Dept. of "Wish I'd Thought of That"

Someone named Jeff Jensen in Portland has a funny --- but seriously good --- idea in the Oregonian about the oft-heard (and mistaken) carhead whine that bicyclists don't pay for the roads and that we should start taxing bicycles:

As a bicycle commuter for 17 years, I fully agree with Willie Nyquist's suggestion (Letters, Dec. 9) that we tax bicycles by adding a registration fee. In fact, I would like to suggest that the rate be the same for all vehicles and reflect the relative use of the road. How about $1 a pound?

Jensen's idea is not just a witty reply to carheads. It's a great way to complement gas taxes, because it's the per-axle-weight of vehicles that does the damage that drives up the costs of maintaining roads. Which is why a fully-loaded two-axle bus can be more damaging than a much-heavier semi-trailer in some cases (the weight is only spread across two axles).

Food & Sustainability course in Salem

Menu for the Future – Northwest Earth Institute's newest course! Sessions of this food and sustainability discussion course are being offered in Salem by co-sponsors AmeriCorps and Garten Services Inc. Now registering for the following Winter 2009 Sessions: · Tuesdays, beginning January 13th, 6:30 to 8PM @ Tea Party Bookshop. · Saturdays, beginning January 17th, 9:30 to 11AM @ Marion-Polk Food Share. Enrollment is limited! To register, call Melissa at 503-566-4159. Course registration and participation is free, however, there is a refundable $20 workbook deposit. Additional course offerings TBD. These course offerings are a part of a not-for-profit AmeriCorps Community Action Project. This project is still looking for course sponsors to cover associated costs. Please show your support and send this message to those who might be interested in sponsoring and/or participating. Thanks! See additional discussion course information @ http://www.nwei.org Menu for the Future is a 7-session course exploring the connection between food and sustainability. Discussion course goals are to: explore food systems and their impacts on culture and society, consider your role in creating and supporting sustainable food systems, and to gain insight into agricultural and individual practices that promote personal and ecological well-being.

More on health and driving ourselves into the grave

WaPo has a story today about the health consequences of places like Salem and Oregon having massively funded bureaucracies dedicated to the vision of more roadways and "roadway performance standards" that drive even more road construction projects in a perfect spiral of futility:

New research illustrates the health benefits of regular biking, walking or taking public transportation to work, school or shopping. Researchers found a link between "active transportation" and less obesity in 17 industrialized countries across Europe, North America and Australia.

"Countries with the highest levels of active transportation generally had the lowest obesity rates," authors David Bassett of the University of Tennessee and John Pucher of Rutgers University conclude.

Americans, with the highest rate of obesity, were the least likely to walk, cycle or take mass transit, according to the study in a recent issue of the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. The study relied on each country's own travel and health data.

Avego -- Realtime ridesharing

Very cool use of the omnipresent cellphones and the new iPhone capabilities -- Avego is a way for people with cars to offer rides and for people needing rides to find cars going their way, and for people to connect "on the fly" without hassle.

I may even break down and get a cellphone (an iPhone, in fact) just so I can take advantage of this very cool idea and offer rides to others on those days when I have occasion to fire up the flivver ...

Check it out -- watch the video clip on the home page, and imagine how powerful this will become as the recession/depression continues and people increasingly need to conserve resources and to relearn the thrifty ways of the Great Depression, when ridesharing was assumed and hitchhikers were a common sight by the roads.

Note that you don't have to have an iPhone (or even a cellphone) to use Avego -- you can connect via your internet connection. Here's a snippet of an exchange I had with Sean O. of Avego:

My interest is in making it platform independent, so that any kind of cell phone or people without cell phones can use it from their home computer, or a computer at work, or even by a landline call, if that's possible.

Is that conceivable?

Sean replied:

Sure, we do that already
www.avego.com

you only need the iPhone device if you are broadcasting your GPS location to other people. (ie., if you are a driver).

On other phones (for drivers), #1 (a lot of them don't have GPS), #2 (a lot of them use a much slower and more inaccurate version of GPS), #3 (a lot of them don't have unlimited data plans like the iPhone does, so people would be hesitant to use them as drivers, because it would be more expensive than the iPhone). So the iPhone is a pretty good platform for a lot of reasons.

Also, our protocol does work on any other phone/device. We have it working on 3 other devices in our labs other than the iPhone, already. Those will be coming out over time to support drivers having other options than just the iPhone, to make it, as you say, platform independent. But for riders, it already works that way (of course, since the iPhone client isn't available yet, you wouldn't be able to know that unless you'd used the system before... which only probably 100 people have, worldwide, so far... so, good question.
Best,
Sean

This has amazing potential in Salem and in the Pacific Northwest, where people are ahead of the US in terms of both technology awareness and also in environmental awareness. So go ahead and sign up, especially if you live in Salem, and start thinking about how we can make sure that any car trip is a full car trip. Because, like Bill Maher said (in his great book):

"When you ride alone,
you ride with Bin Ladin"

Salem Monthly Give Guide ends 12.31

There is still plenty of time to get your donation in to the large variety of nonprofit organizations featured in November's Salem Monthly (and to claim your tax deductions for itemizers, and the Oregon Cultural Trust tax credit for contributions to the Salem Rep).

Participating nonprofit organizations include:

• Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary, an animal rescue farm;
  
  
• Mano a Mano, a Latino outreach center;
  
  
• Friends of Marion County, an organization dedicated to local land-use issues;
  
  
• Salem Repertory Theatre that brings professional theater to the community;
  
  
• Straub Learning Center, which focuses on nature education;
  
  
• Salem Progressive Film Series that offers a series of thought-provoking movies
  
  
• Radio Free Salem, which is working to offer a community radio station [and which now has license in hand and will broadcast as KMUZ! -ed.]

