Congestion pricing is a quicker, more effective and greener way to reduce congestion at the Rose Quarter than spending $500 million on freeway widening.

Failing to advance pricing as an alternative in the environmental review is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act

For the past month, we’ve been taking a hard look at plans to spend $500 million to widen I-5 at the Rose Quarter near downtown Portland.  Ostensibly, this project aims to reduce congestion and improve safety. We’re at the point the process where the public is being asked to review the project’s Environmental Assessment (EA), a document prepared to address the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening EA looks at just two alternatives: a “Build” alternative, consisting of a $500 million, mile-long freeway widening, and a “No-Build.”

But the state could achieve the same objective, faster, more effectively and far more cheaply by implementing congestion pricing.

Tragically, the project’s environmental assessment didn’t consider that as a possible alternative. But look high and low in the Environmental Assessment and its Traffic Technical Report and you’ll find not a single mention of pricing. In our view, that’s a plain violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a consideration of a full range of reasonable alternatives.

Congestion pricing is a better solution for traffic, according to Oregon DOT’s own studies

Now in some places, you might be able to argue that congestion pricing is far-fetched or politically infeasible.  In Oregon, as it turns out, its neither:  In fact, it’s already been adopted as law.  Two years ago, Oregon’s Legislature adopted HB 2017, which directed the state Department of Transportation to begin work to implement congestion pricing on Interstate 5 and Interstate 205 in the Portland metropolitan area.  In addition, in December 2017, Portland’s City Council voted unanimously to endorse congestion pricing as part of the city’s future transportation planning. Last year, the state transportation department published a preliminary analysis of several pricing alternatives.  Among the proposals is one, called “Concept 2” which would extend pricing to all lanes of these two major freeways.

The studies undertaken by the Oregon Department of Transportation conclude that congestion pricing could measurably reduce traffic congestion on I-5. The analysis concludes that the project would reduce congestion and improve travel time reliability on I-5.  It would save travel time for trucks and buses.  It enables higher speeds and greater throughput on the freeway–because it eliminates the hyper-congestion that occurs when roads are unpriced. Here’s an excerpt from page 17, of the report.  We highlighted in bold the most salient bits of the analysis:

Overall, Concept 2 – Priced Roadway, will reduce congestion for all travelers on the priced facility. This will produce overall improvement in travel time reliability and efficiency for all users of I-5 and I-205.  [Concept 2 is] Likely to provide the highest level of congestion relief of the initial pricing concepts examined. [It] Controls demand on all lanes and, therefore, allows the highest level of traffic management to maintain both relatively high speeds and relatively high throughput on both I-5 and I-205. Vehicles 10,000 pounds and more (such as many freight trucks and transit vehicles) would benefit from travel time improvements on the managed facilities.  Pricing recovers lost functional capacity due to hyper-congestion, providing greater carrying volume with pricing than without. This means that diversion impacts may be minimal, but still warrant consideration and study.

This concept is relatively inexpensive to implement, and significantly less expensive than concepts that include substantial physical improvements to the pavement and bridge infrastructure.

Oregon Department of Transportation,, (2018). Portland Metro Area Value Pricing Feasibility Analysis Final Round 1 Concept Evaluation and Recommendations Technical Memorandum #3, 2018.

Bottom line:  congestion pricing works better for freeway users, freight mobility, and transit riders; in keeps unpriced traffic from causing hyper-congestion and effectively and is vastly cheaper than building new lanes and bridges.  It is also likely to result in minimal, if any diversion to local streets.

Omitting pricing as an alternative in the Environmental Assessment violates the National Environmental Policy Act

This is clearly a viable alternative to widening the freeway at the Rose Quarter.  Viable is actually a significant understatement:  pricing isn’t simply a viable alternative, it’s arguably, on its face, a superior alternative).  But that’s beside the point.  From a legal standpoint, not seriously evaluating road pricing as an alternative to expensive, environmentally damaging road widening is violates NEPA’s requirement for a robust analysis of alternatives.

The substantive requirements for alternative analysis are spelled out in 40 CFR1502.  As explained by the Federal Highway Administration,

The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) refers to the alternatives analysis section as the “heart of the EIS,” and requires agencies to:

1. Rigorously explore and objectively evaluate all reasonable alternatives and for alternatives which were eliminated from detailed study, briefly discuss the reasons for their having been eliminated.

2. Devote substantial treatment to each alternative considered in detail including the proposed action so that reviewers may evaluate their comparative merits.

The FHWA guidance requires that the agency clearly state the rationale for not advancing reasonable alternatives:

Alternatives analysis should clearly indicate why and how the particular range of project alternatives was developed, including what kind of public and agency input was used. In addition, alternatives analysis should explain why and how alternatives were eliminated from consideration. It must be made clear what criteria were used to eliminate alternatives, at what point in the process the alternatives were removed, who was involved in establishing the criteria for assessing alternatives, and the measures for assessing the alternatives’ effectiveness.

Nothing in the EA describes the criteria used to select or eliminate alternatives, nor is any analysis offered for the the failure to advance pricing as an alternative in its own right.  It’s simply arbitrary and capricious of the Oregon Department of TRansportation and the Federal Highway Administration to produce an Environmental Assessment which takes no notice of efforts they are both currently undertaking to implement road pricing on this very roadway.

Moreover, while NEPA requires that congestion pricing be evaluated separately as an alternative, it is also the case that road pricing ought to be incorporated in the analysis as part of the No-Build alternative.  The implementation of road pricing in the next decade or so is, in NEPA terms, a reasonably foreseeable event.  Just as the Environmental Analysis has incorporated its expectations about the growing electrification and increased fuel efficiency of future vehicles in its forecasts of emissions (due to the future implementation of fuel economy regulations), it should likewise include the analysis of congestion pricing, which is also a reasonably foreseeable part of the regulatory environment in the next decade or so.

