"North Main Street" is Highway 99 to and from Ashland after you take the north freeway exit to go into town. Ashland being a busy tourist town, this highway gets a fair bit of traffic on all four of its lanes. This is not good road engineering; it's lousy social engineering, which I expect we will all see more and more and more of as the messianic missions of "progressives" wage on.

So backward down there -- no streetcar, even.

Don't worry - the government will step in to once again rebuild a railroad line from Ashland across the state line, that's been shut down by MULTIPLE railroads (Southern Pacific, Central Oregon & Pacific) due to high maintenance costs, low traffic, and ability to route whatever traffic there is on other routes (up to Eugene then on UP's mainline through Klamath Falls). Because that railroad is so despirately needed...yet not one single job was lost when the railroad was shut down. Some shippers moaned and complained, but they had already abandoned the railroad and shifted to trucks and just wanted to have the "option" of a railroad.

Some folks are even talking about passenger service on this line - yet the Southern Pacific abandoned passenger service back in the 1950s, and most rail service removed in the 1930s when the route via Klamath Falls was built - specifically because the "Siskiyou Line" had too many curves and grades that the line was just too slow and restricted.

Yet - the government knows best, and it's pitching in millions to "rescue" this railroad line through Ashland...

What Jackson County needs are GOOD LIBRARIES. Can they run a high-speed free-energy monorail with endless bike racks to the GOOD LIBRARY? It doesn't even need to ever be open, I just want to hug the building.

Sorry, I've seen far too many political ads today... some of them about GOOD LIBRARIES. Oh, and never forget that sincere-looking uptown folks think that we should give the Grange a chance... " *hiccup* a chance... *hiccup* a chance...

is the election over yet

Ashland seems to have pretty frequent bus service to Medford. They even wash those buses, they are pretty. There's just no economic need for rail. Housing density is too low in a small, spread-out town like that.

Plenty of alternate routes for bikes, and lane diets are silly -- it's the main drag, for Pete's sake. Traffic wasn't great with all four lanes. And the peds and cyclists down there would do uppity Portland peds proud.

No lack of cars in Ashland, those hippies love their SUVs, overpriced hybrids, and luxury German autos. Perfect for the quick getaway from SF. Would take a whole day on the smelly, inconvenient, slow-ass train.

"What Jackson County needs are GOOD LIBRARIES."

Your lips to God's ears, as they say.Problem is, a few years ago the nice people decided every little town should have its own library, so they built about a dozen of them in a couple of years. And then "discovered" what had been known all along, which was that there was no money to operate them. So instead of a couple of libraries with normal hours, they ended up with a dozen or more open a few hours a week and staffed with custodians instead of librarians.

So now Jackson County has, for most intents and purposes, no, or pitifully few & weak, libraries. There's a moral in here and it isn't hard to find.