Editorial

Metro needs to stop and listen

The Portland Tribune, Feb 6, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (9 Reader comments)

Metro officials are traveling a slippery slope as they take initial steps to dramatically alter the region’s transportation plan at the same time the Portland metro area updates how it will accommodate more than a million additional residents living here in the next 20 years.

Disturbingly, a draft Metro transportation vision has the definite appearance of being more focused on achieving the regional government’s land-use objectives. Missing, we feel, is an equal emphasis on public priorities for enhanced safety, reduced congestion and maintaining existing roads and highways.

Also glaringly absent is an understanding that the region’s transportation system serves an entire state economy that is dependent upon effective transportation connections linking Oregon to the rest of the nation and the world.

It’s not a contest

While the vision calls for a focus on the entire transportation system, we sense a willingness within Metro to pit different forms of transportation systems against one another.

A recent Metro public opinion survey did as much when it asked respondents whether they would be willing to put “less money into roads and highways and more money into alternative forms of transportation that encourage community developments with housing, employment and stores in close proximity.”

While 63 percent answered “yes” to that question, their response cannot be interpreted as a rejection of road investments.

In the same survey, 91 percent of respondents also said they were “very willing” or “somewhat willing” to pay for maintaining existing roads, highways and bridges, and 68 percent were “very willing” or “somewhat willing” to pay for adding more lanes of traffic on major highways.

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