Pricing first, building (if at all) later is the smarter choice

It’s likely that implementing road pricing would obviate entirely the need for capital construction at the Rose Quarter.  But even if it didn’t, it is far more prudent from both a fiscal and environmental standpoint to implement congestion pricing first, to determine which, if any, “improvements” are needed at the Rose Quarter to reduce congestion and improve safety. The “build first-price later” strategy is a recipe for squandering scarce public resources on roads that people don’t value and won’t use.  As we chronicled at City Observatory, Louisville spent a billion dollars adding capacity to its I-65 bridge over the Ohio River, only to discover that traffic volumes fell by almost half when they started charging a modest toll to bridge users.  It’s financially, as well as ecologically prudent to toll first, and then invest in capacity, when, were and as needed, only later.

Major cities around the world have implemented various forms of congestion pricing, with strongly positive results.  The London Congestion charge is well-known.  Pricing systems are up and running in Stockholm, Singapore and Milan. Once established, the systems generate strong public support because they make urban traffic flow more smoothly.  Systems in Milan and Stockholm were both endorsed in city-wide public referenda after being established. New York seems finally, to be on the verge of approving congestion pricing for lower Manhattan.

For the record, we’ve included a screen-shot of page 17 of the ODOT value pricing report here:

Oregon Department of Transportation, (2018). Portland Metro Area Value Pricing Feasibility Analysis Final Round 1 Concept Evaluation and Recommendations Technical Memorandum #3, 2018

Expanding freeway capacity on I-5 hasn’t reduced crashes in Woodburn, but did triple in cost

Today, we’re pleased to offer a guest commentary from Naomi Fast. Naomi currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon. Previously, she lived in Portland, where she learned to ride a bicycle as transportation while earning graduate degrees at Portland State University. Her website is naomifast.com

In the next few weeks, metropolitan Portland will be taking a close look at an Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) proposal to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland.  ODOT is marketing the project through the release of a multi-volume “Environmental Assessment,” which makes a number of claims about how the project will influence the environment, affect traffic, and–so we are told–reduce crashes.

But as the saying goes, this isn’t our first rodeo.  ODOT has been expanding capacity and widening chunks of I-5 for years. What has that experience taught us about how freeway widening affects safety, and what does it tell us about ODOT’s ability to bring projects in on time and under budget?

Previously, City Observatory has looked at a recent widening of I-5 just north of the Rose Quarter project area.  But just a few years ago, ODOT completed a capacity expansion project on I-5, about 30 miles to the south, at the Woodburn Interchange.  Just like the Rose Quarter, this project was pitched as a congestion-busting safety improvement. Did this project pan out as planned?

When I heard about two separate & serious multiple vehicle crashes this February at the Woodburn Interchange, each of which caused hours of delays on the I-5, I thought: Wait a minute—wasn’t that section widened recently?

As it turns out, it was. The expansion project at Milepost 271, completed in 2015, was in fact similar to in concept to the one being promoted now for the Rose Quarter.  While it didn’t add auxiliary lanes like those in the Rose Quarter, it did add huge new loop ramps with long exit and entrance lanes to increase capacity to move cars on and off I-5.  It had its own lengthy design process, with its own Environmental Assessment. It affected a little less than a mile of freeway, slightly smaller than the propose Rose Quarter widening, with a similar justification, and with an Environmental Assessment that compared just two options: Build & No Build.

Oregonians were told that congestion and crashes were going to be significantly reduced in that section, according to ODOT’s planning reports for the project.

• ODOT’s 2005 EA said, “Travel speeds, traffic flow, and overall safety and function would be improved for all modes of travel using the reconstructed interchange.”
• In the 2006 Revised EA report, ODOT said the widening would “provide a facility that would safely accommodate multimodal travel demands 20 years into the future.”
• A 2011 project paper said, “The purpose of the Woodburn Interchange Project is to improve the traffic flow and safety conditions of the existing Woodburn/I-5 interchange.”
• And at the 2015 ribbon cutting less than four years ago, even Governor Brown was optimistic, as seen in this video.

If improving safety is a key reason for widening freeways, then we should be looking for tangible real-world evidence that widened freeways, like the one at Woodburn, are getting safer.  That means the February crashes cast real doubt on the efficacy of freeway widening and flow improvements as a safety strategy. Along with the February 15th and 20th Woodburn Interchange crashes, there have been others; there was a fatal crash at the interchange just months after it opened.

ODOT’s own annual crash data aren’t conclusive.  In 2016, the first year after the project opened, and the latest year for which annual data are available, the project area experienced 14 crashes.  With so few crashes (less than one per month, on average) crash rates can vary a lot from year to year. The data so far suggest that the crash performance of this area is no better than it was before the project was built.  It remains to be seen how last month’s crashes will figure into the 2019 totals, but two in a little over two weeks is a lot.

There’s one other thing to consider:  While highway engineers almost always think its a good thing if traffic can move faster, safety analysts point to crash data that shows that speed is strongly associated with more crashes and more severe injuries.  The real world experience with widening Interstate 5, both here in Woodburn, and to the north of the project between Lombard and Victory in Portland, shows that contrary to the claims of engineers, there’s no reason to believe that wider freeways will have fewer, or less severe crashes.

How much will it cost?

There’s a postscript to the Woodburn Interchange story.  Not only does it not appear to have delivered improved safety, it’s also ended up costing vastly more than promised.  When initially proposed by the Oregon Department of Transportation in 2005, the project was supposed to cost $25 million (according to the project’s 2006 Environmental Assessment).  When finally completed in 2015, the project’s cost had nearly tripled to more than $70 million. In the case of the Rose Quarter–a much more complex project, in a dense urban setting–imagine if $500 million were to nearly triple.

Highway planners use a deeply flawed “lemming” model of traffic that rationalizes highway widenings

The traffic projections made as part of the Environmental Assessment for the $500 million Rose Quarter I-5 widening project make an audacious claim that the project will reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gases, and completely unlike any other freeway expansion project, won’t induce any additional demand.

