Portland’s streets, bridges, sidewalks, and traffic signals are in desperate need of maintenance, reports the city’s Bureau of Transportation. Yet the city is putting its transportation dollars towards building more streetcar lines.
Bike-friendly city? A Portland cyclist is attended (and eventually hospitalized) after a crash resulting from incomplete paving around a storm drain. Flickr photo posted by Ralph Bodenner (who was also the injured cyclist).
Last year, the Bureau of Transportation reported that nearly half the city’s streets were in poor or very poor condition. Thanks to continued neglect, they have breached the 50 percent threshold: in 2013, 54 percent were poor or very poor, while the share in good or very good condition shrank from 30 to 26 percent (see page 32 of the above-linked report).
Worse, the city’s annual street maintenance budget of $11.8 million (which includes a one-time-only supplement of $4.1 million in 2013), is a mere $79.8 million short of what the Bureau says it needs to halt the declining condition of the streets. That’s right: the city needs to increase street maintenance funding by 676 percent–not to improve the condition of poor and very poor streets but merely to “keep a significant number of [additional] streets from falling into very poor condition” (p. 34).
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The news isn’t all bad. The city’s downtown parking garages, which were built as a favor to downtown property owners, have zero maintenance needs because parking fees cover all maintenance costs (though none of the capital costs). The city’s parking meters and aerial tramway also fund their own maintenance. This reinforces the Antiplanner’s contention that things funded out of user fees tend to be well maintained, while things funded out of tax dollars tend to be poorly maintained. We’ll see how well the aerial tram does when its maintenance needs significantly increase in another couple of decades.
The report alludes to this increase in maintenance costs over time when it reviews the existing streetcar lines, the first of which opened nearly 13 years ago. “Although this equipment is in good or better condition” today, says the report, “it will need to be replaced at the end of the streetcars’ useful life, which TriMet estimates to be 30 years.” Of course, no one has thought of where the money for such replacement will come from. Why should they? Portland’s mayor and city commissioners are not likely to still be in office in 17 years when the first line turns 30, and so won’t have to worry about that infrastructure crisis.
Instead of worrying about trivial things like future streetcar maintenance or current street maintenance, city officials dream of building new streetcar lines on 140 miles of city streets. The city’s streetcar plan projects that the first 18 miles will cost $36 million to $41 million per mile (including streetcars). At that rate, a 140-mile expansion would cost more than $5 billion, greater than the $4.8 billion replacement cost of the city’s entire 4,800-mile street system.
This emphasis on clunky streetcars is misplaced. For one, it does nothing for transit riders. From 2005 to 2012, the city of Portland saw a remarkable 20 percent increase in jobs, yet the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reports that transit commuting has remained essentially flat. Of the 50,000 new workers since 2005, more than 18,000 drive to work, 20,000 walk or bicycle, close to 11,000 work at home–and fewer than 100 take transit.
Between auto, bus, taxi, motorcycle, bicycle, and foot, nearly 97 percent of commuters rely on Portland’s streets and sidewalks that the city is allowing to deteriorate. Only 2.5 percent of commuters take some form of rail, whether streetcars or light rail, yet these are supported by the bulk of the city’s transportation funds. Welcome to America’s best-planned city.
For a real laugh look at FIG. 6 (page 21) of the Portland Streetcar System Concept Plan to see what Portland’s planners envision for a perfectly planned city: A 20-minute neighborhood where you can walk 1 mile or streetcar 3-4 miles in 20 minutes! They are ignoring the fact that you can drive 6 times as far in that 20 minutes!
Thanks
JK
Make the familiar case that mass transit helps alleviate traffic congestion, is environmentally friendly, provides access and mobility for the poor and elderly and, thanks to the growing preference for walkable urbanism, is the wave of the future. But grassroots movements have been fighting heavy rail billion dollar boondoggles for the last several years from Hawaii to Tampa. The problem with transit, the people that publicly support it don’t use it, the people that can afford it don’t need it and the people that need it cant afford it. Buses are cheaper than rail, order of magnitude cheaper. Transit systems in America have a nearly 80 billion dollar maintenance backlog. None of the projects have paid their capital costs, and all operate at a deficit. No one knows where the money is coming from to keep the systems repaired, yet the federal government is dispensing billions to localities eager to build or expand money-losing transit systems of their own.
All of the above is is true and clearly makes no sense. Here in Milwaukie the city is asking voters to pass a $4,000,000 property tax bond this May to have home owners pay $36 per $200,000 taxable value for 20 years to pay for the $5 million the city gave TriMet for the Milwaukie light rail the people didn’t want in the first place. Basically the city says pay up for light rail or we will cut core services such as police, fire protection and liberary.
They needed to put this on the ballot before they obligated the taxpayers money to TriMet with no clue how it would be payed for. The people did and do not want light rail comming into Milwaukie and voted not to fund North/South light rail all ready. That election was never overturned be the electorate and still stands.
I will not except extortion from our government and will vote NO!
If I could I would vote HELL NO!
I guess Portland didn’t get (or used fr other purposes) its share of the $780 BILLION stimulus that Obama and friends doled out a few years ago – ostensibly for infrastructure projects.
