Personal Rapid Transit

The City of Portland today is beginning to discuss the implementation of their Personal Rapid Transit system. Wow! What an exciting project. The benefits are going to be huge and it's gonna take many blog posts to fully discuss them. But for now, I'm just excited about this beginning.

Check out this URL for information about what a Personal Rapid Transit system is: http://www.superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/254

It's gonna be hard to boot-strap in this system, but once it's in place we're not gonna know how we lived without it! Especially with all the new people. Our Transit system is good but not "millions of new people" good. Traffic delays have already reached historic highs ... daily.

But with the benefit of being able to reduce the amount of land dedicated to transportation we're gonna have more urban gardening acreage than we know what to do with. Another big space-saver are going to be the storage warehouses allowing people to shift to smaller, denser residences but still have access to large volumes of safe, private storage. More on this later.

Alright, I'm off to the public feedback hearing. I hope to see some of you there.

Crowded

Today I'm working to help a friend move his ailing and elderly mother from one home to the next. With the increasing elderly population, the institutions equipped to provide care for the elderly are starting to raise their prices and hoard their medical and personnel resources. People like my friend are feeling the hurt because they are being priced out of the system, and too few new care centers are being established.

Of course moving out of one center is one thing ... moving INTO a new one is even worse. The centers are all in lock-down and just to get into the building requires a battery of medical tests to ensure you're not bringing ReDS in with you. It makes sense, no institution wants all of its residents wiped out ... but where are we to go? There are folks who have been in Portland all their lives and yet are Exiles in their own town, now.

Incoming!

I know that once the polycentric movement gets its act together things wont be so busy around here any more. But damn! Bootstrapping it into existence is hard work!

Portland has always been a fragmented place, and in a sense that's going to work to our advantage here in becoming an integrated whole. Does that sound odd? Maybe you need to get up to speed with polycentric thought.

With all the new people and their diverse relationships with one another, the community court system and planning bureaus have joined together to start setting up autonomous self-mediating circles among the citizenry. No longer do we look to the State of Oregon or the Feds to help us solve our problems (or at least not as much!)

These circles are responsible for setting up and handling disputes, sometimes outsourcing to other organizations they trust. To give an example, if two people are a member of a church, and there is some issue of dispute or conflict resolution that needs to happen, it's delegated to that organization to manage it between those people, without having the dispute handed up the ladder of authority to institutions more and more out of touch with the people involved and their unique situations.

The circle that handles any given dispute is usually the smallest circle that contains both parties in the dispute, so, sometimes that circle is defined by family or faith and sometimes it is defined by geography or employment.

The practical upshot is that people have most of their issues dealt with quickly, in a forum they're comfortable with, without putting a burden on the rest of society. When it works, its a beautiful thing.

But that's why I've been so busy! It's such a new expectation that many groups do not have the resources to mediate disputes. So I've been doing a lot of consulting and trainings around town. Oh, and don't even get me started on the militias ...

Home sweet home.

It's nice to be able to reach out again. We just got the internet back online and I've felt like starting fresh with a lot of things including my blog so I'll be posting here from now on ...

Lots to do. Damn, and we thought a lot of people wanted to move to Portland before. It's getting crazy now and I'm running around like mad facilitating meetings between groups I've never even heard of before. More on that later.

Bella is doing well. This season she'll be working on her thesis garden for the local Human University. I'm proud of her. 12 years old and making me look like a lazy slacker. Whew!

By the way, how are all of you?