How do they know that?  Because they have a model that says so.

But how realistic is that model?  As it turns out, not very.  As we detailed earlier, one  problem is that the model (without saying so) is based on the assumption that a 12-lane, 5 mile long freeway was built (reality check:  it wasn’t) between Portland and Vancouver in 2015, and is funnelling thousands and thousands more additional cars into the Rose Quarter than is actually the case.

But there’s a more fundamental problem. The traffic forecasting model used by ODOT is inherently structured to over-predict traffic congestion, and presents a distorted picture of what’s likely to happen with freeway widening.The model, a classic four-step traffic demand model (albeit with a few tacked on bells and whistles, like a microsimulation package) is decades old technique with a couple of critical and well documented weaknesses. The most important one is that it allows traffic to grow without limit in the “base” case.  It predicts that as population increases, more and more people will drive more and more miles, and that they will all be oblivious in their trip making behavior to any changes in congestion.  That is, they won’t be deterred by congestion from changing the timing, mode, destination, or whether they take a trip at all.  That’s because four-step models, like the one used to create the Rose Quarter I-5 estimates, uses something called static trip assignment, STA that takes almost no notice of the effects of congestion and delay.

In an important sense, static trip assignment is a kind of “lemming” model of travel behavior.  It assigns successively more and more trips to congested links even as they become more and more congested.  Implicitly, it assumes that traveler behavior doesn’t respond at all to experienced travel conditions, especially delay.  In fact, the model allows traffic to actually exceed the capacity of the roadway link–by definition of physical impossibility–and consequently over predicts traffic, and leads to forecasts of hours and hours of congestion, as more and more traffic piles obliviously onwards into the congested roadway–and does so every single day, with no learning or adaptation.  Like lemmings, you might say.

This is like the classic 1958 Walt Disney nature film, White Wilderness showing hundreds of lemmings running off the edge of a cliff.  The following lemmings leap to their death, even though they can see the lemmings in front of them falling.

In the film, the little rodents assemble for a mass migration, scamper across the tundra and ford a tiny stream as narrator Winston Hibbler explains that, “A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”

That destiny is to jump into the ocean. As they approach the “sea,” (actually a river -more tight cropping) Hibbler continues, “They’ve become victims of an obsession — a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!”

The “pack of lemmings” reaches the final precipice. “This is the last chance to turn back,” Hibbler states. “Yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space.”

Lemmings are an apt analogy, because in real life (as opposed to 1950s nature films) lemmings don’t actually blindly leap to their death.  As the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife explains, the classic footage which appears in White Wilderness was actually staged by the producers, who from positions off camera, chased the terrified lemmings off the cliff.

In a sense, that’s what modelers are doing with Static Traffic Assignment–no matter how bad congestion gets in the STA models, the lemming motorists, just keep pouring into the congested roadway link.  But in the real world, as opposed to traffic models or 1950s Disney films, drivers (and lemmings) don’t just mindlessly drive into congestion day after day (or jump off cliffs along with hundreds of others).  Instead, in the face of congestion, they change their behavior, changing the time, mode or destination of their journey, or foregoing it altogether.

What the unrealistic static traffic assignment lemming scenario does is to create a fictitious baseline forecast of traffic that looks truly horrible.  And, in comparison, the “build” scenario, in this case, a road widening, looks less bad.  And it also doesn’t have any “induced” demand, because the projections dramatically over-estimated the amount of traffic that would occur in the base no-build scenario. (Induced demand is almost impossible in these models because traffic demand is derived from an earlier step in the process and there’s no feedback loop of less delay to encourage greater trip-making.)

For technicians in the field, the problems with static traffic assignment are well documented.  Norm Marshall writing in the peer-reviewed technical publication “Research in Transportation Business and Management, says:

STA has two fundamental problems that make it ill-suited at analyzing peak period congestion. First, most peak period congestion, especially on freeways, involves traffic queuing behind bottlenecks. Therefore, the roadway segments are not independent, as is assumed in STA. Second, these bottlenecks meter traffic flow to the capacity of the bottlenecks. In sharp contrast, STA allows modeled traffic volumes to exceed capacity. This misrepresents traffic not only on the over-capacity segment, but on downstream segments that the excess traffic could not really reach because it either would divert to other routes or be queued upstream.

Forecasting the impossible: The status quo of estimating traffic flows with static traffic assignment and the future of dynamic traffic assignment, published in Research in Transportation Business and Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rtbm.2018.06.002

Static assignment models allow traffic forecast on specific segments of roadway to exceed the capacity of that segmenta –physical impossibility, and also inaccurately forecast actual speeds because of the non-linear relationship between capacity and speed.

There is a method to reduce this bias, called dynamic trip assignment, which adjusts travel volumes and routing based on modeled levels of congestion.  Portland Metro is developing some dynamic assignment techniques, but they weren’t used in preparing the forecasts for the Rose Quarter freeway widening project.

The lemming model is pernicious for two reasons.  First, it presents a distorted view of what will happen under the no-build alternative.  The EA claims that there will be environmental benefits because we’ll avoid all of the congestion and pollution caused by motorist/lemmings jamming themselves into the Rose Quarter day after day..  But this claim is a fiction: in reality, traffic will never grow to the levels forecast in the model, because the model predicts more vehicles than the road can physically accommodate.  By exaggerating the level of traffic in the no-build scenario, the EA has created a false baseline for estimating the environmental effects of the widened freeway, thus disguising the effect of induced demand.  Because under static trip assignment, capacity makes no difference to whether or when people travel, there can’t possibly be induced demand.  Induced demand is effectively assumed away.  

