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Dead Again–This Time For Certain?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Columbia River Crossing, which was dead, then was alive, now is once more dead. This $3 billion to $4 billion project was going to replace the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington, extend light rail into Vancouver, Washington, and rebuild several of the freeway interchanges north and south of the river.

Bridge supporters said it would relieve congestion, but it wasn’t clear how replacing a six-lane bridge with a twelve-lane bridge would relieve congestion when there were only six lanes approaching the bridge from the north and south. Instead, the real goal was to create lots of contracts for bridge builders, rail builders, highway contractors, and various other engineering and construction firms.

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Subsidies Here, Subsidies There, Subsidies Everywhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

The Port of Portland plans to spend up to $4 million giving shipping companies incentives to send containers through Portland, rather than another West Coast port. The subsidies would pay shippers $20 per container that is shipped through Portland.

This is a classic zero-sum game: If Portland attracts any containers that would otherwise have gone to Seattle, Vancouver, or some other West Coast port, the other ports will merely match Portland’s subsidies to get the business back. The shipping companies earn a little extra profit, taxpayers lose,and consumers probably won’t save enough to measurably increase purchases of imported goods.

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Time Running Out for TriMet

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is building one of the most expensive light-rail lines ever and is planning several more. Yet the agency is running out of money. The cost of maintaining rail lines grows rapidly as they approach 30 years of age, and TriMet’s oldest line was opened for business 28 years ago.


Click image to download the Secretary of State’s audit of TriMet (5.6-MB pdf).

An audit of TriMet by Oregon’s Secretary of State finds that the agency is already falling behind its maintenance needs. A decade ago, it was completing 92 percent of track maintenance and 100 percent of signal maintenance on time. Today those numbers have fallen to 53 percent for track and 72 percent for signals.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is flying to Salt Lake City today to speak at a legislative forum tomorrow sponsored by the Sutherland Institute. The topic will be Utah’s 30-year transportation plan. Since the Antiplanner is skeptical about our ability to know things even five years in advance, you can imagine what I’ll be saying about a 30-year plan.

Thursday, I’ll be in Olympia, Washington to speak at a Senate Governmental Operations Committee work session about growth-management planning. My main message will be that growth-management created many more problems than it solved. Most important, according to Coldwell Banker, the price of a 2,200-square-foot house in Seattle is more than three times the price of a similarly sized house in Houston.

However, despite me being very imaginative in coming up with reasons for not studying the subject, I could never tadalafil india cialis come close to Calvin’s reason of not doing his Math homework. Pineal Gland – Located at the center of the brain, it was investigated on whether the intake of it. brand cialis canada pfizer viagra mastercard devensec.com The drug is safe for consumption for most people. If you are suffering from porn-induced erectile dysfunction, it is advised to take up some simple exercises like jogging, walking, swimming viagra uk sales and stretching. Friday I’ll be in Lake Oswego, Oregon, talking about a proposed “high-capacity transit” line to Tigard, Oregon. The term high-capacity transit is a joke, as Portland’s light-rail system can’t run more than two cars in a train (due to the city’s short blocks) and no more than 20 trains an hour. At 150 people per car, that’s 6,000 people per hour. A good busway could move nearly ten times that many people.

In any case, if I get a chance, I’ll try to post some updates over the next few days.

Portland’s Continuing Disaster

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
55 Comments

The Oregonian‘s latest coverage of Portland’s densification disaster focuses on outer Southeast Portland, a neighborhood that lacks sidewalks on three out of four streets and has poor roads and transit service to boot. When the city proposed to densify the neighborhood in 1996, residents hotly protested, but the city promised to add sidewalks and improve other services.

Since then, the city has added not an inch of sidewalk, roads are in worse shape than ever, and transit service is even less frequent than it was in 1996. But the city has permitted the construction of more than 14,000 new dwelling units. One homeowner (presumably not the home’s occupant) built five three-story duplexes in his or her backyard.

This is the fate that was planned for Oak Grove, a neighborhood the Antiplanner lived in until 1998. Oak Grove was one of 36 neighborhoods targeted by Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, for densification. Metro also gave Portland and 23 other cities and three counties population targets that they had to meet by densifying neighborhoods. Oak Grove residents protested loudly enough that they avoided densification, but that just meant that some other neighborhood had to be densified to meet the population targets.

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Infill Equals Demolition of Existing Homes

By | | Housing, Urban areas
30 Comments

When urban planners talk about infill, they make it sound so benign. “We’ve identified some vacant lands, and we’ll direct growth there instead of sprawling at the urban fringe.”


