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Is the Columbia River Crossing Finally Dead?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington legislature refused to fund the state’s share of a proposed bridge across the Columbia River, proving that at least a few Pacific Northwest politicians still have an ounce of common sense. That doesn’t include the Oregon legislature, which had agreed to put up more than $400 million for the project.

As a result of the Washington legislature’s decision, the Columbia River Crossing office is closing its doors after having spent something like $200 million on a stupid plan for a new bridge that wasn’t going to be tall enough for existing river traffic and whose main goal was to send a low-capacity rail transit line from Portland to Vancouver, Washington.

The two bridges that the new bridge was supposed to replace don’t really need replacement. While one was built in 1913 (and the other in 1958). the older of the two could probably have been replaced for about half a billion dollars if it were really necessary. But the proposed new bridge and associated projects were projected to cost $3.4 billion.

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TriMet Tramples on People’s Credit; Streetcars Still Late

By | | Transportation
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Portland transit follies are increasingly scrutinized by the local media, something that should have happened years ago when there was still a chance of stopping projects such as the $1.5 billion boondoggle low-capacity rail line to Milwaukie. (The video below shows why it is such a boondoggle.)

Joseph Rose, the superreporter who can walk faster than a speeding streetcar, has found that the fare machines for Portland’s low-capacity rail lines are in service a lot less than the agency claims. Some are down more than 35 percent of the time. Since they give out $175 tickets to people who don’t pay their fare, this can be distressing.

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Portland’s Creative Class Gets to Work

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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Thanks to the industriousness of Portland’s creative class of young, well-educated people, Oregon now has the third-highest food stamp rate of any state in the country. As shown in the chart below, Oregon was disgustingly below average in the 1990s, but shot up in 2001, the year the Portland streetcar opened, and has been in the top three since about 2009. Today, it is behind only Louisiana and Mississippi (and, it might be noted, DC), states well known for their hard work and creativity.

It wasn’t easy for Oregon to achieve the status of being number three. Back in the 1990s, most Oregonians on food stamps were rural residents put out of work by the decline in federal land timber sales. But that can only go so far, as there aren’t that many sawmills left that remain to be put out of business. So the creative class got to work, making Oregon one of the first states to distribute food stamps in the form of an debit card so there would be no stigma put on those using it. In fact, the card is called the “Oregon Trail” card, thus identifying food-stamp recipients with the brave pioneers who first settled Oregon 170 years ago.

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Can’t Afford to Pay Bus Drivers, But . . .

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
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Neil McFarlane, the general manager of Portland’s TriMet transit agency, stunned Portland-area residents recently when he warned that the agency would have to cut service by 70 percent unless unions agreed to reduced benefits in upcoming contract negotiations. When he did so, he piously noted that TriMet’s non-union managers have had a pay freeze for four years.

Turns out that pay freeze was more imaginary than real. In the last year alone, TriMet gave its managers pay increases totaling nearly $1 million. McFarlane alone received a 3 percent raise, which–considering his previous pay was $215,000 a year–means a $6,450 boost to his income.

TriMet’s financial woes are hardly new. Last year, TriMet made the largest service cuts in its history and also decided to start charging fares in what was formerly the downtown Fareless Square. Most of the streetcar line had been in Fareless Square, and as a result actual streetcar fare collections averaged less than 4 cents per reported ride.

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Portland’s Latest Planning Failures

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Recently the Antiplanner recounted some of the consequences of Portland’s race to become the nation’s best-planned city: failing schools; crumbling streets; lack of funding for building maintenance; and declining transit service. Now we have more information on the street situation plus one more example of mismanagement.

Portland’s city auditor has released two new reports showing that the city’s priorities are screwed up. A January report found that, even though the city’s transportation budget has been growing, spending on street maintenance, traffic signals, and structural maintenance” has been declining. A more recent report specifically criticized the city for neglecting its streets, saying nearly half need “significant rehabilitation or reconstruction” to put them in acceptable condition. “Despite knowing the inevitable and costly consequences of failing to maintain streets,” the city “limited street maintenance work in recent years, choosing instead to focus on other priorities.”

This is underscored by the city’s own report card showing that maintenance of pavement, traffic signals, bridges, and street signs fail to meet the city’s own standards.

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Stressful and Unpredictable

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland traffic is “stressful and unpredictable,” according to one of the co-authors of the Texas Transportation Institute’s urban mobility report. In fact, by some measures, Portland has the sixth-most-congested freeways in the nation, after DC, New York, Los Angeles, Bridgeport, and (strangely) Provo-Orem.

