I would like to see continued development in the link between transportation planning and improved health outcomes in our community. I don’t think the general public understands that investments in active transportation will save tax dollars–not just in transportation spending, but also in health spending, education spending (kids who exercise focus better), and more.

Bike Portland has certainly made me a better advocate on these issues over the years, and inspired me to follow the data in other forums as well.

For example, I attended a conference last week sponsored by We Can Do Better that included this address: “Transportation, Community Planning and Health Outcomes – Lawrence Frank, Ph.D. AICP, CIP, ASLA, Professor in Sustainable Transportation and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and President of Urban Design for Health, Inc.” Dr. Frank reported a study currently underway that will use ridership data from Trimet and a large healthcare system to look specifically at the health impact of the new Orange Line for people who live along that line (previous studies have shown that transit users exercise more). While it will be a couple of years (at least) before we see those results, it would be great to inform the biking community of these types of benefits.

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.

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Creating new BikePortlander posts is a benefit of your BikePortlander subscription (learn more about our new supporter program here).

What type of posts are we looking for? You can start a thread with a question, an observation, a concern, a recap of a meeting you attended, and so on. All readers will then be able to respond in the comments and add to the discussion.

We hope these posts will become another helpful resource for the thousands of people who rely on us for bike news, information and inspiration every day.

For now, these posts will go into a queue where they’ll be moderated by our staff and then published. We’ll consider elevating the best BikePortlander posts to our Front Page. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch.

[Also, please pardon our dust as we launch this and other new features over the next few days!]