Day: September 22, 2020

Standing in Line for Ikea.

I drove to Ikea last week, but they were closed due to smoke. (That smoke was intense.) As you can see, the smoke has cleared, so now it was time to take part in another 2020 thing: standing in line to go into a store.

Kind of like waiting in line for a roller coaster, but with more space and no discombobulation due to testing physics. Ikea had a clearly marked path to get into their building. I made four turns while making my way through the line. Luckily Ikea is a big enough store that the line moved at a steady clip.

This is Becoming Increasingly Rare

This street, at least on its south side, doesn’t have cars parked on the street.

I think this has to do with every house having a driveway, and every house being a single-family dwelling. Once multi-family dwellings appear, street parking picks up, since builders aren’t required to include parking.

This is a pretty wide street, but a lot of Portland side streets (this is especially true in a lot of southeast neighborhoods) feel unsafe to drive on when cars are parked bumper to bumper on both sides. It’s not unusual for a car driving down the street to pull over to let an oncoming car pass them.

I’d like to see the Portland City Council get on top of this, but they aren’t likely to. Fixing things would be a pain, and the fact that we have city-wide representation, rather than districts means that people can’t really band together in an area with unsafe parking situation and demand their representative do stuff about it.

Someday we’re going to revamp our city’s governing system. And then we can actually start being the city that works.