The Antiplanner

There can be no doubt about it: the city of Portland is run by a bunch of nutcases. Well, the Antiplanner knew that long ago, but they keep getting nutsier and nutsier all the time.

Flickr photo by p medved.

The latest is that Commissioner Randy Leonard wants to spend $500,000 to condemn and take over operation of a historic sign. If you’ve ever driven to downtown Portland from the east side, you’ve seen the sign: it has a deer on it jumping through an outline map of Oregon.

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Many people in Denver actually thought the recent economic meltdown would be good news for that city’s FasTracks megaproject because the downturn would reduce projected construction costs. It did, slightly, but (as the Antiplanner predicted) it reduced projected revenues even more.

Regional Transit District (RTD) officials promised voters that the 119-mile rail project would cost $4.7 billion in 2004. By 2008, cost projections had increased to $7.9 billion. But the 2009 projection is “only” $6.952 billion (see p. 39).

(For some reason, the Denver Post rounds this down to $6.9 billion, when it properly should be rounded to $7.0. I guess that’s what happens when a city loses one of its two daily papers.)

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City officials are probably not going to brag about this one. Business Week wanted to find out which are the the nation’s unhappiest cities. It used criteria such as green space, crime rates, unemployment, and divorce, but weighted things like depression (based on antidepressant sales) and suicide rates more heavily. Oh, yes, it also considered the number of cloudy days per year.

Portland is number one! And not just on number of cloudy days, but also on antidepressants. It is pretty high up on suicide rates too.

By comparison, Detroit, which nobody would use as a model city, has the lowest suicide rate and one of the lowest rates of depression. The magazine still ranks Detroit number 4 based on its high crime and unemployment rates.

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In an effort to lead the region in becoming more sustainable, Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, invested resources in entirely the wrong areas and so failed to significantly reduce its own energy consumption and pollution. But don’t believe me; just read this report by Metro’s own auditor.

The audit found that 91 percent of Metro’s carbon emissions resulted from power consumption and gas flaring at Metro’s landfills. Metro spent 3 percent of its sustainability resources trying to reduce these outputs. Meanwhile, commuting by Metro employees accounted for just 6 percent of Metro’s carbon emissions. So naturally, Metro invested 59 percent of its sustainability resources trying to get its people to drive less.

The report doesn’t say whether Metro actually was able to persuade some of its employees to drive less, and Metro probably has no idea. This is completely typical of Metro planning: focus on the wrong problem, don’t measure the outcomes, declare victory, and go home. Only in this case, Metro has an internal auditor keeping it honest.

Here’s a little-known fact: Denver light-rail trains are the emptiest in the nation. Denver light-rail cars seat 70 and have room for at least that many standing, yet they carried an average of less than 14 people in revenue service in 2007. In the rest of the nation, the average was 24.

If only RTD, Denver’s transit agency, had managed to find some 14-passenger buses (which retail for about $50,000 each). It could have saved taxpayers the $1.2 billion or so that it spent building light rail.

This fact is among many revealed in a new report published by the Independence Institute of Golden, Colorado, which has long been critical of RTD’s dreams of rail empire. The report shows that RTD has repeatedly and continually lied to voters about the high costs and minimal benefits from building more rail lines in Denver.

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Back in 2002, Metro — Portland’s regional planning czar — made several additions to the region’s urban-growth boundary. The biggest addition was 18,600 acres — supposedly enough to house 50,000 people — on the east side known as Damascus. Portland’s housing market was booming, and some people predicted a huge land-rush that would lead to windfall gains for Damascus property owners.

Now, more than six years later, nothing has happened and it looks like nothing will happen. Metro blames it on the high cost of infrastructure. The reality is that Metro planners so gummed up the process that no one could develop their property.

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Portland’s Westside commuter rail is $33 million over its planned budget of $133. Although just $8 million of that is due to the cost of the commuter rail cars, a recent article in The Oregonian blames the manufacturer of those cars for having “cost TriMet millions.”

The Westside commuter rail line goes from nowhere to nowhere. Actually, it goes from Wilsonville to Beaverton, but neither endpoint is a major job center. That means commuters who use the commuter rail will probably change in Beaverton to a light rail train. Faithful Antiplanner ally John Charles says this line is a loser. It is so bad that Oregon’s congressional delegation had to pass a law exempting it from Federal Transit Administration cost-effectiveness criteria restricting funding to projects that only waste a lot of money instead of a whole lot of money.

Colorado Railcar’s original demonstrator unit.
Flickr photo by AaverageJoe.

Engineering, design, construction, right of way, and signals for the project cost about $22 million more than expected, which The Oregonian mentions only in a tiny chart. Instead, the story focuses on Colorado Railcar, a company that has been promoting the idea of Diesel multiple units (DMUs), which more or less means a light-rail-like car powered by a Diesel engine powerful enough to also tow one or two unpowered cars.

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The city of Tualatin, a suburb of Portland, zoned about 300 acres of land within its borders in a low-density zone allowing 1 to 6 homes per acre. This raises the specter of up to 300 new homes on one-acre lots, a notion that is sending regional planners into fits.

“We don’t enjoy getting into this type of confrontation,” says planning professor and Metro councilor Carl Hosticka. But “it’s not fair to the other jurisdictions,” meaning the ones the complied with high-density housing goals set by Metro, Portland’s regional planning authority.

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“When the facts change,” John Maynard Keynes once said, “I change my mind. What do you do?”

If you are a government agency like Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), you simply ignore the new facts. That’s because your plans are based on a delicate political compromise, not on a realistic assessment of those facts.

The latest facts show that one of RTD’s proposed FasTracks rail lines will cost almost 60% more and will carry only 55% as many riders than projected in 2004. As a result, the cost-per-rider on that line has ballooned to more than $60, nearly four times the 2004 estimate and more than six times the cost of bus-rapid transit. Yet RTD still wants to build the line.

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Sellwood Bridge is falling down
falling down, falling down
Sellwood Bridge is falling down
My unfair planners

Portland has finally issued a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for Sellwood Bridge, Portland’s oldest and most hazardous bridge over the Willamette River. Not only is the DEIS about six years late, it is a mish-mosh of confusing alternatives that allow planners to manipulate the public to get what they want rather than what the public needs.

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