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Portland Needs a Dose of Reality, Not Another Vision

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Randy Gragg, the architecture critic for the Portland Oregonian, thinks that Portland “lacks a coordinated transportation plan” and needs a “grand vision” to deal with transportation in the future. In fact, what Portland needs is to deal with the reality of how people really live, not a vision for how some people think everyone else ought to live.

In 1992, Portland-area voters decided to create Metro, a regional planning agency that would create a vision for Portland’s future and implement that vision through land-use and transportation planning. Now, after fifteen years of expensive planning and increasing congestion, Gragg is effectively saying that Metro has failed.

Portland light rail and mid-rise development. Flickr photo by ahockley.

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The Skeptical Planning Professor

By | | News commentary
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Many of things written in this blog in 2007 are mere echoes of statements made by Melvin Webber thirty to forty years ago. Webber, who died last November, was a professor of city planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

The latest issue of Access magazine, which Webber founded fifteen years ago, is a tribute to Webber, with articles by Martin Wachs, Robert Cervero, Peter Hall, Jonathan Richmond, and other researchers who are themselves legendary in the urban and transportation planning fields.

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How Green Can Greensburg Get?

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Last week, I wondered “how many planners today are salivating at the chance to plan the reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas.” The answer was not long in coming.

The governor of Kansas has announced that she wants to make the reconstructed community “the greenest town in rural America.” She says she wants to “rebuild a better footprint.”

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Urban-Growth Boundaries Are Just Plain Stupid

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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Originally conceived as a way of preventing “leapfrog development,” i.e, development of land some distance away from urban fringes, urban-growth boundaries are now used to prevent any development at the urban fringe at all. This pleases planners, who think we should all live in “compact developments,” and who ally themselves with property owners along the boundaries who want to preserve their scenic views.

The last effort to expand Portland’s boundary required lengthy political battles as landowners who wanted to develop their land fought those who wanted to benefit from someone else’s land remaining undeveloped. In about 1999, Portland’s Metro finally expanded boundary. But very little development has taken place because planners are too busy “planning” the expanded areas to allow anyone to do anything in them. The time between expansion and any actual development seems to be at least a decade.

Meanwhile, Metro is under the gun to meet housing goals and is asking the legislature for two more years before it considers any more expansions. Planners say they are too busy planning the previous expansions to think about doing any more.

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San Francisco Dream Home Turns into Nightmare

By | | News commentary
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Last year, someone bought a house in San Francisco “for an almost unheard of price of $525,000.” By “almost unheard of” they mean “incredibly low,” so low that the San Francisco Examiner called it the “cheapest house on the market.” (The house was sold at an auction with bids starting at $400,000.)

You have to live in a pretty warped world to think that $525,000 is a low price for a house. Especially this house. It was only 870 square feet and so dilapidated that the real estate listing warned of “unstable building, floors, dry-rot and foundations. Enter at your own risk.”

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“They were just a wonderful young couple trying to do the American Dream thing and may have gotten in over their heads,” said a neighbor. So the American dream vanishes in a cloud of dust for one more young family. Hope they had good insurance, especially since the house damaged the next-door home as well.

Bay Freeway Update: Going Back to Cars (Updated)

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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BART carried a record number of passengers on Monday, April 30, the day after a tanker truck blew up and destroyed a key part of the Oakland freeway system. BART and other transit systems offered free service on Monday, so they don’t have exact counts. However, on Tuesday, BART carried about 10.8 percent more than on a normal weekday, but only 5.2 percent more on Wednesday and 7 percent more on Thursday.

Wikipedia photo by T.J. Morales.

As Tom Rubin says, the real test is what happens to Bay Bridge counts. On Monday, the bridge carried about 18 percent fewer cars than usual. On Tuesday, it was down to 14 percent; on Wednesday, 11 percent. Part of the decrease in bridge traffic from the east was offset by an increase from the south as drivers realized that there would be less congestion due to the freeway collapse.

AC Transit, the agency that provides bus service throughout Oakland and the rest of Alameda County (including a few routes that cross the bridge to San Francisco) did not record any more riders on Tuesday than on a normal weekday.

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November Ballot to Test: Are Seattleites Still Suckers?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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After rejecting it once, Seattle voters got fooled into voting for a light-rail line whose cost doubled almost immediately after the election. Then Seattle voters got talked into a monorail line whose costs also exploded after the election. Fortunately, they were able to vote their way out of that one.

Now Sound Transit, whose light-rail costs have blown up and whose commuter-rail trains carry far fewer riders than projected, has a new plan: another 50 or 60 miles of light rail.

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Update on Measure 37

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Faithful readers of the Antiplanner will recall that loyal opponent DanS predicted that Oregon would repeal measure 37, the property rights law, by 2008. He believed so strongly that Oregon voters were fed up with the law that he offered to bet the Antiplanner, with the stakes being a dinner.

The Democratic majority in Oregon’s legislature is apparently not so confident about the mood of the voters. After all, 61 percent of voters approved measure 37. While planning proponents are pushing hard to get the legislature to amend the law, few are actually talking about repeal.

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Bay Freeway Update: No Traffic Snarls

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Will the tanker truck accident that destroyed a key part of the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network cost commuters millions of dollars a day? Will those commuters respond by switching to public transit? So far, the answers seem to be “no” and “maybe.”

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

The closure of a freeway interchange that normally sees 80,000 vehicles a day did not result in huge traffic jams yesterday or this morning. Many people may have used the free public transit offered by the state, but so far no reliable reports have said how many. (Transit was free yesterday only; today it should be back to normal fares.) Continue reading →