Summary of this Issue

Portland's program consists of five basic parts:

1. Metro, a regional planning agency that can dictate zoning and transportation planning to three counties and twenty-four cities;
2. An urban-growth boundary that aims to minimize sprawl;
3. A rail-transit system that may eventually include 90 to 150 miles of routes radiating in six or more spokes from the city center;
4. A fifty-year plan that aims to absorb new residents with minimal expansion of the urban-growth boundary by encouraging, subsidizing, or even mandating increased housing densities, particularly along the light-rail corridors; and
5. New-Urban design of new developments and redesign of existing neighborhoods to make them transit- and pedestrian friendly so residents will minimize auto use.

• The light-rail system will consume the vast majority of the region's transportation funds, yet it will carry few commuters and actually increase congestion.
• The coercive programs of densification and neighborhood redesign will encounter fierce resistance from residents--resistance that is just becoming visible as people begin to learn what the plan means to them.
• Coercive elements of the plan are also likely to have unintended consequences, such as development "leapfrogging" beyond Metro's jurisdiction.
• Even if light rail's cost were lower and neighborhood densification were politically acceptable, according to Metro's own numbers the strategy will still fail in its aim of reducing congestion and preserving a small-town atmosphere.

• The Portland that Metro is planning for 2040 will increase its population density from less than 3,000 people per square mile to 5,000 people per square mile--equaling today's New York urban area and more than any other U.S. urban area except Los Angeles.
• Portlanders in 2040 will drive their cars 68 percent more miles on a road network that only 13 percent larger than today. Of major urban areas today, only Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia have fewer miles of freeway per capita than Metro plans for Portland.
• This will nearly quadruple congestion and violate state and federal air pollution rules.
• Meanwhile, the multi-billion dollar light-rail system will carry little more than 2 percent of all commuters in the region--some of them at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of dollars per ride.
• While the urban-growth boundary promises to protect farms, forests, and open space outside of the boundary, it will do so at the cost of destroying the farms, forests, and most of the open space that residents now enjoy inside the boundary.

Portland's planners have good intentions, but they are trying to impose a utopian vision on people who would rather find their own answers. The planners' application of nineteenth-century technology to a twenty-first-century city will only make the problems worse.

It doesn't have to be this way. Communities can manage their growth without huge subsidies to ineffective transit systems and without forcing neighborhoods to increase densities to levels many will find intolerable. The solution is to treat the problems, not the symptoms.

Summary of People 2000: An Alternative to Planning

We call this program People 2000 because, rather than having government plan people's lives for fifty years, we aim to give people the tools they need to solve their own immediate problems. These tools include:

• Neighborhood associations that give people the power to improve and protect the areas they live in;
• Congestion pricing of roads to relieve congestion, reduce gasoline taxes, and provide funds for highway and transit improvements;
• Pollution emission fees to give people incentives to drive cleaner cars;
• Demonopolizing public transit to encourage cost-effective competing services;
• A scenery and open-space trust that is funded by a real-estate transfer tax;
• Development fees to insure that new construction pays the full costs of new services; and
• An end to subsidies to growth.