Portland builders often demolish one home and replace it with four “skinny houses” like this one.
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In reality, infill can mean a complete transformation of neighborhoods, one house at a time. Hundreds of homes are being demolished each year to be replaced with either larger houses (such as this one that is four times the size of the house it replaced) or multifamily housing. Either way can be way out of character for the neighborhood.

This is happening in wealthy neighborhoods as well as working-class neighborhoods. The Antiplanner doubts that this is what people thought they were signing up for when they agreed to give a regional planning agency authority over their zoning codes. Residents of other regions need to beware of local officials offering the bring them the wondrous benefits of Portland-style planning.

Back from the Grave

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Once declared dead, the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing may yet be built. Despite the Washington legislature’s decision not to fund its share of the boondoggle project, Oregon’s governor is twisting arms and holding a special session of the state legislature today to gain approval (and $450 million in state funds) for the bridge.

Some of the twisting appears to have been done in the Washington, DC office of the Coast Guard, which granted the bridge a permit despite the fact that it will interfere with navigation. The DC office apparently did an end run around the Coast Guard’s Seattle regional office, which had opposed the permit. Oregon has agreed to pay $90 million in compensation to three shipping companies whose operations will be affected by the bridge.

The Columbia River Crossing is a plan to build a new Interstate-5 bridge across the Columbia. The new bridge would have more and wider lanes than the existing one and would also have room for light rail. Some bridge opponents object to the added road capacity; others object to the light rail. All the opponents agree that a replacement bridge isn’t necessary as the existing bridge is in sound condition.

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Piling Subsidies on Subsidies

By | | City planning
8 Comments

Portland has a history of piling on subsidies to support subsidies. Depending on who you talk to, it either subsidizes rail transit to support subsidized high-density developments or it subsidizes high-density developments to support subsidized rail transit.


Like so much of Portland’s government-funded infrastructure, the twin towers of Portland’s convention center have no structural function but exist–at who knows what cost–solely because they are pretty. Wikimedia commons photo by Cacophony.

Now it is about to decide to build a subsidized hotel in order to support a subsidized convention center. Advocates imply that the hotel will pay for itself, but the truth is that an $80 million subsidy to Hyatt will come mostly out of taxes paid by other hotels in the city. Hyatt will pay another $120 million, getting a $200 million hotel for 60 percent of the cost.

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Alive Again?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

The once-dead Columbia River Crossing, a $3.5-billion project to build a $1.0 billion bridge across the river between Portland and Vancouver, may be alive again. After the Washington legislature rejected the idea that Washington state taxpayers should contribute $400 million to the plan, Portland bridge supporters have come up with an idea: Just build the bridge, but nothing north of the bridge in Washington.

The plan basically called for a $1.2 billion bridge, a $1.0 billion low-capacity rail line, and $1.5 billion replacing all highway interchanges for miles north and south of the bridge. Although the new bridge would have more lanes than the current bridge, the highways leading to it from both directions would have no more lanes, so the total capacity would not be significantly increased.

The existing bridge is not in any danger of falling down, but Portland wants to cram low-capacity rail down Vancouver’s throat, and replacing the bridge is an excuse for doing so. To keep the plan alive, advocates suggest deleting all of the highway interchange reconstruction in Washington. If Washington decides to reconstruct those interchanges later, it can come up with the funds later. Of course, the plan still includes low-capacity rail.

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Governor’s “Advisor” Actually Paid Lobbiest

By | | Planning Disasters
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Before being shut down, the Columbia River Crossing–a consortium of eight government agencies–spent $170 million. The lion’s share of that went to one consulting firm, David Evans and Associates, which was supposed to write the draft and final environmental impact statements for the bridge.

In fact, it turns out that Evans hired a lobbyist to convince the Oregon state legislature to appropriate well over $400 million to built the bridge. But the lobbyist, Patricia McCaig, never registered as a lobbyist or revealed her source of income. Instead, she claimed to be a “special advisor” to the governor.

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The dark nature of the consulting world–where government agencies overpay consultants to do various analyses and then the consultants promote the projects–always seemed apparent. But this is the first case in the Northwest at least where a consultant was caught redhanded covertly spending money lobbying for an expensive project. This is just one more reason why government should avoid doing megaprojects like the Columbia River Crossing, which involved a bridge, a light-rail line, reconstruction of numerous highway intersections, and other work.