The tendency to overestimate future traffic levels in mature travel corridors is also an endemic problem with the current methodology used to predict future transportation demand. After a careful review of the literature, the Government Accountability Office found:

. . . current travel demand models tend to predict unreasonably bad conditions in the absence of a proposed highway or transit investment. Travel forecasting, as previously discussed, does not contend well with land-use changes or effects on nearby roads or other transportation alternatives that result from transportation improvements or growing congestion. Before conditions get as bad as they are forecasted, people make other changes, such as residence or employment changes to avoid the excessive travel costs.

The weakness of transportation models in accurately predicting future traffic levels is a continuing problem. So it is not merely the Rose Quarter traffic projection model that is problematic; rather the entire class of four-step (trip generation, assignment, mode, routing models) have proved inaccurate in practice. After an exhaustive review of the state of the art, the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies wrote:

“. . . as has been true for the past four decades, these models could not provide accurate information to inform decision making on many transportation and land use policies or traffic operation projects.”
(Committee for Determination of the State of the Practice in Metropolitan Area Travel Forecasting, 2007)

While technology has allowed for faster computation, and more detailed mapping, they conclude:

“The practice of metropolitan travel forecasting has been resistant to fundamental change. Every 10 years or so there begins a cycle of research, innovation, resolve to put innovation into practice, and eventual failure to affect any appreciable change in how travel forecasting is practiced.”

(Committee for Determination of the State of the Practice in Metropolitan Area Travel Forecasting, 2007) pages 123-124.

Why wouldn’t highway departments implement a better method?  Well, as it turns out, the static trip assignment/lemming model tells them exactly what they want to hear:  If you don’t give us money to widen the highway, we’ll have endless gridlock.  It also “proves” that the expansion won’t create any induced demand. From the standpoint of highway builders, this is a convenient property for a model to have.

A model, any model, is only as good as the assumptions that go into it.  The fundamental assumption of static traffic assignment, that motorists behave like (fictional) lemmings, filing irrationally over a cliff (or into a gridlocked roadway, day after day), and that they don’t change their behavior in response to congestion, is dramatically wrong. It produces a gross over-estimate of how much roadways are likely to be congested, and paints capacity improvements in an unrealistic, favorable light, while structurally excluding the well-documented effects of induced demand.

The proposed I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project creates a bike- and pedestrian-hostile environment

The Oregon Department of Transportation has crafted distorted images that exaggerate pedestrian use by a factor of 200

As part of its effort to sell its $500 million dollar project to widen Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter, the Oregon Department of Transportation has prepared some computer generated renderings of what area streets will look like.  At first glance, they seem to buttress the notion that this will be a pedestrian and bike friendly environment, with lots of space devoted to non-car travel. Project staff are is fond of repeating the words “36-foot wide multi-use path.”

But if you take a close look a the computer rendering, what you’ll see is both some troubling design flaws that actually make this a bad place for people who aren’t in cars.  And if you turn a critical eye on the way the rendering is constructed, you’ll see that ODOT has intentionally distorted the perspective to make things seem rosier than they actually are.

Wrong Way Traffic

The first thing you should notice is the two-way street in the center of the diagram.  It’s got lanes of traffic on either side of a combined bike-pedestrian multi-use path.  But unlike every other road in the city of Portland or the state of Oregon, traffic is driving on the left-hand side of the road. It is a miniature diverging diamond. Diamonds are used by traffic engineers explicitly to facilitate the faster movement of cars. But they’re disorienting to pedestrians and cyclists, because instinctively, they tend to look in the wrong direction to detect traffic.  That’s why diverging diamond intersections regularly have “Look Left” and Look Right” stenciled on the pavement to warn pedestrians that traffic is coming from an unexpected direction.  There’s also a bus only lane that appears to run on the sidewalk.

Two freeway on-ramps

Again, because this is a still image rather than a moving one, it isn’t clear what the cars on the wrong way diverging diamond are doing.  Where they’re going, in both cases is directly onto freeway on-ramps.  In both cases, the traffic light at the end of the diverging diamond (the southbound one is over Williams Avenue, immediately in the foreground, another one, not shown is at the other end of the diverging diamond) is the last traffic signal before vehicles enter the I-5 freeway both north and south bound.  Vehicles on the diverging diamond will be accelerating to freeway speeds.  So not only will the cyclists and pedestrians in the center of diverging diamond be disoriented by heavy traffic going in the wrong direction, they’ll also be confronting drivers intent on accelerating to freeway speeds.  The arrows on the following chart show the movement of cars, both from the west and from the north which will be accelerating on to the Southbound I-5 freeway on-ramp.

High Speed Corners

Throughout Portland, as part of the city’s efforts to improve safety, the city is building curb-extensions, bumping the corner of intersections out further into the street, to shorten crossing distances, to make pedestrians more visible to drivers, and critically, to force drivers to slow down to make turns–because the curb extension sticks out further into the junction of two roads, it forces drivers to make a sharper, and therefore slower turn. These drawings are from Portland’s Pedestrian Design Guidelines, and the photo shows a curb extension in practice:

But look closely at the corners of this intersection–in every case they’ve been cut back and rounded off, moving the corner further away from the street–the exact opposite of curb extensions. The following illustration shows the portion of the corners of each of these intersections–the red triangles–that would be cut away to speed car turning movements.

By making these turns wider–in engineering parlance “increasing the radius of curvature”–this encourages cars to drive faster, increasing the hazard to pedestrians.  In addition, it makes pedestrians less visible, and increases crossing distances.  At each of these corners, pedestrians in crosswalks will be confronting fast moving cars.

