Tuesday, September 18, 2007

bad, getting worse

And Bend is not immune to this phenom...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/18/traffic.congestion.ap/index.html

Cooley and 97 is already bad. Juniper _will_ make it worse.

The state wants to spend money changing 97 into an expressway south of Madras to California, making all interchanges below highway grade. That makes perfect sense. Take that truck traffic and make it more fluid, unfettered by cities like Redmond, LaPine, Bend, etc. or dumb intersections like China Hat has been or like the Sunriver T has been.

What is interesting about the cnn article, acknowledging that it is cnn, is the lack of planning to get fewer people driving and/or getting more bodies into cars. Of course, no one mentions bikes.

There just seems to be a lot of head scratching going on. Gee, we had no idea that more cars would be on the roads, would mean more time in the car commuting. Could better planning have mitigated this issue before it happened? Or simply staved off the inevitable? I think it was inevitable. We are bound to buy more, consume more, use more, because we are Americans. I am about to compare us to Europe...be ready or stop reading now...In Europe, most people do not own cars. Most people do not own large, gas-guzzling cars. Housing and building is centered around the urban center, not sprawling across miles landscape. They tend to build up, not out. Smaller houses (versus 2600 square feet for two people). Now, do not get me wrong, I live in Bend/Salem, not Amsterdam; I bought into this just like you, true believer. I love Bend, living in Bend, but thank some one's god that I ride to work, instead of contributing to this problem. I do contribute to other problems, like wine consumption and love of the 80's.

See that waste the article quantifies? We as a people, as a culture, as a belief system, NEED to move ourselves away from what has defined us as consumers, guzzlers, abusers of resources. As in Fight Club, you are not the car you drive...the things you own, start to own you.

Bikes, not Bush.

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