its opinion on a proposed diverter east of SE 28th, as well as about the proposal to make 34th one-way north between Clinton and Division, with a contraflow bike lane southbound. Might be a good opportunity to voice an opinion or learn a bit more about the City’s thinking.

Mon., Oct. 12, 7 PM, Waverly Church, 3300 SE Woodward.

As a huge fan of this website and everything you do, and with an eye to the changes that the new subcriber model might permit us to pursue, here’s a short list of things that would be fun to see:

(1) a better search function. The button has drifted a bit lately, I’d like to see it in the upper right corner which seems like a typical location. When you do search, the results are not organized by date, or much of anything else as far as I can tell. Would it be possible to crib a more sophisticated search algorithm, perhaps even with ‘advanced’ features from somewhere? This would make mining the archives so much more rewarding.

(2) an edit button for the comments. Perhaps this is expensive (I don’t know) but I do know that many, many commenters have expressed a desire for this. [Read more…]