Distorted Images

While a close look at these renderings reveals some of the flaws in the design of this intersection, it’s important to remember that the image itself was crafted by the Oregon Department of Transportation, which made a number of editorial decisions which are clearly designed to influence the viewer.  Consider first the perspective and vantage point chosen for this image.  The viewer is floating 20 or 30 feet in the air, looking down at the bike path and sidewalk.  This doesn’t represent how actual humans will encounter and perceive the project. The foreground (which due to the rendering is shown much larger) is filled with bikes, pedestrians and green-painted spaces.  Nearly all of the car lanes are shown in the background and thereby made to seem much smaller. In a sense, that’s how perspective works, but the decision to put bike/pedestrian infrastructure in the foreground, and cars in the background conveys the impression that one is big, and the other small. Imagine for example, the cars were in the foreground and the bikes in the background–one would have a much different sense of how much space was devoted to cars as opposed to bike-riders and pedestrians.

Invisible cars

Another distortion comes from what’s shown–and what isn’t shown–in the renderings.  This seems to be a very pedestrian-oriented space because ODOT has chosen to show only a handful of cars. The easiest way to detect bias in this image is simply to count things.  How many cyclists are there? How many pedestrians? How many cars?  We can do that.  Here are 25 pedestrians (and we didn’t count ones that weren’t shown on sidewalks.

In addition there are 8 cyclists.

But there are only 5 cars.

On one of the busiest intersections in Portland, at the convergence of two major north-south and east west arterials, as well as the I-5 freeway, there are almost no cars.  But there are huge numbers of bike riders and pedestrians.  Bikes and pedestrians outnumber cars 5 to 1 in this illustration. That’s a wild distortion of reality.  Consider the actual evidence of who uses this intersection.  The City of Portland’s traffic counts, last taken on a typical afternoon in June, showed that in the afternoon rush hour, cars outnumbered pedestrians by about 40 to 1.  Here’s the data:

The data show that between 4 and 6 pm, there were 4,228 cars and trucks that traveled through this intersection and just 96 pedestrians:  In round numbers there were about 40 times more cars than pedestrians used this intersection.  What that means is that ODOT’s rendering has distorted the actual use of this intersection by a factor of about 200.  The ODOT rendering shows five times as many pedestrians as cars.  Reality is that there are about 40 times as many cars as pedestrians.  This is distortion on an epic scale. If one were to take this image as a depiction of reality, you would have to wonder, why are we widening the freeway when there are virtually no cars in this neighborhood?

Imaginary buildings

Like so many freeway interchanges, this is a hardly a pleasant urban environment.  In addition to freeway on-ramps, desolate and unkempt patches of land next to the roads and abutments, the most prominent commercial uses are a gas station, a car dealership and a paint store.  But this image has improved the area by adding several imaginary wireframe buildings.  Of course, the project doesn’t actually involve building any buildings, and there are no plans to make the freeway covers strong enough to support buildings, but that hasn’t stopped ODOT from making its project look more urban and inviting by installing fictional buildings that simply aren’t there.

The renderings prepared by ODOT masquerade as objective information, but are deeply biased.  If you look closely, you can see the projects flaws–wrong way traffic, high speed corners, bus lanes running on the sidewalk, city streets functioning as acceleration lanes for freeway on-ramps. More tellingly, though, the renderings are drawn in a particular way to present a misleading view of the project and its impacts, the viewer is looking at the seen from a kind of video-game viewpoint floating in air, perspective is used to make people and bikes look large, and cars look small, non-existent buildings are conjured out of thin air, to make the area seem more urban and inviting, and the entire scene is populated with people and bikes, while almost no cars are shown.

There’s no evidence that widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter will reduce crashes.

ODOT used a model that doesn’t work for freeways with ramp-meters

When ODOT widened I-5 lanes and shoulders near Victory Boulevard in 2010, crash rates did not decline

Research shows interstate freeway shoulder widths aren’t correlated with crash rates

The marketing campaign for spending $1.45 billion to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway heavily emphasizes safety–falsely claiming that this is a particularly dangerous roadway

Reducing crashes is a linchpin of the project in two ways, both to support an argument about safety, and also because the project claims that with fewer crashes they’ll be less “non-recurring delay.”  City and state officials concede that due to induced demand the project won’t do anything about daily recurring delay–any improvements in the regular flow of traffic will simply prompt more people (who now avoid the roadway because of congestion) to try to use it, with the result that it will be just as slow in future as it is before spending a billion dollars or so).

ODOT incorrectly applied the ISATe model to I-5, ignoring the effect of ramp meters.

The project claims that widening the freeway will reduce crashes.  How they know?  Well according to the project’s “Transportation Safety Technical Report,” were generated by a tool called “ISATe”.  Despite the impressive moniker, ISATe is just an excel spreadsheet.

The AASHTO HSM (AASHTO 2010) predictive method for highways and interchanges using the software ISATe was applied to estimate the relative safety performance of the proposed Project. The method was applied without calibration factors, so the results are presented as relative differences rather than absolute predictions. The models are applied on a segment-by-segment basis, and segments are defined to have consistent geometric characteristics. The largest safety benefit results from upgrading shoulders to full standard on both sides of the highway.

(Emphasis added)

This statement reveals a number of important points.  First, they didn’t calibrate the ISATe mode to existing crash rates on the roadway.  ISATe is based on a rough approximation of factors for a wide range of roadways, and to produce relative, rather than absolute values.

The report specifically says that the the methodology doesn’t account for the effects of ramp metering.  Ramp meters have already been installed on this portion of freeway,

And if you read the ISATe technical manual, there’s a section that explains the limitations of the model, helpfully labeled “Limitations of the Predictive Methods.” The manual says that the ISATe spreadsheet doesn’t estimate crashes for freeways that have ramp meters.

Bonneson, J., Pratt, M., and Geedipally, S., (et al), Enhanced Interchange Safety Analysis Tool: User Manual, National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Project 17-45, Enhanced Safety Prediction Methodology and Analysis Tool for Freeways and Interchanges, May 2012.

This is important because a key reason for ramp meters is to smooth the flow of traffic, and reduce merge conflicts that would otherwise result in an increase in crashes. What ODOT has done is use a tool that assumes that there are no ramp meters to estimate the number of crashes on a road that has long had — and will continue to have ramp meters.

