Choking Portland with Light Rail

Congestion has a “chokehold on this city,” writes Steve Duin. Possibly the Oregonian‘s best writer, Duin’s empathetic articles about the downtrodden and forgotten people of Portland are always worth reading.

Unfortunately, his analytical skills are lacking, so when he notes that it takes him 64 minutes to drive 11 miles on a Portland freeway despite the fact that Portland has built a $135 million light-rail bridge across the Willamette River, he seems unable to put 2 and 2 together and get any answer but “stay the course.”

The last new highway built in Portland opened in 1975. Since then, the city’s population has grown by nearly 60 percent, and the region’s population has more than doubled. Rather than build the transportation infrastructure needed to accommodate these people, Portland has built five light-rail lines and two streetcar lines. As of 2014, these rail lines carried just 8,500 of the city’s 301,000 commuters to work.

That’s right: despite the many billions spent on light rail, it carries less than 3 percent of commuters in Portland proper, and barely 2 percent of the region’s commuters (18,000 out of 895,000). Despite, or more likely because of, all the rail construction, the share of the region’s workers taking transit has declined from 9.9 percent in 1980 (when Portland transit consisted solely of buses) to 7.6 percent in 2014.

But something in Portland’s plans must be working, suggests Duin. Citing city of Portland transportation planner Art Pearce, Duin says, “Of the 40,354 new commuters the city gained between 2000 and 2013, 71 percent walk or bike to the office or work at home.”

These numbers ignore the sorting process Portland has encouraged: people who don’t want to drive settle in the city center, while people who want to drive settle in the suburbs. According to the Census Bureau, the Portland area as a whole gained 135,675 jobs between 2000 and 2013, and 53 percent of them drove to work. While the fact that 19 percent of them bicycled or walked is impressive, just 6.7 percent of new workers in the Portland area, and just 9.4 percent in the city of Portland itself, took transit, a pathetic outcome after spending all that money on three new light-rail lines and the streetcar.
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Portland blindly refuses to accommodate the growth in auto travel. According to the Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Statistics, Portland-area auto travel has grown by 15 percent since 2000 and more than 60 percent since 1990. Yet region’s leaders and planners are so adamantly opposed to building new road capacity that they just spent $319 million replacing the busiest two-lane bridge in Oregon with a new bridge that was carefully designed to have no greater capacity for automobiles than the crumbling 1925 bridge it replaced.

Thanks to Portland’s preference for building light rail instead of actually doing things that relieve congestion, the average speed of Portland auto travel is just 23 mph, compared with 28 mph in Austin, 33 in San Antonio, and 43 in Tulsa, all of which have been growing faster than Portland. But even 23 mph is faster than transit: Portland’s buses and light rail each average under 15 mph, while the streetcar averages just 6. No wonder bicycling is so popular: it is easily faster than transit.

Duin’s solution is to throw even more money at a system that is broken. He applauds Seattle for spending billions on new transportation projects, yet Seattle’s priorities are often as misbegotten as Portland’s. Portland could accomplish far more by spending existing funds more effectively than by increasing funding for projects that will do little good.

Duin closes his article quoting Portland State University multimodal transportation researcher Chris Monsere, who says, “A single person in a single vehicle is the least effective transportation system we have.” In other words, it’s not Portland planners’ fault that their plans aren’t working; it’s those stupid commuters, truckers, and other travelers who should be riding bikes and transit instead of driving.

Contrary to Monsere’s subjective judgement, a 23-mph car that goes where I want to go is a lot more effective than a 15-mph light-rail train that doesn’t. Intuitively, Duin knows this or he wouldn’t have been on that freeway taking 64 minutes to go 11 miles in the first place. Duin, Monsere, and Pearce all need to realize that Portland and other cities need transportation facilities that people will actually use, not the ones that multimodal planners wish they would use.

This doesn’t mean ripping ugly freeways through established neighborhoods. A combination of congestion pricing with adding new lanes onto existing roads, better traffic signal coordination, fixing key bottlenecks, and yes even some better bike routes would get Portland moving again at little or no cost to taxpayers. But instead of meeting actual transportation needs, Portland’s light-rail mafia would rather build another multi-billion-dollar light-rail line.