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The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive

By | | Urban areas
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Portland — the place where people are content to be unambitious; an alternative universe, Gore won, the Bush administration never happened; where you can put a bird on something and call it art! No wonder the media love Portland.
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This is apparently the teaser for Portlandia, a series to begin on IFC in January. Jack Bogdanski predicts it will be “hysterically funny, unless you live here, in which case it’s reality.” Too bad the Antiplanner doesn’t get that channel.

How Many Lies Are in These Documents?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s Metro has published an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed streetcar line to Lake Oswego, the city’s wealthiest suburb. Why anyone thinks people in Lake Oswego would want to ride a streetcar to Portland is beyond the Antiplanner, but Metro’s goal is to spend money, not to transport people.

The Antiplanner turned almost at random to page 6-10 (physical page 398) and found an interesting table: “Cost-Effectiveness by Alternative.” This EIS actually considers a bus alternative, but the table says it is not cost-effective. The cost of carrying one new rider on the bus is $3.82, says the table, while the cost of carrying a new streetcar rider is only $0.98.

But wait just a moment: the table says these numbers represent the “operating cost per new transit person trip.” The traditional measure of cost per new trip, as defined by the Federal Transit Administration, included capital costs amortized at 7 percent over 30 years. When amortized capital costs are added in, the cost per new trip of the bus is $7.93, while the cost of the streetcar is $19.01.

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Transit Unions: Victims or Bullies?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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A Portland transit union leader says his members have been “victimized” by a free-market group that posted their salaries on line. But who is the real victim here: the people collecting the salaries or the people whose taxes pay the salaries even if they never ride transit?

Back in June, a free-market group in New York posted salaries for all government workers in that state, leading the New York Times to calculate that more than 8,000 New York City transit workers earn more than $100,000 a year. Portland’s TriMet has only about 100 employees who are paid more than $100,000. Most are administrators, but at least one is a bus driver and several work in maintenance.

Of course, New York’s MTA has 70,000 employees compared with about 2,600 who work for TriMet. The list of TriMet salaries also lists $18,540 in benefits for most employees, but this does not count unfunded pension liabilities that the agency has incurred for each employee.

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Portland Urban Renewal Scam

By | | City planning, Urban areas
6 Comments

The Antiplanner’s former hometown of Portland, Oregon, is proposing to create a new urban renewal district that is so gerrymandered that blogger Jack Bogdanski suspects it must cover at least 50 scams.

Most of Portland’s previous urban renewal districts are pretty regular, following roughly rectangular boundaries. The proposed new district has fingers going in all directions, often connected to other parts of the district by an area no wider than a street. Some of the fingers overlap existing or lapsed districts.

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Good Luck to Lake Oswego Streetcar Opponents

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Residents of Lake Oswego, Portland’s wealthiest large suburb, have hired one of the state’s leading (and most liberal) political consultants to oppose a planned streetcar between downtown Portland and their community. Who has the bucks to hire Bergstein? One of the names mentioned is Elaine Franklin, wife of former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood. As Bojack says, “this might be more fun than we first thought.

Why is this even an issue when TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is nearly broke? The Federal Transit Administration is giving TriMet “only” half the cost of a ridiculous (and ridiculously expensive) light-rail line to Milwaukie, a suburb whose residents soundly trounced funding for light rail the last few times it was on the ballot. As a light-rail pioneer, TriMet is used to getting the feds to pay for 75 percent or more of its light-rail boondoggles.

To make up some of the difference, TriMet is asking voters for permission to sell $125 million worth of bonds (to be repaid by property taxes) to buy new buses. This is really just a ploy to support light rail, as transit agencies almost never borrow money to buy new buses. But the agency lost the last three times light rail was on the ballot, so it hopes voters might think buses are worth funding instead.

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Living Lightly in Portland

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
18 Comments

The New York Times loves to tell stories of people who got off the “work-spend treadmill” by selling off all but about 100 personal items and moving into a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Portland. Even the Wall Street Journal has jumped on board by telling the heartwarming story of someone who bought and remodeled a small bungalow in Portland.

Actually, they didn’t exactly remodel it. Instead, they tore it down and built this 7,600-square-foot house complete with a wine cellar, sauna, and lap pool. But the good news is that the owners feel the home is too ostentatious, so they are selling it and plan to buy a smaller house in Portland. And a house in Hawaii. They are also keeping their condo in San Francisco.

It is good to know that the Antiplanner is not the only one who is skeptical of conspicuous minimalist consumption.

Is Portland’s Plan Working?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Urban areas
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A new census of downtown Portland employers reveals that, for the first time since the annual census began in 2001, the number of downtown workers taking transit to work exceeded the number driving in 2009. This isn’t because the number taking transit to work increased — it declined by 6 percent — but because the number biking and walking to work grew by 170 percent.

You can look at all the census data for 2001 through 2006 in the 2006 report. The 2007, 2008, and 2008 reports contain commuting data only for those years. These data were collected by the Portland Business Alliance.

The increase in biking and walking to work accounts for almost 90 percent of the reduction in driving to work, and some might say this is a victory for Portland planners. But a comparison of the downtown census data with U.S. census data for the city of Portland and Portland urban area in 2000 and 2008 reveal some problems. (Note: The U.S. Census did not report commuting data in its 2001 survey, and the 2009 survey data are not out yet, so I am using 2000 and 2008 to compare with the downtown census’ 2001 and 2009 data.)

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Not the Only One

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
22 Comments

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TriMet’s Latest Big Lie

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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TriMet’s $166 million “Westside Express Service” (WES) commuter rail is a miserable failure. After going 60 percent over budget, it is carrying only about 600 round trips per day. The amortized value of the capital cost alone is enough to buy every one of those commuters a brand-new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years. Those Priuses would be cleaner than the WES too.

Click for a larger view. Thanks to Steve Schopp for the photo.

So naturally TriMet wants to “celebrate WES” so much that it is advertising this great project on the back of its buses. Note that it isn’t asking people to actually ride the train, because that would never happen — no offense to Wilsonville, Tualatin, or Tigard, but from a transportation view the train goes from nowhere to nowhere, which kind of explains why hardly anyone rides it.

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