Consequently, by inappropriately applying the ISATe spreadsheet to a roadway that’s already had ramp metering installed, ODOT has overstated the base level of crashes on the road, and overstated the likely reduction in crashes from wider shoulders.  According to the US Department of Transportation, ramp metering on Portland freeways has already produced a 43 percent decline in crashes.

Because the ISATe model doesn’t take account of the actual presence of ramp meters, it over-estimates the reduction in crashes that might be attributable to adding lanes and shoulders to this stretch of I-5.  In essence, the installation of ramp meters here has already accomplished some, if not most of the supposed crash reduction benefit that would be achieved by widening the freeway.

ODOT’s own experience on I-5 shows wider shoulders didn’t decrease crash rates

So rather than looking at a spreadsheet based model that, according to its own user manual, isn’t capable of accurately estimating crash rates on this kind of freeway, it makes more sense to look at the actual experience with freeway widenings on Interstate 5.  As we’ve pointed out at City Observatory, ODOT has already helpfully run this experiment. It widened a mile-long stretch of I-5 just north of the Rose Quarter in 2010, between Lombard Street and Victory Boulevard, adding lanes and widening shoulders.  That stretch of road is used by essentially the same drivers to travel through the Rose Quarter. It is, in a sense, a perfect natural experiment on the efficacy of wider freeways reducing crashes.

And what ODOT’s own data show is that after widening I-5 crash rates were higher than before the freeway widening. The data is shown below.  Crashes spiked during the construction period (2010; gray bar), which is a common occurrence.  But after project construction was completed, from 2011 onward, crashes were consistently about 10 percent higher than they had been prior to construction.  Far from reducing crashes, freeway widening actually increased them.

Research shows wider shoulders aren’t statistically associated with fewer crashes on Interstate Freeways

There’s actually no valid statistical evidence that shoulders wider than 6 feet on divided roads produce any additional safety benefit.

The same could be observed for shoulder width, where the crash rate decreases up to 6 ft and then varies as the shoulder becomes wider. These trends are simple observations, and statistical tests were not conducted to determine their statistical significance. (page 21)

Stamatiadis, N., Pigman, J., Sacksteder, J., Ruff, W., & Lord, D. (2009). NCHRP Report 633: Impact of shoulder width and median width on safety. Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, DC.

Other research has concluded that there is no statistically significant relationship between outside shoulder width and crash frequency on Interstate highways.

Highway geometric factors are found to have variable impacts on highway safety (across accident severity level and road class). For example, it is found that widening outside shoulder by 1% will have no impact on Interstate highways  . . .

Chen, S., Saeed, T. U., Alinizzi, M., Lavrenz, S., & Labi, S. (2019). Safety sensitivity to roadway characteristics: A comparison across highway classes. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 123, 39-50.

In short, there’s no evidence that the Rose Quarter freeway widening will improve safety:

• ODOT used a model (ISATe) that doesn’t apply to this freeway, which has ramp meters.
• ODOT’s own experience with widening the I-5 freeway and shoulders resulted in an increase in crash rates, not a decline
• The scientific literature concludes that lane and shoulder width is a statistically insignificant factor in determining crash rates.

ODOT is really building an 8-lane mega-freeway at the Rose Quarter

You can tell from the tortured rhetoric about “auxiliary” lanes that the Oregon Department of Transportation is falling all over itself to make the freeway widening project it has proposed for the I-5 Rose Quarter area seem absolutely as small as possible.  They maintain that they’re not actually widening the roadway at all, just adding “ramp to ramp connections.”  In reality, however, ODOT is engineering a right-of-way that can easily hold an 8 lane freeway–effectively doubling the size of the current Interstate 5.

How big is it?

The public descriptions of the Rose Quarter freeway project go to great lengths to minimize the size of the project.  As we’ve noted the project’s Environmental Assessment insists that the lanes its adding to the I-5 freeway aren’t actual freeway lanes, but are an entirely different and environmentally benign creature called an auxiliary lane.

But for a moment, set-aside all this talk about counting lanes or what they’re called.  How big a footprint will the widened I-5 freeway have?  That fact is carefully concealed from view in the main Environmental Assessment Report, but if you did dig through the appendices, you’ll find one diagram in the project’s Right-of-Way analysis that hints at the freeway’s actual footprint.

This chart shows a representative cross section of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter, as currently built (top) and as proposed to be widened by ODOT (bottom).  The fine print in the bottom of each schematic shows the number of feet of width of each lane and of the shoulders.  In the proposed widening, the total width is about 126 feet.  There are six 12-foot traffic lanes (three in each direction, two labeled “thru” lanes one labeled “auxiliary”), plus 12 foot shoulders on the left and right side of the traffic lanes.  We assume the median is five feet wide.  That works out to about 126 feet ((6 *12)+(4*12)+5=126).

If you look at that diagram, it looks like there’s a lot of space in that 126 feet relative to the size of the illustrated cars and trucks:  48 feet is dedicated to shoulders, which is a lot for a busy urban highway built on extremely expensive land.  (The Right of Way Report notes that land near the freeway is worth as much as  $150 to $200 per square foot, and land acquisition for the project will require a total budget of $55 million).

How many lanes can you fit in a 126-foot right of way?

So instead of arguing about what we call lanes, let’s ask a basic question:  How many freeway lanes can you fit in an urban, 126-foot right-of-way?  Well the answer can easily be found by simply looking at the way the ODOT stripes freeway lanes and shoulders in Portland.  According to ODOT’s lane report data, this section of the Interstate 84 freeway, just east of 12th Avenue has 3-foot left shoulders, and 7-foot right shoulders.  (Highway 2/Columbia River Highway is ODOT’s designation for Interstate 84.  LN1 through LN3 correspond to travel lanes, LS and RS are left shoulder width and right shoulder width, with all data presented in feet.  Data are show for I-84 from NE 12th Avenue to NE 21st Avenue (which corresponds approximately to the area illustrated in the photograph below).

