A couple of post-worthy links

Well, I promise at least one of these links is post-worthy: The City of Portland's Principal Planner, Steve Dotterrer has put together a fantastic presentation on Portland's transportation history. Through much labor, I embedded Dotterrer's audio to each corresponding slide. The audio is pretty good, but you'll most likely need to download the pdf's to listen. Luckily, its free (thanks City of Portland!) and well worth a listen. The presentation is broken down into seven files for size's sake.

The other link is to a review I wrote of Jeff Mapes' book Pedaling Revolution for the Winter 2009 Oregon Historical Quarterly. Yes, I am a year late in telling my legion of loyal readers about it. I apologize to all four of you.

4 comments:

Max said...

Apology accepted. ;-)

Rota Fortunae said...

Firefox kept choking on the audio, so I'm sorry I wasn't able to listen to it. But apart from one color slide that showed a bicycle, there didn't appear to be a discussion of the ways bicycling was a robust part of the transportation system circa 1900, nor anything about Portland's early bike paths. Did Steve discuss this?

Scott Cohen said...

Someone asked that question during the presentation. Steve basically said that bicycling didn't really impact the development of the city or land use the way the river, streetcars, or the automobile did

Rota Fortunae said...

Ah, well, that's basically true. Compared to the river, streetcar, and autos, bikes didn't impact very much the city development or land use. Still, I'm inclined to think it deserves more mention - at least for a while, significant numbers of people biked. Readers might be interested in a new note on women bicyclists between 1895 and 1912.

Thanks for posting links to the slide deck!