4. OSPIRG Intern

In my freshman year at Oregon State, Ralph Nader came to Oregon and urged university students to fund a public interest research group that would hire experts to advocate for consumer and environmental goals. I circulated petitions and the student body governments of Oregon State, the University of Oregon, and most other major schools in the state agreed to contribute an average of a dollar a quarter per student to the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group.

In my sophomore year, OSPIRG announced that it would hire 16 student interns to work for the summer at $750 each. I applied but was told — probably because of my mediocre grades — that I didn’t make the cut. However, they did have $250 left over, and if I would work for that amount, they’d be happy to give me a project.

The previous summer I had worked as a parking lot attendant, and anything was better than doing that again. So I happily took the job and bicycled from my northeast Portland apartment to OSPIRG’s downtown offices in the Governor Building on 2nd and Stark. Downtown Portland was then a sleepy place that was practically dead after 6 pm. The Governor Building was a ramshackle office building surrounded by parking lots left behind after other buildings had been torn down. As I recall, OSPIRG was on the fourth floor, and I usually ran up the stairs two at a time rather than take an elevator.

I asked if I could work on a forestry project, but instead they wanted me to work on a transportation issue. In 1970, it was rarely possible to see Mount Hood from Portland on a sunny day due to air pollution. The Clean Air Act sought to reduce that pollution, and the Environmental Protection Agency required cities to write plans showing how they would manage transportation to meet that goal.

Many city officials thought this was pointless because the increasingly strict emissions standards that the EPA imposed on auto manufacturers would eventually clean up the air no matter what the cities did. That wasn’t good enough for the EPA, which encouraged cities to find ways to get people to reduce driving in the most polluted areas, which usually were downtown.

Portland’s traffic engineer had a plan to clean the air by adjusting the timing of traffic lights in downtown Portland’s one-way grid so that cars would go faster. Faster cars polluted less, he noted, so retiming the lights would achieve EPA’s goals. A major problem with this plan, as I saw it, was that faster speeds would attract more traffic through downtown, which would offset some or all of the reduction in air pollution.

OSPIRG selected this project on the advice of Ron Buel, who was the chief of staff to city commissioner (and future mayor) Neil Goldschmidt. Buel had written an anti-automobile book called Dead End and he wasn’t satisfied with the city’s plan. He wanted to make transit improvements that would give people alternatives to driving.

I was pretty comfortable thinking about transit, having taken the bus to high school for two-and-a-half years. For most of that time, the buses I rode were operated by a private company named Rose City Transit, or Rosy for short. Adult fares were 35 cents, which was the highest of any transit system on the West Coast (the largest of which were already municipalized and therefore subsidized). As a student, I paid less, probably 25 cents.

Transfers were free; usually I didn’t have to make one, but sometimes on my way home I would get off the bus in downtown and wander around until the next bus came. Buses passed through downtown on several different streets; as I recall, most buses stopped for five minutes downtown so passengers could walk, sometimes two or more blocks to transfer to a bus on a different route.

Rosy’s bus fleet consisted of more than 100 Flxible (Twin Coach) and Mack buses from the 1950s plus 75 General Motors “New Look” buses purchased in the 1960s. My route must have been popular, as it was usually served by a GM bus. From my home to downtown was something of an express route, as the bus made only about three or four stops after picking me up, then got on a freeway and went straight downtown. After leaving downtown, the bus did not use the freeway to get to my school, so the overall trip took nearly an hour.

By 1968, Rosy’s ridership had fallen by more than 50 percent over the previous decade, so to make up its losses it applied to raise fares to 40 cents. The city rejected this increase and instead the state legislature created the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District, or Tri-Met, which took over Rosy’s operations in December, 1969. From my point of view, nothing changed except that Tri-Met painted Rosy’s red buses orange. Local businesses, however, subsidized Tri-Met with an employee tax that was really an income tax, but since it didn’t appear on paychecks most employees weren’t really aware of it.

By the time of my OSPIRG internship, I was heavy into cycling, but was still sympathetic to transit. I decided to call cities and transit agencies all over the country to see what they were doing to reduce air pollution and stimulate ridership. Long-distance phone calls were still expensive in 1972, and OSPIRG interns were required to log each call.

I was particularly intrigued to learn that Cleveland had, in the last twenty years, built new rail-transit lines. But I rejected that as too expensive and focused on low-cost ways of boosting ridership. One idea was to ask suburban churches to use their parking lots, which were often largely empty on weekdays, as park-and-ride stations.

Another was to create a downtown on-call bus system that would consist of call boxes on most street corners. Like a pre-smart-phone UberPool or Lyft Shared, people could press a button at one of these call boxes and a bus would pick them up and take them to any other downtown destination.

Although the cost of these ideas was low, I also proposed to increase downtown on-street parking fees by 40 cents an hour, both to serve as a disincentive to driving and to fund the transit improvements.

When I bounced these ideas off of public officials, I got no sympathy. The chair of Tri-Met’s board told me the agency had a federal grant to build a downtown bus mall and that was all they were going to do. He admitted that he didn’t even live in one of the three counties served by Tri-Met, so he had no use for transit and didn’t seem to see why anyone would ride it. Another official told me that his car already met EPA’s air pollution standards (he drove a Diesel, which spewed out plenty of pollution, but not the main pollutants being regulated by EPA for gasoline vehicles), so he didn’t see what the problem was.

Nevertheless, I wrote up my ideas in a report. Of OSPIRG’s seventeen interns that summer, I was the first to publish and my report generated more publicity than most of the others. I was on morning talk television shows, did a few radio interviews, and got plenty of newspaper headlines. Except for Goldschmidt, Portland’s city council ignored my report and approved the traffic engineer’s plan, and that seemed to be the end of it.

Except that it wasn’t. Riding partly on the coat tails of my report, OSPIRG’s director, Steve McCarthy, got himself appointed to Tri-Met’s board. Then he convinced the governor, who made the appointments, that the rest of the board were deadheads and had them all replaced. The new board made McCarthy general manager, and he implemented many innovative ideas, some of which were from my report. While he didn’t do the downtown demand-responsive bus system, he made the entire downtown a free-fare zone so people could get around on buses that were traveling through downtown anyway without charge.

Thanks to these improvements, transit’s market share of Portland-area commuting grew from 7 percent in 1970 to 10 percent in 1980. Although almost every other city in the country had also municipalized their transit systems, only about a third of major urban areas saw similar increases. Nationally, transit’s share of commuting declined from 8.5 percent to 6.2 percent.

The main effect of my report, I suspect, is that it put OSPIRG in the limelight enough to get the governor to appoint McCarthy to the Tri-Met board. The short-term lesson I learned was that policy analysis can have an important effect on public policy. In the long run, Steve McCarthy and I would learn some very different lessons about public policy, but that’s a story for another chapter.