Steven T. Jones reports from the Toward Carfree Cities conference in Portland
My head and two notebooks are filled with alarming indicators of the need for more people to go carfree and with innovative ideas for making that happen. The solutions range from facilities like the floating bicycle/pedestrian path on the eastside of the Willamette River…
…to technologies for making transit more accessible (such as online trip planners and the Nextbus system used by Muni, which San Francisco’s Michael Smith gave a presentation on yesterday) to key research (consultant Peter Jacobsen finds bikers and walkers are safer in large numbers: “There’s something going on with motorists behavior changing”) to sociopolitical movements, including the many freeway revolts around the U.S. (SF’s Jason Henderson moderated a session on that yesterday) and reclaim the streets pushes such as Critical Mass, depaving, and creative protests against expanded roadways.
Whew, that lightened my head a little bit, but there’s still just so much to say about carfree issues, which have only in recent years penetrated the mainstream consciousness. Bay Area residents Brian Smith and Jonathan Winston each maintain good blogs on the topic, and up here there’s the great BikePortland.org site and one from Canadian journalist Jude Isabella. But the standard these days is being set by the New York City Livable Streets Movement, which includes Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and the Open Planning Project.
And with stable funding from carfree-minded entrepreneur Mark Horton (who started the file-sharing service Limewire, among other things) and a desire to reach into more U.S. cities, Streetsblog is eyeing San Francisco and other California cities to expand its reach and impact.
San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum, author/activist Chris Carlsson, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek.