Search Results for: Portland, OR

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading →

Portland Makes the New York Times

By | | Housing, News commentary
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A few years ago the New York Times was praising Portland as the “city that loves mass transit” (meaning it loved to spend money on mass transit, not actually ride it) and the city where people were willing to live lightly in 400-square-foot apartments. How the mighty have fallen: Last Saturday, Portland rated most of the top half of the Times front page with an article about homelessness, drug addiction, and death.

Click image for a larger view.

The article and accompanying photos jump to fill two entire interior pages of the newspaper. At around 3,500 words, the article qualifies as a long read, especially for a newspaper. But for many people, including Jack Bogdanski, the article was more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. Continue reading →

Portland Update

By | | Urban areas
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I am so glad that Bojack — that is, Lewis & Clark Law professor Jack Bogdanski — is back on line, as he provides a daily reminder of why I am so happy that I moved out of Portland. Bojack’s old blog chronicled Portland’s political hijinks from 2002 through 2013, then sadly went silent.

Photo by Victoria Ditkovsky.

Now he’s back with an even darker view of what life is like in the place whose motto was once “the city that works.” Here are just a few of his recent posts. Continue reading →

Portland Bicycle Ridership Declining

By | | Transportation
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Portland, Oregon has 385 miles of bikeways, 121 of which have been built since 2014. But these bikeways have failed to boost the number of bicycle riders in the city. In fact, a report from the city of Portland says that, in the wake of COVID, the number is declining rapidly.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the share of Portland employees riding bicycles to work peaked at 7.2 percent in 2014. By 2019, it had fallen to 5.2 percent. The pandemic led to a surge in bicycle sales, and the share grew to 5.4 percent in 2020 but then fell dramatically to a measly 2.8 percent in 2021. Continue reading →

Portland Downtown Devastated by COVID

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The number of people working in downtown Portland dropped from more than 103,000 in mid-2019 to 13,000 in mid-2020, according to a State of the Economy report recently published by the Portland Business Alliance. The report doesn’t actually show numbers, but the chart below, which I took from the report, can be used to make pretty close estimates.

This chart is taken from page 3 of Portland Business Alliance’s State of the Economy report. Click image for a larger view.

By the end of 2021, the downtown area had recovered to about 34,000 workers, still less than a third of pre-pandemic numbers. The pandemic may not be the only factor depressing downtown employment: Black Lives Matter protests that began in May 2020 resulted in “numerous instances of arson, looting, vandalism, and injuries,” many of which affected downtown businesses and will probably continue to do so well into the future. Continue reading →

Portland Debate over Higher Densities

By | | Housing
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Portland’s housing prices aren’t as high as San Francisco’s, but they are still too high. As indicated Tuesday, median home prices are more than five times median family incomes, which makes housing unaffordable because under standard mortgage rules it’s not possible to get a loan for five times someone’s income.

This is the kind of home Portlanders aspired to in 1888.

Portland’s solution to this problem is densification, but Portland State University real estate professor Gerard Mildner says this won’t work. In an op-ed published on January 18, Mildner argues that Oregon’s land-use planning system “has been manipulated so that NIMBY objections are raised to a regional level.” Although the region’s population has doubled since 1979, the region’s urban-growth boundary has grown by only 15 percent. Continue reading →

Portland Wises Up

By | | News commentary
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Austin voters apparently approved the cities foolish $7 billion light-rail plan. San Francisco Bay Area voters apparently approved a regressive tax-increase to support high-income riders of the Caltrain commuter train. But Portland voters have apparently rejected a $5 billion transportation measure that was mainly aimed at building the region’s most-expensive light-rail line yet.

Portland’s rejection of light rail is not too surprising as the region has rejected every transit tax measure that’s been on the ballot since 1996 because voters have learned that light rail costs too much and does too little. Too bad Austin couldn’t have learned from Portland’s experience.

Portland voters also appear to have returned centrist Ted Wheeler to the mayor’s office even though polls showed he was running well behind leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Wheeler had earned the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters when he didn’t try to stop police from stopping property destruction in downtown Portland. Iannarone, meanwhile, openly supported antifa violence and wore clothing celebrating Chairman Mao. Continue reading →

Portland Pedestrian Priorities

By | | Transportation
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Transportation policy debates are often characterized as highways vs. transit or automobiles vs. alternatives. But they are more fundamental than that. The real debate is between the engineering view and the planning view.

Engineers ask, “how are people going to get around and how can we make their travel safer and more efficient?” Planners ask, “how should people get around and how can we manipulate them into making what we think are the right choices instead of the wrong choices?”

The problem with the planning view is that it is impossible for central planners to determine what is the “right” choice for everyone. So they simplify the question and focus just on one thing, such as energy or pollution. Then they simplify still further and chant, like the pigs in Animal House, “automobiles bad; transit, walking, and cycling good.” Never mind that automobiles are more energy efficient than most transit or safer than cycling. Continue reading →

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading →

Portland Has Too Many Loose Screws

By | | Transportation
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A loose screw caused the Portland streetcar crash that took place a couple of weeks ago, reports TriMet. The screw jammed up the streetcar throttle, making it difficult to impossible to slow the streetcar down.

Of course, this invites all sorts of invidious jokes that the Antiplanner can’t resist making, mainly because it’s nearly midnight and I’ve been working on too many other projects to have written a more incisive blog post for Thursday.

Anyone who watches Portlandia, which some consider to be more of a documentary than a comedy, knows there are a lot of loose screws in Portland. One of the first real examples of loose screws was the decision to build the streetcar line that opened in 2001. There was some plausible justification for light rail, at least at first glance, but streetcars made no sense at all when buses were better at everything streetcars could do except spending lots of money. Continue reading →