Designated Driver The value of the UO's DDS program BY TRAVIS ALLAN EDWARDS I am a driver for the UO Designated Driver Shuttle. In just one year on the job I have been stolen from and physically assaulted. I've seen a van vandalized and another hit by a car. I've broken up multiple fights and cleaned up unpleasant amounts of bodily fluids, but most importantly, I've prevented countless people from driving an automobile while under the influence. And we're open seven nights a week. We have recently, for reasons unknown to us, come under attack by fellow students, being accused of not doing our job properly. Vague articles were written for The Daily Emerald with unclear accusations, giving our riders the false impression that our employees have been driving while intoxicated. Two of our employees did drink alcohol on one occasion while secluded in our office, but they never got behind the wheel of, or set foot in, a DDS van that night. The necessary actions were taken to resolve that one isolated incident. However, because of the accusations leveled against us, we are still asked on a nightly basis why our employees are driving drunk, which never happened to begin with. As a program funded by the UO, we give rides to at least 200 university students on an average weekend night. We are frequently so busy on weekends that we have four to five vans working simultaneously to handle the high demand for our service. These seats are filled with students who are under the influence and are unable to drive, or simply students who are looking for a safe ride home to seemingly all corners of Eugene and Springfield. After the first article was written, almost all of our passengers were under the impression that our employees were driving under the influence. I do not see why this one event which only involved two employees should have such an impact on DDS as a whole. There is no reason for our riders to ever feel unsafe when riding in our vans. The articles written about us depict us as an unorganized group of people who have no passion for our jobs, but these assumptions are based on the few conflicts we have encountered this year. They overlook all the positive contributions our program offers. While we have had tough issues that have been dealt with, we still continue to offer a rare and widely used service to university students by preventing as many people as possible from getting behind the wheel while intoxicated. DDS has five operational vans, which are used every week. And with about 20,000 students at the university, the vans are (not surprisingly) used to capacity almost every night of the week. However, with students living in every pocket of Eugene and Springfield, having five vans running around is not always enough to get everybody safely home quickly. We are forced to periodically turn off our phones so that wait times do not amount to several hours. This action has been depicted as negligence. But we can only take so many calls. On weekend nights it is common for us to work far past the end of our shift, sometimes keeping us out past 4 am. We have hit our share of snags and complications, but I do not see why these small and infrequent occurrences should be used to make generalized assumptions about our service. Regardless of what both the past and future hold for DDS, we will continue to try our hardest to provide the community a valuable service by providing students an alternative to driving intoxicated, and a safe ride home. Travis Allan Edwards is a driver for the UO Designated Driver Shuttle, phone 346-RIDE.     Emerald Canal Diary Still dreaming of a blue-green park strip BY JERRY DIETHELM Dear diary: People have been asking me of late if it isn't time we thought again about building the Emerald Canal. I usually respond with a "Don't hold your breath unless you can hold it for years," or some such, but they are persisting. Isn't the time ripe now for the renewal of the West University Neighborhood? Wouldn't the canal be an excellent way to promote new higher density housing in the area along a blue/green park strip extending from the current end of the Millrace to Amazon Creek? Wouldn't it be terrific to be able to connect up our riverfront bikeways and walkways south through town to the Amazon corridor and all the way to Fern Ridge? Must be something in the air. The prospect of downtown renewal has everybody giddy. And then they ask the usual questions and I trot out some of the old patter. It would be around 11 or 12 blocks long somewhere in the Oak-Pearl zone; yes, there have been a number of possible routes looked at, the idea being to minimize impact and promote desirable development; no, no final route was ever selected. Yes, it would require some up-to-date planning. Yes, there were two large, elaborate models built and shown around town, showing what it might be like that generated a lot of support. Did they know, I've had fun asking, that George Washington had proposed a 3,000-mile canal, linking both sides of our country? I show them my slide of his scheme. Ah, now that's visionary! I'd say. I'm only talking 11 blocks! And how do you get water to run uphill? Actually, the end of the Millrace is higher than the Amazon at 17th by about 10 feet and so the water would run downhill. What did the Emerald Canal have to do with flood control? Wasn't that an important way of paying for it? Yes, according to Corps of Engineers studies, the Amazon basin will back up with water under a 100-year flood, because the water can't get out to the west fast enough. Today under the right conditions it would flood a large area of the central city, just like old times before the 1950s concrete ditch that Congressman Charlie Porter helped fund. Urbanization in the south hills has meant more and more runoff, and so the situation continues to get worse. Enter the reversible Emerald Canal to carry the excess water through the city to the river with its infinitely greater capacity to absorb runoff. Garrett Rosenthal, then with LCOG, did the original calculations and the corps confirmed them. The rising head of water in the Amazon could reverse the flow and send the floodwaters north to the Willamette, and it would be cheaper to make a canal than build upstream dams on Coyote Creek south of Fern Ridge. Getting the water from the end of the present Millrace to the river, however, was the big problem. Returning the Millrace to the river wasn't just good downtown development, the city remembering itself, the undoing of past errors, green urban watershed planning or aesthetic delight. It was to be a way to drain the city when the big need came. And this was before we began to experience some of the changing weather patterns of recent years. But the Mama Gloria episode is still my favorite. How close we all came to starting renewal in the West University area just seven years ago!     Diane and I had just come back from two months in Italy and my old co-conspirator, Charlie Porter, told me he had someone he wanted me to meet, a wealthy widow just recently returned from years of living in Germany, who was looking for a local water-related project to invest in. Oh sure, I thought. But Gloria Teichert turned out to be real. Her German husband had made his fortune as an interior designer, some said working for the Chicago mob in earlier years, but I never believed that part of the story. She had been instrumental in convincing the German government to fund water projects on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa that would bring some of the snow pack to villages on the plains below. The very grateful Africans named her Mama Gloria. So, I gave her the Emerald Waterways show in the house she'd moved into here in town, surrounded by all the valuable paintings and artifacts she'd brought back from her castle home. She was enthusiastic and had me take her on a tour of the West University neighborhood in her chauffeured Lincoln. The area needed a good makeover, she pronounced, and she could afford to buy a good piece of it. Next she picked out a storefront she wanted to rent on West Broadway (where DIVA is today) where we would build and show the new model of the Emerald Canal. Charlie, Jerry Rust and I took Gloria to meet with Paul Farmer, our then planning and development director, who was new in town and hadn't yet heard the saga of the Emerald Canal. After another version of the show, he asked in all seriousness, "Why haven't we done this?" Good question, I responded. Timing, the times, the cost, the cycles of the Oregon economy, the complexity of the project But both Gloria and her brother became ill, he quite seriously, and they decided to move to Canada, where she is no doubt still today applying her sharp mind, imagination and wealth to some vast project. I like to think of Mama Gloria up there in the north arranging for the digging of an inland passage called The Maple Leaf Canal. Jerry Diethelm us a Eugene architect and landscape architect, planning and urban design consultant, and professor emeritus of landscape architecture at UO.
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