Abusing the corpse


I see that the car-haters of Portland City Hall are at it again. The way they're going to bring back the city's dead downtown is to make it more expensive to park a car there. Such a great idea!

And interestingly, they're taking the gloves off in explaining the reason why. It's not just about saving the planet. It's also because people who make enough money to own a car should be cut down to size:

During a city council meeting on PBOT funding last week, Oregon Environmental Council’s transportation director Sara Wright noted that a transportation system that invests in areas for cars, like highways and cheap parking spaces, is only prioritizing people who have the ability to own and drive a car. That leaves out Portlanders who are unable to obtain a license due to physical ability or age and people who can’t afford the average $10,000 a year it costs to purchase, maintain, insure, and fuel a car.

“This prioritization means that the benefits of the system—access to jobs, education services, and community—are not available to people who don’t meet that description,” Wright said. “This is particularly egregious given that the burdens of the system—air toxics, noise pollution, traffic violence, the loss of so much public space to car movement and storage, and the effects of climate change—are experienced more intensely by the same people who are less able to take advantage of the benefits. This rate raise will allow Portland to invest a little more in the people who are most heavily burdened and the least benefited by the status quo.”

Ah yes, as I've said for years, if you are successful, have a job, have a family, and drive a car, Portland wants you out. If you stay here, you must suffer like the less fortunate do. 

The right thing for City Hall to do at this point is make parking free downtown for at least a year. But they will do exactly the opposite, of course. And so off to the malls of Washington and Clackamas Counties we go, where parking is free and there might even be a security guard to keep an eye on things.

Comments

  1. We should have people that hate families run our family services departments- oh wait that is already the case. We're screwed. The talking-point word salad insane asylum is in full control.

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  2. Let me try to understand this. Paying a few dollars at a parking meter in downtown is unacceptable, but paying for wear and tear on your car to drive to Clackamas Town Center is just fine. In fact, it’s invisible, isn’t it? It just shows up buried in the cost of maintenance, new tires and so on. Plus by going to the burbs, you have the pleasure of dining at a mall food court, patronizing a chain “restaurant”, instead of eating at an independently owned restaurant in downtown.

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  3. Are these the same parking meters that got a crooked city employee fired a decade ago???

    ReplyDelete

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