Portland Metro: More Lies Per Capita

“We’re driving less than other metros,” says Portland Metro, “and we’re driving less than 20 years ago.” These are the kinds of lies that are so typical of Portland planners: easy to check, but since few will bother, they get away with it. First, although Portlanders do drive a little less than residents of other large urban areas, they also drove a little less than residents of those same urban areas 20 years ago, so that’s no change.

More important, Portlanders are in fact driving more than they were 20 years ago. Metro’s source for its data is the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) urban mobility study. But those data only count miles of driving on freeways and other arterials. Because Portland hasn’t built any new freeways or arterials in 20 years, people are forced to drive more on collectors and other roads. When all driving is counted, according to the Federal Highway Administration (which is the source of TTI’s data), Portlanders drove an average of 22.9 miles per person per day in 2014, up 13 percent from 20.2 miles per person per day in 1994.

Metro uses lies like these to implicitly claim that all of its spending on light rail is worthwhile. In fact, light rail is just not very important to Portland travel. As the Antiplanner showed last week, transit carries just 2.6 percent of motorized travel in the Portland urban areas, and since light rail is less than 40 percent of transit, that means light rail is less than 1 percent of all motorized travel.

Metro says that transit accounts for 4.1 percent of regional travel, but that’s measured in trips, not passenger miles. Since transit trips average less than half the length of auto trips, this biases the numbers in favor of those people who are willing to proscribe their lives to a much smaller land area and range of economic opportunities.

In any case, these are only some of the lies Metro planners used to persuade regional officials to support new light-rail lines even when Portland voters have repeated rejected funding for more rail. Metro’s latest scheme is to spend $2 billion on a light-rail line to Tigard, only they can’t say they are building it to Tigard because Tigard voters ordered their city council to not spend a dime on light rail without voter approval, so Metro planners say they are going to build it to Tualatin. Eventually, they expect to get to Tigard no matter what the voters want just like they expect the Interstate light-rail line to eventually reach Vancouver.

To sell light rail instead of bus-rapid transit, which the planners admit would cost only half as much (and far less than that, they don’t admit, if the buses use existing shared lanes), they have to lie about the supposed defects in bus-rapid transit. Light rail “attracts more new riders” than buses, they say without any evidence at all.

But the big lie about buses is that their capacity is lower than rail. Bus capacity is so low, planners claim, that it “would hit full capacity during rush hour within 10 years of opening.”

This persuaded at least some officials that buses won’t work. “I had high hopes for BRT,” said one. “But . . . it would not carry the capacity it needed in the long-run.” This is baloney.

Planners say Portland’s two-car light-rail trains can hold 266 people while a bus can hold 86. In fact, double-decker buses can hold more and, as Alex Francis Burchard noted here a few days ago, buses in Turkey can hold 200 people. But let’s go with the planners’ numbers, which mean that it takes three buses to hold as many people as one light-rail train.

Because Portland has short blocks, it can’t run light-rail transit longer than two cars. Except in a few places where trains don’t stop, Portland can also safely run no more than 20 light-rail trains per hour. So that means, as shown in the chart below, the capacity of a light-rail line is 20 x 266 = 5,320 people per hour. That’s not very many.

That means the partner should try to stay away from those places where you usually used to smoke and also places where you can enroll yourself into the drivers online ed and learn the rules and regulations of driving home to safety. levitra overnight They take orders online and generic viagra germany make deliveries from their stores. If you are looking for specific mediations such as the golden root complex, you will have to look at how they have tripled spending on the buy levitra where to a whopping 58 pounds million in 2006. Kicks to the apples, taking out the knees, all while staying away from his criminal fists is what order levitra online http://downtownsault.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/05-11-16-DDA-MINUTES.pdf you want to do.
This chart is from page 5 of Metro’s staff report on light-rail vs. buses in the Portland-Tualatin corridor.

Metro seems to think that, because light-rail lines can only support 20 trains an hour, busways can also support just 20 buses per hour, as indicated by the above chart that claims buses can only move about 1,700 people per hour. This is ridiculous: why would anyone sensible build a billion-dollar road for just 20 vehicles per hour? (Of course, the people who want to build a two-billion-dollar rail line for, at most, 20 trains an hour aren’t sensible in the first place.)

Portland’s existing bus mall can support 160 buses per hour in each direction (or it did before they fouled it up with light rail, which reduced the mall’s overall transit capacity). Passengers boarding these buses must pay fares or show passes to the driver as they board, which slows “dwell” times at each stop. But a bus-rapid transit line to Tualatin, says Metro, would use advanced fare collection,” meaning people would pay before they board. This would cut dwell times in half and could double throughput to more than 300 buses per hour.

At 86 passengers per bus, even just 160 buses means 13,760 people per hour, or about three times the capacity of light rail. Unlike the light-rail line, the busway capacity can be increased by running more buses or running buses capable of carrying more people.

Of course, the increase in demand projected in the above chart for 2035 is itself a fantasy. By 2035, many if not most of the people that Metro expects will be riding transit will in fact be using shared, self-driving cars. But Metro plans for the past, not the future, so it ignores the effects of self-driving cars when it plans billions of dollars worth of infrastructure.

When Metro planners argue that trains are more attractive to riders than buses, they may mean that riders are more attracted to rail speeds. The planners claim that, even with dedicated bus lanes, buses would take 2 to 10 minutes longer to get between Tualatin and Portland. The Antiplanner is dubious about this claim: if light rail running in an exclusive right-of-way and transit signal priority at intersections could make the trip in 30 minutes, why couldn’t buses that also had an exclusive right-of-way and signal priority?

It’s not like light rail is particularly fast. Downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village is 11 miles, so the projected 30 minute time for light rail is just 22 miles per hour. This is probably optimistic: the 2014 National Transit Database says Portland ran light-rail vehicles 7.7 million miles in 529,000 hours for an average speed of less than 15 miles per hour.

It doesn’t really matter because I don’t see the need to have exclusive bus lanes in any case. Planners project rush-hour demand of about 2,200 people per hour in 2035, or roughly half of light rail’s capacity and a tiny fraction of a busway’s capacity. That number could easily be served by running about 30 buses per hour, which can be done on shared lanes without hugely interfering with existing traffic.

While buses on shared lanes would go a little slower than in exclusive lanes, it would also save about $1.9 billion off the cost of building light rail. A portion of that $1.9 billion could be used to relieve congestion for everyone in that corridor, not just the tiny percentage who would use light rail, thus saving people far more time than building a light-rail line that only a few thousand people will ride each day.

Yet, year after year, plan after plan, Metro planners devote more a disproportionate share of the region’s transportation funding to transit, and mostly for rail transit. Metro’s 2035 Regional Transportation Plan, for example, calls for spending 30 percent of capital funds on transit (p. 6-5). When operating costs are added, most of the region’s transportation dollars go for a mode that carries just 2.6 percent of motorized travel (and less than 2.6 percent of all travel).

Portland’s problem is that the light-rail mafia that runs the region is addicted to building rail boondoggles, meaning they are addicted to the political contributions from the companies that profit from such construction. They will never want to stop until the voters force them to. Fortunately, Tigard voters have set a precedent that voters in Tualatin and other parts of the region can follow and possibly prevent the waste of $2 billion on this project.