Stalled freight costs big bucks

Local businesses search for solutions as congestion throws schedules into chaos

By Lisa Baker

The Portland Tribune, Dec 21, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

It’s like a great pair of Manolo Blahnik high heels. Stylish. Cultured. Talked about.

But if you had to run Ñ really sprint Ñ to make it somewhere on time, you’d want something more utilitarian. Like sneakers.

Portland, while listed among the most livable, cultured cities in the nation, also is ranked among the worst for traffic congestion.

In the vernacular: Sure, it looks good, but can it move?

And businesses notice. Bill MacKenzie, a spokesman for Intel Corp., says success for a high-tech company means speed and precision Ñ not just in the development of its products, but in their delivery.

“We operate on precise time frames Ñ high-tech companies more than others,” he says. “Any deviation from schedules has a cost associated with it.”

Alongside commuters fuming at the inconvenience of the vehicle heap at Delta Park or any of the other chokeholds in the Portland metro area, trucks containing tons of freight are idling, too. And each minute, businesses say, they’re pouring another bucket of cash out the window.

The timing issue is so crucial that Intel has poured its own cash into adding wiggle room to the corset that is U.S. Highway 26 and to the squeeze play that is Oregon Highway 217. The company donated $500,000 for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s Highway 26 onramp project.

Even so, improvements statewide have not kept up with demand, and delay time has increased to 41 hours per year per driver, just five hours fewer than Seattle, according to this year’s national study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. The institute ranks the Portland area the 14th worst for congestion out of 85 urban areas Ñ an improvement on last year, when the region ranked eighth.

Susie Lahsene, manager of land use and transportation policy for the Port of Portland, says road delays have a real cost: “One minute spent idling in traffic costs $1 in wasted fuel and lost productivity. And that’s conservative.”

She says the 10,000 trucks on the Interstate 5 trade corridor at any given time experience delays that constitute a loss of $26 million worth of productivity annually, and more than a half-billion dollars over 20 years, a figure that doesn’t count the additional trucks needed to compensate for lost time.

The need to move freight has become more critical in the global marketplace, where successful companies are those with efficient supply lines that are able to reach the customer with speed and ease, Lahsene says.

No empathy for industry

The problem is, most Portlanders don’t see why they should care about the problems of industry, and if they don’t care, neither do policymakers, Lahsene says.

“Policymakers are responsive to their constituents, and freight doesn’t vote.”

Instead, she says, decision-makers have focused on passenger needs, neglecting freight concerns. “Getting the attention of policymakers for this issue has been a challenge,” she says.

Lahsene believes the key is to make Oregonians care so that their representatives will swing into action: “I think if people understood the economic relationship between industry and the consumer, it would help. We need to make it clearer to them.”

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