Steve Pomerance

In December I wrote about the Boulder City Council’s need to determine how they intend to fund the massive transportation needs that will be created by the 60,000 more jobs and thousands of new residents expected under “reasonable” build-out of the city. Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a PLAN-Boulder panel discussing the city’s proposed Transportation Maintenance Fee, a stopgap measure to make up for deficits in funding road maintenance and paying for increased transit. My fundamental issue with the TMF is that it provides no incentive for people to reduce their auto trips: The TMF charges properties based on statistical averages rather than charging real drivers for actual behavior. The city has expressly decided to avoid creating any incentive with this charge, even though they know that incentives work — in downtown Boulder parking is costly, so people have shifted away from single-occupant-vehicle use. I have been involved with local politics long enough to kno...

I just returned from a great trip to Ecuador. I have never been there before, although I’ve traveled elsewhere in South America, including multiple trips to Peru (starting with the Peace Corps) and to Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia. Ecuador is a wonderful place to visit. The people, scenery, and accommodations are terrific, and the country, at least from a traveler’s perspective, is well-managed and easy to deal with. And I have to say that the quality of the meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables, fruit and baked goods was superb — I looked forward to every meal. The big event of the trip was a climb of Cotopaxi, a 19,347-foot volcano. My wife and I, with the assistance of a guide (mandatory allegedly) started at 1 a.m., after a sleepless night in a crowded refuge at just under 16,000 feet. After six-plus hours of mostly headlamp climbing (which produces its own version of motion sickness) using crampons up a glacier and through an icefall, we popped out on the sunlight summit to supe...