This one is for Wallace www.findagrave.com/memorial/150...

notice how its called "the windshield test" because conservatives think of cities as places to drive through, not places to live in and experience first hand. Why should we give a single shit about the opinion of someone who doesnt care to even get out of their car and be part of the community

Bragging about the stock market was dumb when Biden did it, and it's dumb now. The majority of your labor force doesn't own significant stock or 401k. (IT folks and middle management often have good 401ks but we're being downsized like crazy)

There are a lot of Portlanders who consider themselves progressive but turn reactionary when they see visible poverty. The urge to just make poverty disappear from sight instead of working toward holistic solutions is why we don’t have nice things in this country. Poverty is a social creation.

TFW you want to argue with people who say things like "bicycling isn't a viable form of transportation" and explain that you're a disabled veteran who rides a bike to work and shopping and everywhere else... ...and then you remember that arguing on the Internet is pointless.

Reminder - you can support people who have given service to the country and also be anti-war Please

Testify to stop the sweeps before Wednesday!! > Scroll to item 8 > Testify on this item > Submit written testimony > Support with changes > Write a comment supporting Councilor Morillo’s amendment to defund sweeps and fund social services www.portland.gov/council/agenda

Every so often I remember that oil men are fracking giant swathes of Texas. Fracking is like salting the earth but worse. They're doing it so that millions of Americans can drive a shitty car to a shitty job every day. Anyway back to your regularly scheduled brain rot.

Someday we will free Portland's Joan of Arc from her prison of motor vehicle traffic

Hating on golf courses is baffling to me. If your city had the same population density as <your favorite European city> you could double your population. But sure let's hate on the golf course that you could build a thousand units of housing on (if you could finance it which I know you can't)

Having observed the Texas Transportation Commission in action, I will confidently predict that that will ignore everything in this report.

Remember when weather predictions were accurate? All the way back in 2024?

We need a "Mr Rogers Urbanist" What do you do with those feelings you feel? I can work them out during a bike ride on these protected bike lanes. I can go for a walk in my neighborhood on this continuous sidewalk with shady tree canopy. I can take a bus to my friend's house and get a hug.

This! So many American cities hide their homelessness problem by sweeping unhoused folks out into the empty spaces between suburbs. It's infuriating. Hiding a problem doesn't make it go away. Portland should do better. I'm glad we have folks on city council who care about our unhoused neighbors.

Just talked with a professor from France who informed me that they just don’t do evictions in the winter where he’s from and that that’s extremely normal. It would be a BATTLE to get a policy like that in Portland. We’re honestly barbaric in the United States. It’s absurd.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

What's the one thing that all transgender folks have in common? A hated of public restrooms

Great articles like this is why I follow Strong Towns: www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025...

We talk so much about the Portland area freeway projects but honestly kind of insane how much widening is happening on I-5 in Salem lmao what a waste of money man

Oregon has the highest eviction rates in history. 🚨 READ: www.portlandmercury.com/opinion/2025...

been thinking about this with 82nd avenue especially: critics are arguing against BAT lanes on the basis that they’ll reduce capacity on the road and they’re not really correct but they’d be inarguably wrong if we were running more than 5 buses an hour

Sidewalks shouldn’t stop for side streets, pass it on

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

In Texas they are removing traffic calming because it's considered 🚨 DEI 🚨 Hundred year old main streets have been turned into state highways, and the state of Texas is demanding that these inherently walkable cities remove any protection for pedestrians or cyclists. Pure evil.

Cars are to transportation what billionaires are to American society... there's way more of them than we need and the forces that maintain their dominance make life worse for the rest of us. Mamdani understands that. bikeportland.org/2025/11/05/m...

buy a drink for the iraq war vet in your life. bring out the confetti. bake em a cake.

One of the things that's nuts to me is how, with commercial aviation, we've basically decided on the worst possible option as the *default* mode of long-distance travel, mostly because it is necessary for a tiny class of insanely privileged people to do objectively insane things. 1/

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: There should be a lesson in every public school teaching people the difference of wealth at the federal poverty line, $100,000, $1 million, & $1 billion. I’m convinced that Americans don’t actually comprehend how enormously different in scale these #’s are.

PDX has a generational opportunity to rebuild NE 82nd into a delightful street that supports people walking, taking the bus, biking, driving, making deliveries, gathering outside. So far the designs we're seeing aren't rising to this opportunity. Really hope you can help @senkhanhpham.bsky.social!

The elderly woman screaming obscenities at the bus stop last night was probably just excited about how well her stock market investments are doing. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours to get all that joy out

Washington DC is a beautiful walkable city with a government problem.

Austin Texas is a college town with a suburb problem

We should be designing roads for the car volume we want, not the car volume we have. This means narrow existing lanes, remove lanes, widen sidewalks, build bike lanes, etc. until we reach safe speeds and vehicle volumes.

I don't think there's anything wrong with talking about the state of the housing market as a "market failure" but if you are a skeptical of well functioning markets, as many of us are, here's an alternative: the housing market is working as designed, and we should design it to work differently

Tax gasoline and use the money to fund transit and housing. [short-term] Tear out I-84 where your transit backbone is and build socially funded and owned TOD in the highway footprint. [long-term] Lowering the per capita cost of transportation and housing is key to long term economic stability

It’s so important to celebrate wins — good vibes and momentum are extremely fun and productive. If I was in Chicago I would definitely be going to this

the last time I sat out a low turnout off year election because I was feeling lazy and I thought I knew what was going to happen I accidentally helped kickstart dan ryan’s political career — don’t let it happen to you!

If we're dissatisfied with how certain publications cover local politics, good thing we live in one of the most saturated media markets in the US. We're spoiled for choice here; Bluesky actually is a referral traffic engine; might as well support good coverage and ignore the bad coverage

Wow! Best review of LIFE AFTER CARS yet, via @taylorgriggs.bsky.social in @portlandmercury.com. Check it out and be sure to see us at @powells.bsky.social on November 13th!

Is it just me or is Halloween much more subdued this year?

The people yearn for (democratic) socialism (this one will make you cry)

Ever since the first famine of human history, the job of the people in charge has been to make sure there's enough food for the foreseeable future. This is literally government job #1. 🤦‍♀️

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

Astonishingly, Doug Moore of the Portland Business Alliance told WWeek that, in the age of Trump, their top priority is stopping the DSA. I can't think of anything more unhinged than watching the chaos unleashed by Trump and focusing on stopping DSA in response. www.wweek.com/news/2025/07...

I'm betting that AI wouldn't be nearly as popular IF WE HADN'T RUINED EVERY FUCKING WEBPAGE WITH AD SPAM There was a time when search results were useful. Now everything is full of ads and clickbait and pop-ups. I hate the internet now, and that's sad.

The sidewalk in front of my apartment has hundreds of users per day and was built before human powered flight. Americans really do not understand the cost of maintenance and how that changes your city.

I don't know how to explain to people that their retirement is bundled into the heart of capitalism. Your 401k needs 10% growth, that's 7% more than the 3% national inflation target. Where do you think that money is coming from?

I don't care if people from Gresham can easily drive into my neighborhood and spend $200 in a local restaurant ... nearly as much as I care that the local restaurant has a steady patronage of local customers who can walk there on a weekday. These populations are diametrically opposed.

Please go vote for Portland Parks 😍

This is going from 700 people making weapons for ICE to 7,000 people making weapons for ICE