Calling for defenses, no matter how absurd, from Dan and msetty now. Come out and call us mendacious, the streetcar proponents and planners lily white, poor innocent individuals under attack by the astroturf-orchestrated GM anti-streetcar conspiracy redux.
Most Portlanders that I know realized a long time ago that streetcars and light rail are really just a huge infrastructure subsidy for real estate developers who happen to own many of the properties that border the ‘transit’ routes.
Thanks to continued neglect, they have breached the 50 percent threshold: in 2013, 54 percent were poor or very poor, while the share in good or very good condition shrank from 30 to 26 percent (see page 32 of the above-linked report).
Quality of life!
That’s right: the city needs to increase street maintenance funding by 676 percent–not to improve the condition of poor and very poor streets but merely to “keep a significant number of [additional] streets from falling into very poor condition” (p. 34).
I think this is Portland’s idea of ‘planned obsolescence’.
JC said:
Most Portlanders that I know realized a long time ago that streetcars and light rail are really just a huge infrastructure subsidy for real estate developers who happen to own many of the properties that border the ‘transit’ routes.
As are the streets, roads and freeways.
Your point?
As are the streets, roads and freeways.
Your point?
Unlike streetcars and light rail, the vat majority of people use streets, roads, and freeways.
Frank sez:
Unlike streetcars and light rail, the va[s]t majority of people use streets, roads, and freeways.
Your point is not directly relevant to the issue brought up by JC since he was talking about was subsidies to developers, where transit subsidies are dwarfed by the many trillions of subsidies inherent in roads and “free parking” (sic) system over the past 90+ years of almost complete governmental and cultural favoritism towards driving and sprawl and against urbanism.
Msetty lies:
here transit subsidies are dwarfed by the many trillions of subsidies inherent in roads and “free parking” (sic) system over the past 90+ years of almost complete governmental and cultural favoritism towards driving and sprawl and against urbanism.
Especially this juicy part:
cultural favoritism
So in other words, because people happen to like cars, car culture, and the development patterns that occur around the car, msetty has his poor feelings hurt and wants government to turn it all around and subsidize transit boondoggles to right some of the twisted wrongs he imagines against his preferred form of living. Of course, by preferred, I mean what he prefers for everyone else. Msetty himself lives on a palatial estate, as do practically all smart growth advocates:
Do As We Say, Not As We Do, Smart growth’s biggest boosters still love suburban living
And as a side thought, when was the last time a car “oriented” development in Portland, to use msetty’s twisted rhetoric, received a property tax abatement or outright government cash gift? That’s right, never. Of course, those subsidies to TOD are all OK cause it is just “making up” for decades of twisted sprawl-oriented subsidies.
It has already been established here that subsidy to car “culture” is in the order of about a cent per passenger mile. It has already been established here that everyone benefits from and pays for roads, even the USPS, which uses rural roads pick up and deliver msetty’s books at a subsidized rate.
It has been established that I sometimes use the swipe input method on an onscreen Android keyboard to comment.
It is clear that msetty must point out trifling typographical mistakes when I comment to make himself feel superior.
It is clear that msetty does not understand how to properly use sic.
It is clear that not everyone benefits from streetcars and light rail.
It is clear that msetty chooses to live somewhere where he cannot use a streetcar or light rail.
It is clear that msetty is just here to troll.
The subsidies to “car culture” has been somewhere between $50 and $100 trillion over the past century. So-called “free parking” accounts for at least a third of this.
And it is clear that Frank continues to be a complete ideologue who just cannot deal with facts that conflict with his skewed misinterpretations of the world.
Metrosucks deserves no response other than what is printed above is just more random brainfarts from an Eliza program, not that sophisticated at all.
Hey, Metrosucky, wanna help me sweep out my sister’s goat barn on our palatial estate? The materials there have more value than anything you spew out.
The hypocritical ideologue spaketh:
The subsidies to “car culture” has been somewhere between $50 and $100 trillion over the past century.
Nice unsupported assertion, hypocritical ideologue! No wonder you didn’t support it. Good luck finding a peer reviewed source that supports that fantasy number!
Enjoy your 50 acres of auto-accessible-only privacy!
The subsidies to “car culture” has been somewhere between $50 and $100 trillion over the past century.
How about we add up all the infrastructure for airplanes and call it subsidies to “airplane culture” since that takes away from msetty’s preferred mode of travel, rail. So sad for msetty that he’s stuck 100 years ago when his favored choo choo trains crossed the nation. But wait, he doesn’t personally care about using trains, he just wants the rest of us to do so. He wants to drive his SUV from his ranch in the Bay Area to his propaganda address wherever and rake in the bucks for being a smart growth shill.
The incident above, in the Anti Planner’s picture, is another reason why
https://www.facebook.com/BicyclistsBelongInTheTrafficLane
50 to 100 trillion? Just in road subsidies? Please use figures that have some relationship to reality.
The total US federal budget for the last 18 years is between 40 and 50 trillion. (and a lot of that is borrowed money).Just a small fraction was spent for roads (much of which was covered by the gasoline tax-hardly a subsidy).
Prior to that time frame, budgets were much smaller and the total US budgets for the first 82 years of the last century would be less than MSetty’s estimate just for road subsidies.
And we do know that at least a little bit of those funds were used for something other than roads and highways.