The Association of Oregon Counties and the League of Oregon Cities have prepared a series of informative fact sheets on road funding. Here's an OAC chart on the cost of a ton of asphalt that bears careful pondering -- keep in mind that we're now on the peak oil downslope (meaning that, while there will be a lot of price volatility, the overall trend for asphalt costs -- like all oil-derived products -- is going to keep climbing sharply).We've stretched auto dependency to the point that it's going to snap and hurt us badly--everything we do to try to prop up the road system is going to take more and more money, meaning people are going to limit driving and spending even more.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Willamette Valley had the same level of streetcar service today as it had in 1909?
When Claude Gerstle, a surgeon and athlete, suffers a tragic bicycle accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, he and his daughter, Jessica, discover hope in the politicized area of science called stem cells. "The Accidental Advocate" is a wheelchair odyssey of a father and daughter who track down the thinkers, the politicians, the crusaders and the naysayers in an effort to understand the potential of the science and why a political quagmire is stalling a cure. The film sorts the hope from the hype, the ideas from the ideology. The promise of stem cell research has united diverse patients and families — rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, religious and secular, a group of millions of Americans — creating a very vocal national movement to reverse limits on the federal funding of the research. 
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