Comments on: AskPablo: Commuting

By: fiona

fiona — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:02:37 +0000

Check out worldcarfree.net. Presenters at this years conference have some good ideas about how to solve some of the problems presented in your blog post. I believe parts of the conference will be podcast. Also, there is a company in Portland offering more “luxurious” rides to and from work. Companies like theirs can help change the way people think about commuting. http://www.ecoshuttle.net

By: Gwen

Gwen — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:41:43 +0000

Too lazy to park the car? How about too lazy to bike or walk? Check out the Walk-a-bility site and see where you stand. It's awesome. http://www.walkscore.com/

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:31:11 +0000

Road bottlenecks are one thing, but what about those drive-thru lanes at fast food joints, pharmacies, banks and dry cleaners? Has anyone evaluated how much crap is dumped into the atmosphere because we’re too lazy to park the car and walk inside? I often park my car, walk inside and find it actually takes less time than waiting in the drive-thru lane.

By: Nick Karno

Nick Karno — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:40:24 +0000

The answer is telecommuting. Rather than carpool lanes or widening freeways, let’s just get people off the roads. A LOT of people just drive to an office and sit in front of their computer all day (I’m a lawyer, and 9 days out of 10 I really don’t need to physically be in the office). The technology is already in place, but people can’t wrap their minds around it yet. Still, I think it’s our only solution for this problem – public transportation can only do so much. If a worker HAS to have an office, there are also work centers where people can use rented offices that are close to home and telecommute with other people in their office. It doesn’t have to be from home, but the tax write-off would be nice.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:58:28 +0000

Nice post – I’ve always thought that adding highway lanes to solve traffic problems was sort of like loosening your belt to solve obesity. Still, in some cases, it’s a good idea.
The worse problem is that it’s not just the mass transit/bikes/etc that need to be improved, but entire neighborhoods. Most new neighborhoods have been built in such a way that even if there were mass transit, you couldn’t get to it without driving. So we could spend zillions on fancy rail projects and no one would use them even if they wanted to… Only by rezoning development to require walk-a-bility and the ability to walk to transit will there be enough options for people to avoid this kind of problem.