According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual mobility reports, traffic delays due to congestion have been growing at nearly 8 percent per year since 1982. Those who closely scrutinize urban transportation planning in the U.S. increasingly believe that planners are doing everything they can to avoid solving this problem.
Case in point: Portland, Oregon, which sits astride the Willamette River and has ten roadway crossings of that river. One of them, the Sellwood Bridge, is structurally unsound and in 2004 the county engineer has banned all trucks and buses from the bridge. I can testify that the bridge is also one of the least bicycle-friendly bridges in the city.
In 2005, Bechtel Corporation came to Multnomah County with a proposal to build a new bridge. The company would presumably recover its expenses by tolling the bridge. Such public-private partnerships have proven very successful in Europe. But Portland planners said they weren’t interested because they wanted to take lots of time to study the situation.
Planners now say it will be at least 2010 before construction on a new bridge even begins. Even though Portland’s population has grown by many times since the original Sellwood Bridge was built, the replacement bridge is almost certain to add no new capacity for autos.
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This reminds of of the story of Henry Kaiser (scroll down to “7-syllable highway”), the great twentieth-century entrepreneur. In the mid 1960s, Kaiser was building a housing development about eight miles from downtown Honolulu. The only connection between Honolulu and Hawaii Kai was a narrow, two-lane road called the Kalanianaole Road. The state announced that it would do a study to see if expanding this road was feasible.
Kaiser, whose resume including building roads, dams, liberty ships, automobiles, housing developments, and hotels, among other things, visited the governor and offered to build the road for the cost of the study. The governor said that they would have to bid it out. Kaiser won the bid and finished the road in just four months, for less than both the cost and the anticipated time required for the study.
That couldn’t happen today. Instead, planners do endless studies before a spade of dirt is turned. Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston reports, for example, that Washington Metro wanted to build a rail line to Capital Center, a popular entertainment venue. After ten years of planning and construction, the rail line was completed — three years after Capital Center closed.
Such nearly endless planning guarantees that transport systems cannot respond to congestion and changing travel patterns, even if planners wanted to (which Portland planners do not).
Why do you think that is the case? Why do planners take so long and cost so much? Is everyone evil and corrupt? are they all on the take? As much as my Chicago roots want to believe that, there has to be a better reason.
Lessee…
Randal doesn’t like the democratic planning process, but he likes a company building a bridge even though they got run out of Bolivia for gouging the public, and they can’t provide a funding mechanism or construction schedule.
No wonder they are looking into it carfully and Portland puts into place a process to ensure the public doesn’t get gouged:
They address one of Randal’s concerns – cost overruns – and he gets all upset about it.
You don’t have a problem, Randal, with democracy and oversight, right? Democracy is slow.
My grampa had a saying: some people aren’t happy unless they’re unhappy.
DS
The notion that planning reduces cost overruns is laughable in general, especially so when applied to Portland. Public projects are almost universally late and over budget, and Portland’s are usually worse than most.
As to the supposed necessity for a “funding mechanism” to build the bridge, it was obvious from the context that Bechtel would be spending its own money to build it. Your use of and focus on that phrase betrays your government bias. No businessman would ever ask about “funding mechanisms”, since the phrase is absurd outside government. No schedule was available because you don’t need one unless Portland says yes to the bridge. They don’t really need a schedule anyway, there’s a vanishingly small chance that Bechtel would take longer than a publicly financed project.
Your use of and focus on that phrase betrays your government bias. No businessman would ever ask about “funding mechanismsâ€Â, since the phrase is absurd outside government. No schedule was available because you don’t need one unless Portland says yes to the bridge.
Gosh, sorry. When I owned my landscape design/construction business, I used to be all manly and say: howya gonna pay for it? I guess that shows my blue collar bias, using monosyllables. You can also say that a bridge of this sort takes 40-48 months to build (if you have the money, longer if you have to do creative finan…er…raise money.
DS