Stories tagged with "oregon"

The Neighborhood Car? Is it Time?

This is a guest post from Hans Noeldner, a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. Hans' first piece on the rules of downtown revitalization can be found here and his piece on the "Declaration of Dependence" can be found here.

Today he writes a letter to his fellow members of the Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming (GTFGW). It seems to me that the theme of “unwinding” vehicular one-upsmanship is pertinent…

Note, these are exactly the kind of stories we are looking for for the new TOD:Local segment, please submit them to Glenn or the eds box!

Dear GTFGW – Transportation Working Group (TWG) members:

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine for a moment that we extrapolate into the future, from the relatively modest cars most people drove twenty-five years ago…to the 5,000-pound SUVs and 6,000-pound pickup trucks that dominate our suburbs today…to the vehicles that might cluster ‘round our soccer fields and school drop off zones after another ten or twenty years of “healthy” economic growth:

(You will have to click here, it's a flash module...and click “CST” and “MST” at the bottom.)

Intersection Repair: Building Community Over Automobile Throughput

Here in NYC, over the last month, we have seen a radical transformation in the upper levels of the city's department of transportation. Much of this has been because of the persistence of a few dozen transportation advocates who have successfully won favor within the Bloomberg Administration for their ideas of streets as public places requiring safe routes for pedestrians and cyclists and more access for mass transportation by taking back street space from personal automobiles. What we call: Livable Streets. Streetsblog (which I also write for) received some well deserved credit today by the NY Times' City Room.

In looking at what is going on around the country with the livable streets movement, I came across this excellent video of something called "Intersection Repair"

Intersection Repair

"City Repair" in Portland, Oregon hosts an annual Village Building Convergence where hundreds of people come together to build diverse projects for the benefit of their communites and to take back their streets via a process known as Intersection Repair.

Declaration of Dependence

This is a guest post from Hans Noeldner, a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. Hans' first piece on the rules of downtown revitalization can be found here. Today's post, "Declaration of Dependence" can be found under the fold.

"Downtown Revitalization Rules"

This is a guest post from Hans Noeldner.

I am a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. I ran for public office because I believed that 90% of the work to create a sustainable society must be done at the community level. Having served for nearly two years, I am even more convinced this is true. Our consumption of resources and production of wastes is more powerfully shaped by our land use decisions than any other factor I can think of. And land use decisions are intensely local.

More of Hans' interesting (and it being Sunday, it has an NPR-Michael-Feldman-esque feel about it...) observations on the rules of downtown revitalization under the fold.