will this be your next 'outing'?

could you call this a "drive by blogging?"

will this be your next 'outing'?

I believe it's somebody from the Portland State planning Mafia; since they're pretty much interchangeable, I haven't been curious to go beyond that.

It puts you on their blogroll. They mustn't hate you too much.

That particular hater likes to spar more than some of the others do. Always behind a curtain of anonymity, of course.

Well, uhh... [looks around nervously] ... to the extent I can glean anything from the snippets, dude does have a point. It is a bit - okay, a lot - more strident around here than it was when I first started hanging out. Maybe that's just a side-effect of gaining a higher profile, maybe not. [shrug] Or maybe it's just because we don't have Bush/Cheney to kick around any more.

I think it's a worthwhile forum still, but it's not so pleasant sometimes. I miss Nice Week.

Page not found
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog Urban Planning Overlord does not exist.

If you click on the "urban planning overlord" link it takes you to yesterday's post...

Jack,

How would you define "the Portland State planning Mafia"? I'll be enrolling in PSU's Urban & Regional Planning graduate program in the Fall. Do I automatically get to become a member of "the planning Mafia"? Or do we have to be on different sides of an issue first?

Here's the post:
back from the occasional wretched PC excess
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Just Say No. Always.
It's been exactly one year since the last post on this worthy blog.

And our old "friend" continues his tirades.

Note the complete crank-fest in the comments section. Perhaps he's expelled all contrary voices from his blog - I found a reference to noted Republican crazy (NOT!) Jack Roberts getting the boot a while back.

And note the slam upon a new target, a State Representative who dares to disagree with the blog proprietor. And a vicious ad hominem attack to boot.

But back to substance - roads get wear and tear, and a car that is driven 10,000 miles a year on those roads has more impact than a car that is driven 1,000 miles a year on those same roads. And an SUV weighing 10,000 lbs. has more impact when driven on those roads than a Mini-Cooper weighing 4,000 lbs.

The current gasoline tax is a rough calculator for apportioning the costs of keeping roads and building new ones on an equitable basis. And it's getting rougher - should a Prius driver pay only half what a Mini-Cooper driver pays for road upkeep because his car uses only half the gas, but weighs more?

So taxing cars based upon actual miles driven on our roads makes sense. As for figuring out exactly how to do it in a non-intrusive way - that's a subject for more work, once the concept is accepted.

posted by Urban Planning Overlord at 11:35 AM 0 comments

Joey,
Look out for the mafia UPO is a member of.
Urban Planning Overlord is the very typical misinformed and dishonest central planning advocate in the Portland region and at PSU. They never miss an opportunity to misinform.

And he calls it "But back to substance"?
Ha.

Roads don't get wear and tear from cars, period. A car that is driven 10,000 miles a year on those roads has the same impact as a car that is driven 1,000 miles. None.
The same as an SUV weighing 10,000 lbs. and the same as a Mini-Cooper weighing 4,000 lbs. None.

Large freight rucks and other heavy vehicles along with studds wear out roads. Not cars.

"Roads don't get wear and tear from cars, period."

Got Data?

See, Ben, this is exactly what I was talking about. The point you make is pretty absurd - a car surely does less damage, but there's no reason to think it does zero damage - but there's room to argue that. However, you also have this "mafia" BS and guilt by association with - *gasp* - academic experts! So you make a ridiculous assertion and also pre-emptively smear anyone who might use a little science to show how ridiculous your assertion is. Great for winning online arguments, not so good for finding rational solutions to real problems. A genuine Bush administration tactic, I bet your momma is real proud.

Sigh. Not sure why I even bother...

Can someone explain to me what this conversation is all about. I thought the mafia lived in Jersey?

PS: A weight/miles tax makes sense to me. There is no way a 25 lb. bike with a 150 pound rider causes the same road wear as a 3,000 lb car or a 40,000 lb. truck covering the same miles.. So let's make everyone pay their share based upon the physics. We should register the bikes too and have them pay their fair share based upon weight and mileage. Then we could also get them to all have lights for night time riding.

How can we find a way to tax the rain and the temperature changes here in Portland? Given that most of the damage is due to water seeping into cracks, freezing, and then expanding, thereby breaking up the pavement which is exacerbated by vehicles, or by studs and chains employed as a defense against the environment... How can we find a way to tax the environment?

Native: Show me the perfect tax? It's always a trade off. Weight and mileage is as good as it gets from my way of thinking.

Well, the post is back and with an update that bites back against bojack's snark and ben's cluelessness.

db,

I understand what you are saying. But an individual pothole exists in one location. The damage increases as additional vehicles travel over it. Any individual vehicle may be traveling one block, one mile, or 100 miles in its journey. The damage is the same. Weight may be a factor, I'll concur, but overall travel distance is not since the pot hole is stationary.

So the same crowd that says Portland spends like a drunken sailor wants to spend money on a program to determine wear-and-tear from bicycles on public roads? Um...

And why again does distance driven not matter? You think there is just a single pothole that everyone drives over?

Oh, and his post is back up and has a little extra update with some love for bojack's snark and ben's cluelessness.

Careful bojack, don't pick fights on blogs where you can't delete comments! ;)

Native: So the odds of you hitting one or more pot holes are no greater if you drive 1,000 miles a week as opposed to 100? I'm not strong in statistics but somehow it seems to me that I'm going to run over more pot holes driving to Hermiston than to the Pearl District. On the bicycle, by the way, I generally try to avoid the potholes

db,

As a driver of of an automobile, so do I.

Twice as often, I guess. Sorry.

Well it's twice as hard with four wheels.

Touche!

Weren't a few members of that PSU planning mafia very publicly against demolishing the Memorial Col.? Horrible people, indeed.

I agree, db, a weight/mile tax makes sense as a way to raise money to maintain roads. (Or more precisely, miles*weight/wheel. Or if you want to get ridiculous, miles*weight/wheel_contact_area.)

Which is not to say that such a tax wouldn't have issues. Do you charge people for miles driven outside the taxing area? If not, how do you figure out how many miles were driven within the area? (Personally I would prefer any solution that does not involve a tracking system in each vehicle...)

Assessing a weight-mile tax on bikes is also problematic. There's no infrastructure in place to track bicyclists, and creating one would be such a huge and varied PITA that it probably would never produce a net positive revenue.

AD: I agree. There should be a minimum registration for the bikes because the impact differential is off the charts. But I'd like to see bike registration for a whole lot of reasons, theft etc, but mostly for safety so we dont get so many incredibly brilliant people and artists driving their bikes in the dark in black clothing. I had a case in Vancouver where I became pretty well convinced that people crossing the street or riding at night were convinced that a car with lights could
see them two tho three times further than that was true. It is one of those things that is not intuitive That means that the bike rider has an extremely false sense of security, like driving another car, where you have opposing lights. That's why I'm for cycle registration. Why not?. All vehicles on the road at night should have lights.

db-

I think mandatory bike registration would be impractically difficult. (Quite aside from being personally objectionable.) People riding irresponsibly on bikes tend to kill themselves, not other people, so unlike motor vehicles there's little incentive to try to regulate.

Plus, once you regulate non-motorized vehicles, where do you stop? Razor scooters? Skateboards? Rollerblades? Boots? High heels? There isn't another really bright line to be drawn.