Alternative Transportation in Salem

A proposal for parking at Willamette University

Alternate modes:

• Walk
• Bicycle
• Public Transit
• Mixed-modes (bus and bike, bus and walk, car and bike, car and walk, car and bus)
• Carpool

Individual advantages to leaving the car at home:

• No parking troubles.
• You can save some significant money on auto purchase, wear-and-tear, and insurance.
• Even only modest but regular walking and bicycling can make major improvements in your health.
• Learn how the rest of the world (besides the United States) lives.  It can be liberating.

Global and community advantages to leaving the car at home:

• The automobile is a major source of air pollution and resource depletion, possibly the greatest single source in the U.S.  Leaving it at home can make significant contributions.
• Responsible use of limited resources (oil, land for street widening and parking, production capacity of industrial nations).
• Congestion reduction in our cities.
• Reducing what has become literal slavery to our automobiles.  If that sounds corny, think back to the anxiety you felt the last time you couldn't find a place to park that car.  You can be free of the two-ton ball and chain. How many hours per year are you working just to pay for automobile-related expense?
• In the U.S., our entire culture revolves, increasingly, around the automobile, but it was not always so.  One need go back only 50-60 years to find a very different attitude about transportation.  Here are some things we sacrifice at the altar of the automobile:
• Safe streets for our children to walk along and across.
• Massive amounts of productive land used for parking.
• Greenery paved over until we completely loose contact with any real sense of the earth.
• Not to mention thousands upon thousands of lives lost annually in this country in traffic accidents.

Who wrote this stuff, anyway?

: mjanebawillamette.edu