We hate traffic more than we value sleep.

On Thursday night this last week, I had to drive into Tigard and Beaverton (two cities on Portland's west side) during the night time. I was amazed to see that a major construction project on Oleson Rd. was running during the night!

Oleson Rd. is a very valuable connector in the hilly southwest part of the metro area. It has been undergoing a redesign and repaving project for what seems like forever. But it runs almost 100% through residential neighborhoods. There is almost zero non-residential property actually on Oleson.

But Sunday through Thursday nights, they are working through the nights on the road. With bright lights and loud equipment. Many, probably hundreds, of homes are within mere feet of the road construction. As they widened the road, the yards of these homes shrunk considerably. Lots of the homes are now within one dog-leash of the new sidewalks. And there are significantly more homes in close proximity.

So apparently those communities would rather not sleep - than have extra road construction delays during the day.

Tell me that the car is not king...

If they tried to do a 24hour a day road construction project next to my house, I think I would polish up on my Edward Abbey reading...

Comments

Why shooting should be banned on public lands:

I don't need to say too much. The pictures speak for themselves. These pictures were taken at ONE spot on NF-45 forest road in Mt. Hood National Forest. The road is also known as "Memaloose" or "Maymaloose" road depending on which sign and map you read. It is maybe 50 miles outside of Portland, southeast on Hwy 224 - along the Clackamas river. The country up there is some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. The ridge lines, and the deep jagged canyon from millions of years of raging water in the Clackamas river are something wonderful to behold. Driving up this road, we passed at least 5 spots that seemed to be popular with shooters, before we turned around. The road is a steep one lane paved road, and our GPS said we went from 700ft. at the river to 3000ft. almost instantaneously. At some points there are steep 1000 foot drops on either side of the road. It is breathtaking. Until you come across the shooting sites, which make you nauseous. I

Free Topographical Maps

The Libre Maps project has purchased and made available for free all of the USGS Topographical maps of the USA. All 50 states. The maps have always been free sort-of, there was just no where until now to actually GET them for free. The Libre Maps project raised enough funds to buy the many gigabytes of data and the Internet Archive is hosting them. These are great 24k scale topographical maps folks. The same types you pay for in sporting goods stores. And many applications on your computers can work directly with them and your GPS. You can get water and tear resistant paper and print them out.. All good stuff... For the lazy in the audience, here are Oregon's.

Not safer, just stupider.

The first definition of stupider is "Slow to learn or understand; obtuse." I think that there would be good cause to add to it "See American". Today, while passing through the security checkpoint at Portland International (PDX) I witnessed the TSA personnel sending people to the back of the line for not taking off their flip-flops. They shouted endlessly about removing liquids, regardless of size. And they generally treat every one of us like we were infants incapable of understanding simple instructions. But perhaps they might be on to something.

Incursio

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