So in less than a month you've now caricatured and dismissed with Rogue status two groups of Portlanders with legitimate concerns about issues that affect them (Alameda parents and people living along the NE/SE 50s Bikeway). For all your anti-establishment posing, you're awfully quick to disparage citizen involvement. If you were around in the early 70s, I'm sure you would have given a Rogue to the "haters" organizing to stop the Mt Hood Freeway.

 

I had to drive this morning.  Just today I had a rant to my passenger about the storage of private property on public streets.

 

 

@ Davey_Blun That's not really fair. Think about the two groups-- people who can't imagine having to struggle to park directly in front of their house even if it makes their neighborhood more bike-friendly, and rich white people who are afraid of sending their kids to a diverse school district rather than an overcrowded rich-kid public school. Not exactly the same type of people as people who support a massive and unneeded highway through the residential part of the city.

As someone who lived in the Woodstock area until moving to Alberta St recently, I think a bike lane along 52nd is a fantastic idea! There's one on 41st, but it's a little more flat ten blocks further east. Sounds like a great route to get to Hawthorne, one I would have used regularly. That said, I'd like to see a bike lane on Foster even more (it's crazy scary biking on that street), whether it creates a bit of a parking disaster or not.

 

It is not the bicyclists that financially support bicycle infrastructure, rather the motorists who drive and pay fuel taxes whom the freeloading bicyclist activists often despise and systematically raid resources from. If anybody should be called “rogue”, it should be the spandex-clad pedal pushing car haters that routinely that want all this specialized bicycle infrastructure as long as somebody else pays for it. Ten percent of the jobs in the US are tied to the auto industry. One less driver and one more bicyclist is one less taxpayer contributing to transportation infrastructure. Multiplied many times over, private sector jobs are lost only to be replaced by jobs in the public sector or non-self-sustaining jobs in the private sector that must be financed or subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, a real Ponzi scheme. For whatever reason, hardcore bicyclist activists think themselves so important they should have the freedom to ignore traffic control devices and the rules of the road while expecting drivers to operate their vehicles safely and get out of the way for them. Moreover these kamikaze style bicyclists refuse to accept the concept of mandatory helmet laws or license and registration fees to fund their own priorities. In that sustainability starts with financial self-sustainability, it is past due time to establish taxpayer equity in the area of transport funding, an about face “change in direction” whereby the users of alternative forms of transport - including bicyclists – to directly pay a substantial share of the costs for the infrastructure they regularly use and rant for. Until bicyclists accept some accountability and the financial responsibility to pay for bicycle infrastructure; it is the boisterous bicycle advocates that wear the true colors of being rogue.

 

Thanks WW for covering this issue and for taking the correct position on it.

The point I would disagree with is the implication that there was a lot of dissenters at this meeting. In fact there was an almost embarrassingly small number of people concerned about the loss of a couple of parking spaces, compared with scores of people who very much supported the concept.

As a member of the Citizen Advisory Committee that has been studying these details for many months, I can tell you that the individual neighbors, neighborhood associations and business groups in southeast are almost universal in wanted this project to happen.

In the beginning, I was particularly sympathetic to the people who really need their on-street parking space. But the more I dug into the details of the project the more I realized that the number of people for whom parking on street is their only option is ZERO. That's right: the spaces that may be removed are, in EVERY case, someone's ADDITIONAL parking space, and the griping is over whether these people should have to walk a few additional feet in order to access their public on-street storage space.

Given the significant current safety issues for bicyclists and pedestrians along this corridor, keeping the staus quo in order to protect someone's "right" to store their extra vehicle on the street is pure nonsense.

This bikeway is a great project for an area of town that has not gotten nearly the support it deserves.