There are other measures by which Portland isn’t quite so bad, though overall Portland ranks 17th even though it is the 23rd largest urban area. The significance of the freeway number is that it is based on actual measurements of traffic by Inrix, while most of the other measures are calculated based on estimates of miles of driving and lane miles of roads. The Antiplanner has never trusted these calculations because a lane mile of highway built in 2000 has a far greater capacity to move traffic than one built in 1950. Thus, the measure that ranks Portland sixth-worst is probably one of the most reliable in the report.
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Portlandia supporters, of course, attempt to double-talk their way out of this. The mobility report, says one, “ignores differences in trip distances among metro areas and how trip distances have changed over time.” The Texas people disagree, saying they do take distances into account. Moreover, a look at census data reveal that the average Portland commuter takes 24.2 minutes to get to work, which about the same as in other urban areas of similar size (Minneapolis is 23.4 minutes; Denver is 25.7; St. Louis is 23.6; Cincinnati is 22.8; San Antonio 23.8). Since census data also show that 85 percent of Portland-area commuters still take autos to work, Portland’s investments in transit and bike paths have, at best, merely nibbled at the edges of the problem.

The Continuing Saga of the American-Made Streetcar

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland Streetcar, the non-profit organization that operates streetcars in Portland, is demanding that the city cough up $145,000 to fix its brand-new, American-made streetcar. Let’s take a look at the history of this car.

First, the city used its own money to buy streetcars from the Czech Republic for an average of $1.9 million apiece. Each streetcar has just 30 seats, but the cost per vehicle is about six times greater than a 40-seat bus. But that wasn’t expensive enough.

The most recent expansion of Portland’s streetcar system was funded by the federal government, which has a buy-America requirement. So Oregon’s congressional delegation and lobbyists persuaded the Federal Transit Administration to give Oregon Iron Works $4 million to build a prototype streetcar. The company used plans purchased from the Czech manufacturer of Portland’s streetcars to effectively produce a replica of those cars.

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Neglecting the Basics

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Portland is proud of being a livable city. Sure, its streets are crumbling, city buildings are neglected, and its schools are crappy. But don’t worry; it’s a livable city.

The Portland Building in August 1982. Photo by Steve Morgan.

A building so ugly that Willamette Week newspaper uses the “ugly” tag for any article that refers to it.

The Antiplanner noted last February that the city’s transportation bureau elected to give up on street paving and repair so that it could fund streetcars. The latest news is that the city isn’t even property maintaining its buildings, including the internationally famous (for being ugly) Portland building. The city has just over half the money it needs to keep this and other city buildings maintained.

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The Columbia River Crossing Is (or at Least Should Be) Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Taxpayers for Common Sense recently released a report (see page 27) that finds $2 trillion in budget cuts that will allow Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff”–and one of those cuts is the Columbia River Crossing. The agency planning this bridge has managed to spend well over $130 million without accomplishing anything except to design a bridge that the Coast Guard says doesn’t have enough clearance to allow Columbia River ship traffic.

The latest death knell for this porky project was the rejection by Vancouver, Washington voters of a sales tax designed to pay the operating costs of the light-rail line that was supposed to cross the bridge. This has led fiscal conservatives to argue that the current bridge proposal is dead and planners must start over.

The Oregonian editorial board sycophantically responds that the bridge is vital for economic growth and jobs, and the voters didn’t reject the bridge but merely that method of funding it. What a load of crap. Everyone in the Portland area knows that the bridge is totally bloated with pork and light rail.

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Density’s Parking Impact

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The City of Portland has approved numerous massive four- and five-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes separated by streets of single-story shops. These buildings stress the infrastructure built to handle a smaller population, which is most obvious in the increased traffic and parking problems–especially since many of the buildings are designed without parking.

Despite Portland’s reputation as a car-free city, I can attest that neighborhoods that once had few cars parked on the streets are now jammed with cars, indicating far more cars per housing unit than there were a few decades ago. The introduction of apartments lining the business corridors of these neighborhoods has led to huge increases in congestion, which isn’t helped by the fact that the city carefully keeps most signals uncoordinated so that people now frequently drive on neighborhood streets to avoid stopping at frequent red lights.

To allay concerns that the apartments were taking parking away from existing homes and businesses, the city just published a report reviewing the parking situation around eight recent buildings. Four of these had about two-thirds of parking space per dwelling unit on site, while the other four had no on-site parking (page 3). The city’s report found that, even during peak periods, at least 25 percent of on-street parking within two blocks of these buildings was vacant (p. 2).

That was enough to lead the Oregonian to headline its story about the report, “City study finds increase in no-parking apartments but little neighborhood parking impact.” There’s more to the story, however.

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