Bill Lascher 3/28/14 Bill Lascher 3/28/14

Transit Modality Decision Overload - Picture of the Day

A plethora of transit options at the South Waterfront campus of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland.

Bill Lascher 8/8/12 Bill Lascher 8/8/12

Introducing the Thinkingest Podcast

Bill Lascher 9/23/11 Bill Lascher 9/23/11

Along for the Ride: Streetcar Music Festival

Guitars, cellos, saxophones, toy pianos and more, the Streetcar Mobile Music Fest featured musicians performing aboard various streetcars throughout the night. Click the link to listen to and see what it was like when I went along for the ride.

Bill Lascher 9/16/11 Bill Lascher 9/16/11

Along for the Ride: Max Blue Line 1 -- Hillsboro

This week's installment of Along for the Ride, my series of weekly chronicles of Portland, OR-area transit lines. is an audio postcard from a rush hour trip aboard the MAX Blue Line to Hillsboro. In a future edition, I'll explore the rest of the line, from Downtown Portland, East to Gresham.

Bill Lascher 8/26/11 Bill Lascher 8/26/11

Along for the Ride: Island Time Aboard the 85

Bill Lascher 8/19/11 Bill Lascher 8/19/11

Along for the Ride: Going Live on the 75

Bill Lascher 7/6/11 Bill Lascher 7/6/11

New rankings beg question: what makes Portland sustainable?

Can our ability to live healthily, prosperously and durably over multiple generations (my rough definition of sustainability) be gauged by simply totaling up new construction and how many gizmos it features, dollars spent, and the new kilowatt-hour reducing technology we build? Or should our analysis be a little more complex? Should we explore our actual behaviors, i.e., the actual effectiveness of the programs we incent, the way our buildings - LEED or not - get used and the type of demands we place on our power grid? Wouldn't that be the real measure of sustainability?

My un-scientific, un-journalistic assumption is that Portland would probably end up pretty far ahead on that sort of scale as well, but we -- everyone, but particularly journalists reporting on the environment -- might be well served by asking these sort of questions.

Bill Lascher 11/3/10 Bill Lascher 11/3/10

Where should green planning efforts come from?

Hundreds of urban planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs and policymakers danced around this question last week as they convened on Portland for the second annual Ecodistricts Summit.

Hosted by the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), the event complements a maturing experiment to make five of the Oregon metropolis's neighborhoods into "Ecodistricts," neighborhoods designed to be more sustainable.

Bill Lascher 5/1/10 Bill Lascher 5/1/10

Ducking the Elephant in the Room

The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then, so is the MAX, but you don't mind. You've been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Bill Lascher 11/25/09 Bill Lascher 11/25/09

Making the most of making the media

For all the critiques I have of the W e Make the Media Conference at the University of Oregon's Turnbull Portland Center in November, 2009,and all the many more already so eloquently articulated by other thinkers (Click here for a list of the reflections I've found, some of which I'm responding to here), I'm stunned by how, a few days later, I remain invigorated by the event. Like Abraham Hyatt and many others, I left the event quite drained, but now feel energized. Though the event may not have gone in the direction organizers hoped, perhaps it was a success anyhow.