Pedalpalooza is over in Portland for the year. All the corking and fire and mayhem and drinking camaraderie was as enjoyable as ever. It’s always a bit disheartening when Pedalpalooza ends, largely because you don’t want the fun to stop. The other downside is returning to the drudgery of common life and the realizations that the globe is still warming, we’re still at war with, like, five different nations, wildfires are killing people, the list goes on. In reviewing recent local and national events, however, there are several cycling stories worth sharing that ought to mitigate your post-Pedalpalooza blues.
The first is that the Columbia River Crossing freeway mega-expansion is *drumroll*….FINALLY DEAD!! The $4.2 billion dollar lumbering zombie-in-a-coma nightmare came at long last to a sudden and deserving death on the second to last day of June, 2013 after the Washington state senate refused to waste any more money on the thing. My complete take on hearing this news was published on Mismanaging Perception.
It’s been thoroughly satisfying to read the sore-loser ramblings of CRC backers who just can’t seem to understand what went wrong. It should be perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention that everything went wrong with this project. Economist and bike commuter Joe Cortright summed it up well, “The CRC was the last gasp of the highway-building dinosaur. They had this world view that car traffic was going to increase every single year without limit.” It’s worth remembering that this utter mistake of a project was pushed full force by Oregon Democrats like state rep. Jules Bailey, whom the OLCV absurdly claim as one of their “environmental champions“.
