SE 2nd & Caruthers street mural

Next up is another of the city's four(?) new-ish Green Loop murals, this time on the eastside where SE Caruthers deadends west of 2nd Ave., between the Portland Opera building and the docks for the Portland Spirit fleet, hence the musical theme on this one. This is a quiet dead-end street for cars, but as a bike route it's a major intersection between the Springwater Trail, the Tilikum Bridge, the Eastbank Esplanade, people headed to or from OMSI & the Hawthorne Bridge, and I guess now for people doing the Green Loop thing too. Meaning if you're a mere pedestrian and you're here taking photos of the mural, you really need to watch out for traffic and not just stand in the street like a drunk Tour de France spectator.

Unlike the two westside plazas, I don't think this one was meant to host food trucks even seasonally. But given the level of bike traffic through here, it might be a good site for a super-genius idea I had a while back. So here's the startup pitch: If you're commuting by bike and are hungry on the go, right now you need to stop somewhere, get off the bike, and order something, and wait. Meanwhile SUV Steve, your office archnemesis, can just roll through the nearest drive-thru. (Which means SUV Steve consistently gets to the office before you, lands that big promotion, and gets an even bigger SUV, destroying the world even faster, just to be clear on what's at stake here.) The pro cycling world has solved this problem already: Riders roll through a feed zone partway through the race, grab a musette bag from a team soigneur, and continue on their way without stopping or even slowing down very much. Imagine that crossed with a Portland food cart: You'd order and pay through the app ahead of time, and give a rough ETA for when you might be there, and then just roll through and snag your breakfast burrito and keep going, and be at work on time for that one crucial meeting. There'd be an RFID tag scheme or something along those lines to match the right bag to the correct rider, and a newbie lane for people who aren't good at the bag-grabbing part of the arrangement, and some way for people to return the reusable bags, and a really solid EULA so nobody can sue you if they crash after a bungled handoff or something. But overall I think this could totally work, given the right location, at least on a seasonal basis.

The reason I'm telling you all of this instead of pitching it to VCs is that I don't actually want to be in the food service business again, personally, and especially not in a way that involves getting up at zero-dark-thirty to make the breakfast burritos. Don't want to deal with Portland customers again, or constantly hiring and training new food-cart soigneurs (who are bound to get sick of being rained on before long). And before any of that, navigating the city's kafkaesque permit system. And at some point doing a few weeks of crisis PR when it turns out some of your customers are egregious litterbugs. So if any of that sounds more appealing to you than it does to me, feel free to go ahead and have at it, be my guest, and remember that I have absolutely zero liability if things don't work out in practice.