If ODOT were to simply re-stripe its widened 126-foot Rose Quarter right of way in exactly the same fashion it has striped Interstate 84, less than a mile away, it could easily fit eight full-sized travel lanes in the space it is planning to build.  Four 12-foot travel lanes (48 feet), plus a 3-foot right shoulder and a 7-foot left shoulder (10 feet total shoulders), are equal to 58 total feet of width.  Allowing for a 5 foot median, this means an eight lane freeway would use 121 feet ((58*2)+5=121).  As noted above the Environmental Assessment schematic shows 126 feet of total right of way.

Despite the protestations that 12 foot left and right shoulders are “standard,” ODOT’s own practice–in this exact area–makes it clear that isn’t true. ODOT not only builds and operates urban freeways with narrower shoulders (and consequently more lanes), the US Department of Transportation holds out these design standards as a best practice for other cities and states to follow in providing more freeway capacity.

Portland’s I-84, is actually touted by the US Department of Transportation’s as poster child for narrower shoulders.  Here is a page of the USDOT report, “USE OF NARROW LANES AND NARROW SHOULDERS ON FREEWAYS: A Primer on Experiences, Current Practice, and Implementation Considerations.” FHWA HOP-16-060.  The narrow shoulders on I-84 are also featured on the cover of the document.

Build now, paint later

It’s pretty easy to see what’s likely to happen here, if this project is allowed to go ahead.  ODOT will widen the right of way and, on opening day, stripe it for six lanes (it will probably stop calling them auxiliary lanes just as soon as it breaks ground).  It will let a decent interval (six months or a year) pass, and in all likelihood, traffic will be just as bad, if not worse than it is today.  Then Oregon DOT–which will be operating under a new director–will note that the previous administration underestimated the challenge at the Rose Quarter, and will “discover” that there’s actually room to fit in a couple more travel lanes.  And ODOT will fire up the paint truck.

All that stands between the proposed Rose Quarter freeway widening project that’s depicted in computer renderings of the Environmental Assessment and an 8-lane freeway is a few hundred gallons of Federal Spec TTP-1952b traffic marking paint.  A few hours with a lane-marking machine would essentially double the capacity of the current I-5 freeway.  And nothing in the Environmental Assessment examines what the effects of such a widening would be, in terms of added car traffic from induced demand, air pollution and carbon emissions. Which brings us to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  NEPA requires that ODOT disclose the cumulative and reasonable foreseeable future consequences of its actions. This provision is designed to prevent agencies from breaking down otherwise environmentally significant actions into smaller, less impactful pieces that can individually escape review, but which cumulatively would affect the environment.

If striped like I-84, a widened Rose Quarter I-5 could accomodate four travel lanes in each direction.

In NEPA terms, the possibility that the Oregon Department of Transportation could come back, a few months or a few years after it’s spent $500 million on the concrete and structures for its 126 foot right-of-way, and simply restripe the freeway to add capacity, is “reasonably foreseeable.”  That means that rather than just looking at the project with stripes as proposed, the Environmental Assessment should present the likely consequences of building a road that could easily accomodate one more full travel lane than it has considered.  Alternatively, the Environmental Assessment ought to look at the alternative of building a narrower physical right-of-way.  The freeway right of way could be at least 20 feet narrower–and all of the physical impacts of widening on the community, including land takings (especially onto the site of Tubman Middle School), could be reduced, while achieving the same traffic flow that ODOT has claimed is needed.  Considering just this kind of alternative is exactly what the NEPA process is designed to do.  By treating 12 foot inside and outside shoulders as an unquestioned and unquestionable assumption, ODOT has both built in the room to easily widen the freeway, and concealed the likely long-term environmental effects of this decision and sidestepped its responsibility under NEPA to consider alternatives that would reasonably have smaller environmental impacts.

We’ve been down this road before

But would a state Department of Transportation so brazenly and cynically manipulate its environmental disclosures to hide its true intent?  Surely, if it really wanted to widen I-5 to 8 lanes through the Rose Quarter ODOT it would level with the public, wouldn’t it?

In fact, the Oregon Department of Transportation has a demonstrated track record of concealing the actual number of lanes it plans to build when it widens freeways, and specifically, the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland. In the Final Environmental Impact Statement of the Columbia River Crossing, issued in 2011, ODOT was always careful to refer to the new bridge and widened freeway it was proposing as having 10 lanes, 5 lanes in each direction.

On paper, this was a reduction from the 12-lane bridge and freeway put forward in the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), issued in 2008.  After the issuance of the DEIS, the City of Portland and other regional leaders sought to reduce the project’s environmental impact by reducing the number of proposed automobile lanes.  In 2010, at Mayor Sam Adams request, the Project Sponsors Council for the CRC directed ODOT to reduce the number of lanes on the CRC from 12 lanes to 10.  Let’s turn the microphone over Oregon Public Broadcasting‘s Kristian Foden-Vencil:

Leaders of cities, ports and transportation districts around Portland, agreed Monday on key aspects of a new I-5 bridge over the Columbia River. They agreed the new Columbia River Crossing ought to be 10 lanes wide — not 12. . . .  Portland Mayor Sam Adams, called the vote a significant step forward.
“Portland-Area Leaders Agree On Aspects Of New I-5 Bridge” OPB News, August 9, 2010

`State DOT officials have crafted an Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals

In theory, the National Environmental Policy Act is all about disclosing facts. But in practice, that isn’t always how it works out. The structure and content of the environmental review is in the hands of the agency proposing the project, in this case the proposed $500 million widening of the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway in Portland. The Oregon Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration have already decided what they want to do: Now they’re writing a set of environmental documents that are designed to put it in the best possible light. And in doing so, they’re keeping the public in the dark about the most basic facts about the project.  In the case of the I-5 project, they haven’t told us how many vehicles are going to use the new wider freeway they’re going to build.

