I believe the city of Irvine sweeps the paths often. Nothing stays clean like that without maintainance. There were no pebbles, broken glass, leaves, branches, nothing of the sort. I was really impressed.

Functionally, we get far less than 2% of the local transportation dollars when you subtract the millions spent on worthless bike paths to nowhere like the new path over I-5 to the mall. This year the city manager cut all funding for bike path maintenance while finding funds to repave roads that see zero bike traffic. Also, we don't have MUPs in OR. Our bike paths are defined in the vehicle code as roads, making them roads without sidewalks where the peds have no right-of-way. That doesn't stop folks from driving to them to do critical masses.

Your bridge link didn't point out that the reason the I-5 bridge was being replaced was to avoid weight restrictions of 80,000 lbs (the limit in something like 47 states). To maintain the insane 105,500 lb weight limit ODOT will build three bridges and tear down three bridges. It is just insane.

As far as progressive/liberal, I just don't see it. We have a small core of progressives but they are grossly outnumbered by the *********s and their ilk. Even our so-called left wing here is incredibly undereducated and mostly believe in magic.