Indeed, the real problem with anarchist societies is that they don’t scale up well.
It’s one thing to live with a few dozen people in a hippie commune out in the hills somewhere, it’s quite another to manage infrastructure on a scale big enough to provide services for a city the size of Portland.
So, with that logic, if you owned a house and someone didn’t like the way your siding looked, you would be okay with them tearing it off and haphazardly doing whatever siding they wanted?
We don’t own the streets, the governments do, and they are supposed to fix them because they can do it properly. Without training, someone could easily do more damage than good.
The only thing I can think of is liability to the public on city property. For example, If the sidewalk in Chicago is covered in snow, you are required to shovel it, either at home or at work. If you don’t and someone falls on it, they can sue you, not the city, though it’s city owned and maintained.
I’m all for volunteers doing great things but I’d rather not having them do things that they’re not qualified for that support infrastructure. Someone could easily put a bit of concrete down improperly, have it not seal or adhere correct and then create a larger pothole. It would be different if it was a dirt road in Montana, and all you had to do is shovel another bit of dirt on it.
This whole “pot hole” thing is really whipping folks into a froth. By golly…
Oh god, the unpaved streets here. They don’t even come through with rocks and dirt to fill stuff in. At least the asphalt limits the size of the potholes to huge. There are holes in some of the dirt side streets you could loose an Irish wolfhound in. And the fact that something like one in three drivers put chains or studded tires on in winter despite never driving outside the city limits… flames… the side of my face…
A friend once complained about the roads and actually had someone in the mayor’s office tell him the poor maintenance was an intentional feature to discourage driving and encourage other modes of transportation.
I live in Portland. The roads have been seriously jacked up since the ice storms we had back in 2016.
There are bridges - like the I 405 Fremont bridge - where the is rebar sticking out of the pavement. There are huge grooves that have been carved into the interstate from tire chains on all of the semis.
My wife used to work for ODOT. The City of Portland’s attitude toward improving roads is basically to do nothing in hope that less people will drive. But as more and more people move here, it is only taking more of a toll on the roads.
Portland is racist and classist as hell. Of course the white, well to do neighborhoods don’t need to limit their driving, but the northbynorthwest neighborhoods get hairshirted to make up for it. Living here is a good reminder of what was wrong with “the good old days”…
Don’t worry. PDX just lowered the residential speed limit to 20 MPH, so they can spend all that inevitable ticket money on repairing the streets, right?
What?! Shouldn’t anarchists being tearing the streets up?
It’s sort of like the passive-aggressive office worker who washes your dishes and then posts a note about.
Reminds me of the crappy stairs that guy built in Toronto
Ok, all that said. I would get kick out of doing this myself. I think as citizens we do have some right to change the public built-environment we are often forced to deal with.
You haven’t heard? We smash up businesses on the vanguard of gentrification now, i.e. local yuppie scum.
Tell it to Barcelona, they’ll be surprised.
I think that if citizens who are qualified to do the work want to volunteer their time and skills to get work done quickly, for cheap or free, they should be able to do so as long as everything is done to some standard
The problem with those stairs is that stairs are fairly hazardous, so an incorrectly built stair is a lot worse than no stair: it will tempt the unstable to use it, then betray them. Those stairs in particular are built such that they are likely to fail in ways that will make someone fall (because of how they are cantilevered).
I’m dubious that a bad asphalt patch for a pothole can do much other than fail again very quickly, and maybe make it a tiny bit harder to repair properly. Not much harder - I believe - because proper repair means cutting back the crumbling edges of the hole to get a strong surface anyway, which means you have the jackhammer out anyway. So this patching might be considerably more useless than it appears, but its not likely to be worse than the hole.
I suppose the worst case for a bad pothole repair is probably that the bad repair fails to fix, or exacerbates an erosion problem and a sinkhole forms under the road which can fail more dangerously.
Well In Portland you pay no sales tax, right?
Chicago has very good snow clearing because it snows there quite reliably and does not melt for a long time. I lived there recently and it was quite something how Chicago transforms into its snow form to do battle with winter. It would be a huge waste of money for Portland to do the same. It snows, what, a few days a year maybe? And almost always melts by the next day (usually by lunchtime)?
Yeah, this city is a masterclass in how a privileged group can use government and entrenched power structures to maintain privilege while hiding their complicity from themselves. Lots of people here talk a great line, but when the rubber meets the road? Nope…
(I type furiously while looking out the 9th floor window of a Pearl District office building…)
Yeah, I drove by some of these people on the way to the franchulate.
Portland is absolutely horrible at road maintenance. We have twenty years of “deferred maintenance” where the money was siphoned off into everything from art projects downtown to filling holes in the budget made by investing public employee pensions in Enron.
Though there’s sales tax combined with income tax here in Chicago, Living in Portland was more expensive. Rent was higher, grocery costs higher and income tax was higher. The only thing cheaper in Portland is cigarettes.
In early 2017, it snowed in Portland. The news had said it was the most snow(at once)they’ve had in 80 years(15 inches). Nobody could drive safely and the plows they had created those ice sheets. It was still very icy almost three weeks later. People abandoned their cars places, grocery stores were getting low on everything and nobody wanted to go to work. I just rode my bike around and had fun. The first day that it had snowed, I think there were around 10 people in the office, out of 100.
'Strewth! And so am just gonna repost my response then:
To be fair, the Portland Board of Transportation responds to pothole complaints in minutes. I reported four potholes last week, and left home, only to see a utility vehicle performing measurements on one less than an hour later. Three of the potholes were patched within a few hours, and the fourth, was not, but is an actual sinkhole, so the repair required is more than simply filling with asphalt, and I know it’s on their agenda.
Portland has literally responded within minutes of me making a request to fill potholes. Are you just whinging, or are you actually contacting the DOT to put in a request?
