Loading

Cars at crux of tension between Metro and suburbs

FRESH LOOK — Transit road map hinges on city, county, region agreement

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Nov 28, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Every day for more than a decade, Chris Todd has been commuting from Vancouver, Wash., to Wilsonville.

As the freeway has become more congested, he’s learned tricks for dodging traffic while heading south, but on the trip home, he has no choice — the queues of cars that once began north of Portland now start on the Terwilliger curves.

He wishes he could take light rail, but his fellow Clark County voters did not approve a line connecting to Portland in 1995. So now, for the first time, he’s talking seriously with his wife about taking a job in Vancouver — their children are involved in too many good programs there to leave.

“Even though I’m paying Oregon income tax, I don’t get to vote,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Portland Tribune, “nor has there been any significant transportation investment to relieve the commute for those of us in Vancouver who are contributing (by paying Oregon income taxes).”

Todd is not the only one chafing at congestion, wondering what the plan is and who is in charge. In poll after poll, congestion rates as a major concern.

Who’s in charge? That’s Metro, the regional planning agency that’s supposed to guide the way for Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties, as well as some two dozen cities and towns within them.

Under federal law, Metro is the agency that hands out federal transportation funds for the region.

And the plan? Well, for more than two decades Metro has put out a regional transportation plan. But local officials are increasingly saying it

doesn’t go far enough.

They want to revise the plan by this time next year, as part of the agency’s “New Look” at how to achieve its overall development and transportation goals.

So what was the old look? What will the New Look look like? And how do we look so far?

Agencies may collide

Every five years, a new regional transportation plan, covering everything from roads to bike lanes and trails to mass transit, is produced by city, county and Metro officials who make up the Metro Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation.

Though the region’s process has changed only gradually over the years, it still gets a lot of kudos. Portland, says Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Institute in British Columbia, does “some of the best planning in North America.”

For a city said to do such a great job of charting its future, however, the road map is surprisingly blurry.

For example, the next light-rail expansion

largely will be determined not by Metro, but by the transit agency TriMet, which tends to juggle projects until it finds one that meets the criteria for federal funding.

Today, ask TriMet General Manager Fred Hansen what’s next, and he won’t give you a definitive answer, saying only that a line down Southwest Barbur Boulevard is “more than a glint in the eye.”

“There is no master plan,” said Metro President David Bragdon of the region’s transportation system. “But there should be.”

Another problem: The road map of future transportation spending is, like so many maps, the product of politics.

According to many participants, the regional plan’s list of proposed projects has been based not on getting the best bang for the buck but on political horse-trading by Metro Joint Policy Advisory Committee members to get their projects slated for building.

Rather than a rational long-term plan with specific, measurable goals, the dynamic is “how do we divide the spoils” of available transportation funding, said Portland city Commissioner Sam Adams.

Yet another problem with the road map? Not everyone follows it.

The current regional transportation plan, for instance, says the streetcar is for local trips in high-density inner-city areas. The city-affiliated nonprofit Portland Streetcar Inc., however, is applying for federal funds to expand its operations outside the central city — despite being warned by TriMet’s Hansen that doing so likely will reduce future construction and operating funds for light rail and buses.

Moreover, the current push to run streetcars on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Grand Avenue — already one of the best-served areas in the region for transit — is continuing despite internal objections by TriMet staff that the streetcar might need its own lane on the streets, according to TriMet documents.

Nor, documents and interviews show, has there been a concerted effort — let alone a public discussion — to balance the goals of streetcar proponents, the efficiency concerns of TriMet and the economic realities of companies that have their own designs on that corridor for moving freight by truck.

The haphazardness of such efforts is something Metro is trying to rein in. In the past, the Metro Council almost always would just sign off on what the Metro Joint Policy Advisory Committee hashed out.

Now, however, led by Councilor Rex Burkholder, the Metro Council is quietly brandishing its veto on projects it thinks are poor ideas.

With little money to spend, Metro officials say they want to focus on projects that provide the most return on the public’s investment, as measured by several goals, or “outcomes.”

What outcomes? That is the question.

And to understand the road map of the future, you’ve got to return to the past.

Moses gained, lost followers

In 1943, Robert Moses, the nation’s master road-builder who made the state of New York a leader in freeway and park development, was hired to map out a transportation system for the Portland region.

His grid of proposed freeways sliced up Portland like a birthday cake.

Back in New York, meanwhile, Moses was building roads and bridges galore, and citizens started realizing the downside to his approach, historian Robert Caro wrote in his Moses biography, “The Power Broker.”

1 | 2 Next Page >>