Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

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.

Cascade Policy also expressed doubts regarding Metro’s projection that the line will carry 43,000 riders per day. Not only have all previous Portland light-rail lines fallen short of their ridership projections — generally by around 50 percent — but Portland light-rail ridership is already declining. Moreover, the bus routes that the light-rail line would replace are also experiencing declining ridership. Cascade’s review also found that the traffic analysis included with the draft EIS showed that Portland would have more congestion if it built the light-rail line than if it did not.

Portland opened its latest light-rail route, the $1.5-billion Orange line to Milwaukie, in September, 2015. Yet ridership in 2017 was only 2 percent more than in 2014 — and 15 percent less than it had been in 2011. Portland-area residents are clearly not as in love with light rail as the planners who rule them.
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Sadly, Portland has locked itself into a transportation technology that is expensive and obsolete. On one hand, almost continuous construction of new light-rail lines since 1982 has created an engineering lobby that seeks to build ever-more lines. On the other hand, while buses could move more people at a lower cost, Portland has clogged up its downtown bus mall (as the Antiplanner previously noted) by building a light-rail line down it, thus making it impossible to add new bus routes to the mall.

Metro is no doubt counting on a Democrat taking the White House in 2021 or, at the latest, 2025, which it hopes will free up federal funds for the project. But it still has to find at least $1.4 billion, and probably much more, in local funds. Portlanders have rejected tax increases for TriMet the last couple of times they have been on the ballot, and this is one project the region will have a hard time building without another tax increase. But that hasn’t stopped TriMet from pretending that the line is inevitable.

One of the properties TriMet has purchased is a distinctive synagogue that Portland planners want to turn into a transit-oriented development. Sadly, the congregation that owns this building had been forced by government planners to move once before. The area south of downtown Portland once was a thriving community of Jewish and Italian immigrants, but the city declared their neighborhood a slum and forced the out as a part of the South Auditorium Urban Renewal project in the early 1960s.

Now they are being forced to move again, not because they are a slum but because they aren’t high-density enough for Portland planners. Of course, if Portland ever truly achieved its density dreams, and lots of people gave up their automobiles, then light rail wouldn’t have the capacity to move them. But who cares about that; the important thing is to spend another $3 billion.