Think outside box on traffic

By Robert Behnke

The Portland Tribune, Jan 6, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Traffic congestion now costs Portland-area residents hundreds of millions of dollars a year in wasted time and wasted fuel. It also increases the prices of goods and services, and it reduces our quality of life.

In Oregon, the governor appoints the directors and commissioners who oversee the performance of TriMet and the Oregon Department of Transportation. Is there anything affordable that the present or the next governor can do to get Portland off the list of U.S. metropolitan areas with the fastest growing traffic congestion?

Most people believe Oregon’s governor has two basic choices available to accommodate the future growth of the Portland area’s population and to control traffic congestion:

• Plan A raises taxes significantly and spends most of the money on new highways and what’s left on public transportation. Opponents believe this approach will cost more money than voters or legislators are willing to provide; uses too much land; limits travel choices; increases environmental and energy problems; and fails to halt the long-term growth of traffic congestion.

• Plan B raises taxes significantly and spends most of the money on big-box (i.e., fixed-route bus and rail) transit and what’s left on highways. Opponents believe that this approach will cost more money than voters or legislators are willing to provide and that door-to-door travel by big-box transit is too inconvenient and too slow to attract sufficient riders.

No growing metropolitan area in the U.S. has been able to reduce the long-term growth of traffic congestion via either plan. The opponents of both plans are right.

I hope Oregon’s governor will have the wisdom to reject both of these high-cost, low-payoff approaches and adopt some variation of Plan C, which is advocated by Joel Garreau, author of “Edge Cities.” Plan C uses low-cost information technologies to make regional transportation systems more cost-effective.

Garreau was in Portland in early December to give a speech on future technical trends, as part of the Linus Pauling Lecture Series on Science & Technology.

Although Garreau believes that public transportation systems can shape the future of communities in the United States and other countries, “it must (first use Plan C to) drastically change the way it operates.”

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit