More Meetings for Things You Don’t Want
You’re going to get more streetcars, whether you like it or not. Just ignore the fact they don’t really relieve congestion. PDOT will be holding a series of meetings about future streetcar planning.
On a sorta-related note, my sister was in town last weekend from Phoenix. I asked her how long it takes her to get to work, and she told me a little less than half an hour, noting that it was very fast despite how far she lives from her office. Why? In Phoenix, they build roads. Imagine that! Building transportation infrastructure which can meet the demands of the people… what a concept!
Posted in Business/Development, Government/Politics |
March 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Your control group may not be the best choice. From what I can tell Phoenix is one of only two cities (the other being Houston) that have improved traffic congestion in the entire nation.
Where will all the extra lanes and roads go? Hwy 26 has been widened about as far as it can in the bottlenecks, I-5 can be improved with a new bridge but that’s not going to help the Portland city center bottleneck as the area continues to grow.
Street cars can’t reduce congestion in a growing city, but they may reduce the *rate of increase* of congestion (though it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the effect of rising gas prices).
March 18th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Have you seen Phoenix?
I’ll take a little bit of congestion for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening over that ugliness any day!
March 18th, 2008 at 11:41 am
That would be fine with me too. But Portland has been far from “a little bit” and “an hour” for many years. The reality is that Portland hasn’t upgraded freeway capacity significantly in decades.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Highway 26 has had a lot of work done the past few years, I’m not sure what you could do to I-5 other than a new bridge over the Columbia which is already in the works yes? And places like Sunnyside have been upgraded as more development poured in.
And I’m still having trouble seeing how this problem is more pronounced in Portland than anywhere else in the nation. The US has a lot of infrastructure upgrades to make in the next twenty years…
April 28th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
The most common response to “Portland needs roads” that I have seen is: “We haven’t updated our capacity in 30+ years, it’s just too big a job now.” I think I tried that one as a child, “But Mom, I haven’t cleaned my room in two weeks, it’s too messy for me to do now.” It didn’t work for me, and it shouldn’t work for this town.
Maybe my Mother should be running Portland?
The city and it’s planners continue to play fast and loose with figures, try and convince us that we’re really all in the trains every day, and they don’t really take 3 times as long as driving (at best), and pushing 184,000 lbs of metal really must be an efficient way to transport the 20-30 people I usually see on it. However, the 90-some odd percent of the population that has to drive, or bus, daily, really would like the roads worked on…
We’d also like the sabotage to stop. Consistently, four-lane roads in this town have been restriped to two lanes, then cicanes, pedestrian islands (where no pedestrians ever tread), traffic circles, and speed bumps erected. The city could probably gain a 20% increase in usable lane-space by restriping again.
May 18th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Actually traffic in Portland really hasn’t gotten any worse for a long while. Hwy 26 actually got really nice for about 2 years with a lane addition. Now of course it has been filled up and is beginning to encroach upon being a jam everyday again. Now Vancouver is a completely different story, but it isn’t Portland so I generally don’t include it. ;P I-5 really seems to be the issue. 217 is kind of problematic but it generally doesn’t “stop”, but just moves at maximum throughput of 30mph traffic.
Compared to Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Memphis, all cities I spent more than 3 months in with the daily commute, Portland is by far the easiest - being that it actually has options helps too. It however is more costly than the other three if one doesn’t want to deal with a commute, but the choice is there. By comparison there is no congestion here compared to the other cities. The gap in cost of living has definitely decreased also as the cost to live in those cities has skyrocketed because of gas prices. Every Interstate in and out of everyone of those cities is congested during rush hour and other hours during the day and I’m fairly sure the average commute is far more than what it is here. Inclusive of the congested areas are the highways, primary arterials, and feeder streets also.
Of course all that said, the Streetcars won’t help a damn thing in this city. Especially with the implementation. It is by form and function a mere amenity. It does attract some development, theoretically, but I’m very doubtful that it attracts development like the Portland Streetcar non-profit likes to brag about. Only one system has attracted that, the one here in PDX, and it also went hand in hand with millions upon millions in tax abatements. Kind of a chicken or the egg at that points.
Anyway, I’m done rambling.
I would like to see some real commuter rail options though, done cheaply like the WES train. They could run that for about 1/5th-1/12th the cost of light rail, and it could be ramped up to carry even MORE than light rail since it is heavy rail. But if they keep blowing the cash on streetcars…
…ok, now I’m really done rambling and ranting.