Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro.

Portland planners then proposed a “south-north” line that would go south from downtown to Oregon City and north from downtown to Vancouver, Washington. This was expected to cost $150 million a mile in today’s dollars. To raise that much money, the city wanted the state of Oregon to chip in.

The legislature was strong-armed by the governor to support the idea, but opponents gathered enough signatures to have a state-wide vote, which was rejected by voters in 1996. TriMet then went to Portland voters and asked for a tax increase to build the line without state matching funds. By this time, voters had realized that low-capacity rail didn’t relieve congestion and was becoming an increasingly expensive money sink, so they rejected the proposal.

TriMet managed to use tax-increment financing, lottery money, and federal funds to build it anyway. The north line (now called the Yellow line) didn’t quite make it to Vancouver as Vancouver voters repeatedly rejected local funding. The south line (now called the Orange line), which ended up costing well over $200 million a mile, didn’t make it to Oregon City, stopping at the boundary between Milwaukie and Oak Grove. Nevertheless, the lines created plenty of opportunities for the region to subsidize more high-density developments.

Now Portland wants to build a 12-mile line to the southwest. This one is expected to cost close to $3 billion or nearly $250 million a mile. Voters rejected the plan earlier this month.
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TriMet says it wants to build the line anyway “because the demand still exists.” What demand? Overall transit ridership has declined in every year since the Milwaukie line opened in 2015. Ridership in 2019 was the lowest since 2006. The pandemic has pushed ridership down another 55 percent. Bus service already exists in the Southwest corridor and there is no demand from transit riders to change that to light rail.

The only demand that exists is among contractors who want to earn fat profits building a line that costs $250 million a mile and urban planners who want to use the line as an excuse to build more high-density transit-oriented developments. That’s where the “economic stimulus” comes in.

The economy doesn’t need a stimulus, but like college students who find any event to be an excuse for a party, Democrats are willing to use any economic event as an excuse for a stimulus bill that will simultaneously enrich Democratic supporters, such as unions, and promote the “green” agenda of building obsolete transportation systems.

TriMet’s CEO naturally knows the CEO of the Los Angeles Metro system, Phillip Washington, who was appointed to lead Biden’s transportation transition team. Los Angeles and Portland planners agree that, as Washington once told the Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them.” Clearly, Washington’s idea of an “economic stimulus” is more about social engineering than about helping the economy to recover from the pandemic.

The pandemic has changed the world. People are leaving the cities for suburbs, smaller cities, and rural areas. People are riding transit less even though driving is nearly back to 2019 levels.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is that, despite past failures, urban planners still want to build megaprojects aimed at getting people to stop driving and ride transit more. Portland doesn’t need another light-rail line. Portlander’s don’t want to pay for another light-rail line. But, one way or another, taxpayers are probably going to end up spending another $3 billion or so on another high-cost, low-capacity-rail line in Portland.