“If we’re 100 years into the automobile era, it seems pretty inconceivable that the car as we know it is going to be around for another 100 years. …
“There’s not going to be a cataclysmic moment,” Cohen says of what’s coming for the car. “Like any other technology that outlives its usefulness, it just sort of disappears into the background and we slowly forget about it.
The landline telephone is undergoing that process right now. Your grandmother probably still has one. But did you even bother to call the phone company the last time you moved into a new home? “It’s not as if we all wake up one morning and decide we’re going to get rid of our landlines,” Cohen says, “but they just kind of decay away.
– What the Steamship and the Landline Can Tell Us About the Decline of the Private Car
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Urban commercial real estate has always been a rough-and-tumble scrum, and now Amazon.com has torn up the playbook. Across the country, many brick-and-mortar retailers are in big trouble.
But there’s an opening in this bad news that you can ride a bike through.
Bikes, it turns out, seem to be a perfect way to get people to the few retail categories that are thriving in the age of mail-order everything: bars, restaurants and personal services. And in Portland, where an early investment in basic bikeways has made bikes a popular way to run errands, retailers are responding by snapping up strorefronts with good bike exposure.
“All the bike traffic is part of the reason I chose the place, and I am definitely paying a premium for this spot,” said Shana Lane-Block, whose 30-seat farm-to-table cafe and bakery Compote opened in 2011 on Portland’s Clinton Street bike boulevard. “In the nice weather, it is astonishing to me how many bicycles go by.”
– Portland retailers swoop into storefronts along bikeways
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