The organizations that were selected work on relatively small to no budgets. Donations can be made at SELCO Credit Union or given via an online donation through the Give Guide website (which is provided by SELCO).

To make a donation or read more about each organization, visit the Give Guide online.

This drive ends December 31.

Like babies, obesity often starts in the backseat of a car

Interesting article on the lesser-discussed of the two major health scourges we have a lot of here: teen pregnancy and obesity.

People are always willing to gas endlessly about teen pregnancy, but obesity doesn't get as much attention. What's worth noting is that Salem and Marion County, two governments that really get hammered by high public obesity rates (through health care costs), do so much to promote obesity. They do this by relentlessly promoting auto culture.

(As just one example of our structural obsession with promoting cars, note that, by law, you have to build a room for a car into every house built in Salem, and you have to pour a driveway, even if you have no intention of ever having a car. Oddly, there's no such law that requires a homebuilder to provide sensible solar orientation or to take advantage of the free energy that shines down on the home, or to reserve suitable space for a vegetable garden. Why is that?)

It should be noted that obesity isn't entirely new. There have always been some genetically predisposed people, people whose bodies make them obese on very little food. This, however, is a very small fraction of us.

What is new, mainly since WWII, is the culture of obesity, which is exactly the same as the culture of the automobile.

Governments have decided that the central organizing principle of society is and should be providing automobility for all those who can afford it--or who are willing to try to afford it, while doing without decent housing, health care, and eduction.

Like babies so often do, for most people, obesity starts in the backseat of cars. The vast majority of us who are obese (and I include myself since I oscillate between 40 and 50 pounds over the top of my recommended weight) are that way because we live sedentary lives that involve lots of travel in cars.

And a big part of why we live sedentary lives is that our city and county planners and elected officials think that the only time we deserve consideration is when we're in a car.

In the mind of planners, when we're on foot or a bike, we're an "alternative" to God's proper mode of transport, the car. If you cut across the city and county government departments (police, public works, community development, etc.), you'd find that the care, feeding, monitoring, and storage of cars is the prime obsession of government today, and that it permeates every department.

In the name of encouraging "growth" we do indeed encourage growth--both the sprawl that helps make the city almost entirely unusable by those not in a motorized wheelchair called a car and the sprawl around our waists.

Most telling is that Salem just defeated a levy to allow the bus system to keep operating in its limited way on Saturdays, while passing a much more expensive bond to pour even more money into streets and sprawl.

Support Oregon Food Bank - with just a click!

Erstwhile Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski runs a "buck a hit" day for charity every year where he donates $1 for each unique visitor to hit hit blog that day. This year it's gotten a whole lot better:

This year, a benefactor of this blog who is both prosperous and generous has offered to take us back to our high-rollin' roots. He'll give $1 to the Oregon Food Bank for every hit on this blog next Wednesday, up to $5,000! And so rather than quit counting the hits at 1,000, this year we'll keep going to five times that number, with a new dollar going to the food bank for every unique visit. (We use SiteMeter for the "official" count.)

This wonderful new development means that we'll need lots of extra visits beyond the number from a typical day on this blog. Assuming that we're not showing photos of Sarah Palin's torso, our readership on a typical weekday usually comes in at around 3,000 unique visits, and so the laws of inertia aren't going to get us to 5,000 without some serious help from strangers. We're back to the olden days, where having new folks show up all day really will make a difference. Please help us get out the word and get readers in here that day -- next Wednesday, December 17.

So this is your opportunity to do a lot of good with a little bit of effort -- make sure to click over to bojack.org next Weds!

Even though he's Portland, the Oregon Food Bank helps all over, including here in Marion County, where we have a lot of people living on the very margins and who are going to need a lot of help in the months to come.

Great post on "How Things Changed"

(click graph to enlarge)


Ryan Avent has an insightful post at Gristmill that every city, county, and state official in Oregon (and the US) ought to read and heed:

There's a remarkable graph that has starred in blog posts and news stories with some regularity over the past year. It shows vehicle miles traveled in America over the last quarter century or so. For most of the period, the line rockets upward, straight and true, preparing to blast off the page. But then the strangest thing happens. In 2004, it starts to level off. And in 2008, it begins to decline.

The tale behind that line grows in significance by the day. That rocket-ride upward corresponds fairly directly to the economic story that has culminated in the current crisis. Americans moved outward from cities in droves in the 1980s and 1990s, buoyed by cheap oil prices. Commute times soared as metropolitan areas stretched into the distant exurbs, many of which now lay devastated by housing defaults and foreclosures. As demand for oil increased, so too did prices, which led to a stream of money flowing into the Persian Gulf. Gulf nations recycled it back to us by buying American debt, thereby facilitating the massive borrowing that fueled the housing bubble.

In the end, high oil prices also helped to pop that bubble. The squeeze expensive gas placed on household budgets helped push marginal homeowners over the edge, fueling the credit conflagration, before finally exhausting the American consumer and tipping us into recession. And an epic recession it will be -- large enough to sink oil prices and the international financial system that sustained American debt-supported consumption.

Read the rest there.

No Harm, No Fowl

Story about Lawrence, Kansas, and the struggle to get zoning codes updated to recognize the value of small fowl as part of an integrated pest-management and food security strategy for the 21st Century.

The old saying in sports is "no harm, no foul." We're stuck with being harmed by Salem's antiquated zoning code that doesn't allow small fowl in residential zones.

Fantastic News - Radio Free Salem (KMUZ)!

Don't know how this slipped past without notice, but Salem's "Radio Free Salem" project has announced that it will get its Low-Power FM license and be able to broadcast community radio in Salem as radio station KMUZ!

The Oregon Cultural Trust has an inquiry about whether gifts to KMUZ will qualify for the OCT tax credit deal (see prior post) -- they certainly should!