A traffic report without ADT is like a financial report without $

To take just one prominent example, the Project’s “Traffic Technical Report” which purports to discuss how the traffic will affect the flow of vehicles on the freeway–which after all, is the project’s purpose–conspicuously omits the most common and widely used metric of traffic volume:  average daily traffic or ADT.

How common is ADT?  It’s basically the standard yardstick of describing traffic. ODOT uses it to decide how wide roads should be.  It’s the denominator in calculating road safety. Average daily traffic is also, not incidentally, the single most important variable in calculating how much carbon and other air pollutants cars will emit when they drive on this section of road. ODOT maintains a complicated system of recording stations and estimation, tracking traffic for thousands of road segments on highways. ODOT’s annual report,  Traffic Volume Trends details average daily traffic for about 3,800 road segments statewide.  It also turns out that predicted future ADT is an essential input into the crash modeling software that ODOT used to predict crash rates on the freeway (“ADT” appears 141 times in the model’s user manual). ODOT uses ADT numbers throughout the agency: Google reports that the Oregon DOT website has about 1,300 documents with the term “ADT” and nearly 1,000 with the term “average daily traffic.” Chapter 5 of ODOT’s Analysis Procedure Manual, last updated in July 2018, contains 124 references to the term “ADT” in just 55 pages. “Average daily traffic” as fundamental to describing traffic as degrees fahrenheit is to a weather report.

But there’s one place you’ll find absolutely no references to ADT:  The Rose Quarter I-5 Traffic Analysis Technical Report.  We searched the PDF file of the report for the term “ADT”–here’s the result:

Search through the appendices to the Environmental Assessment, and you might stumble on a reference to ADT that escaped the censors.  You’ll actually find four references to ADT in the Safety Technical report (page 31), but these are only for surface streets, not for the freeway.

ADT is just the very prominent tip of much larger a missing data iceberg.  There’s much, much more that’s baked in to the assumptions and models used to create the estimates in the report that simply isn’t visible or documented anywhere in the Environmental Assessment or its cryptic and incomplete appendices.  The advocacy group No More Freeways have identified a series of documents and data series that are missing from the report and its appendices, and has filed a formal request to obtain this data. To date, no further data has been provided by the state or federal transportation departments.

This is important because the Environmental Assessment makes the provocative claim that this project–completely unlike any other urban freeway widening project in US history–will reduce both traffic and reduce carbon emissions. The academic literature on both questions is firmly settled, and has come to the opposite conclusion. The regularity with which induced demand swamps new urban road capacity and leads to even more travel and pollution is so well documented that it is now called “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.” The claims that freeway widening projects can offset carbon emissions by reduced idling have also been disproven:  Portland State researchers Alex Bigazzi and Manuel Figliozzi have published one of a series of papers indicating that the reverse is true:  wider roads lead to more driving and more carbon pollution, not less.  And in addition to not providing data, there’s nothing in the report to indicate that the authors have produced any independent, peer-reviewed literature to support their claims about freeway widening. The agencies simply point at the black box.

If the Oregon Department of Transportation and its consultants have discovered a remarkable new scientific finding by which this project–unlike any other, anywhere–can reduce carbon emissions, then they owe it to not just the citizens of Portland, but to the entire world to explain how this remarkable process operates.

In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the Oregon Department of Transportation has previously presented flawed  estimates of carbon emissions from transportation projects.  During the 2015 Oregon Legislature, the department produced estimates saying that a variety of “operational improvements” to state highways would result in big reductions in carbon.  As with the Rose Quarter freeway widening, the putative gains were assumed to come from less stop and go traffic. Under questioning from environmental groups and legislators, the department admitted that its estimates of savings were overstated by a factor of at least three. ODOT’s mis-representations so poisoned the debate that it killed legislative action on a pending transportation package. What this case demonstrates is that the Oregon Department of Transportation is an agency that allows its desire to get funds to build projects to bias its estimates. That demonstrated track record should give everyone pause before accepting the results of an Environmental Assessment that conceals key facts.

Not presenting this data as part of the Environmental Assessment prevents the public from knowing, questioning and challenging the validity of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s estimates. In effect, we’re being told to blindly accept the results generated from a black box, when we don’t know what data was put in the box, or how the box generates its computations.

This plainly violates the spirit of NEPA, and likely violates the letter of the law as well.  Consider a recent court case challenging the environmental impact statement for a highway widening project in Wisconsin. In that case, a group of land use and environmental advocates sued the US Department of Transportation, alleging that the traffic projections (denominated, as you might have guessed, in ADT) were unsubstantiated.  The US DOT and its partner the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) had simply provided the final outputs of its model in the environmental report–but had concealed much of the critical input data and assumptions. A federal judge ruled that the failure to disclose this information violated NEPA:

Statistical errors are common and can easily lead to wrong conclusions

Maybe, just maybe, the Oregon Department of Transportation has a valid and accurate set of data and models. But absent disclosure, there’s no way for any third party to know whether they’ve made errors or not.  And, even transportation experts, working with transportation data, can make consequential mistakes. Consider the recent report of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (another arm of the US Department of Transportation) which computed the crash rate for Tesla’s cars on autopilot.  In a report released January 2017, NHTSA claimed that Tesla’s autopilot feature reduced crashes 40 percent.

That didn’t sound right to a lot of transportation safety experts, including a firm called Quality Control Systems. They asked NHTSA for the data, but were unable to get it, until the agency finally complied with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request two years later.  The result:  NHTSA had made a fundamental math error in computing the number of vehicle miles traveled (which is actually an analog of Average Daily Traffic).  Rather than being relatively safe, the corrected calculation showed that the auto-pilot feature is significantly more dangerous that the average of all human drivers.

What QCS found upon investigation, however, was a set of errors so egregious, they wrecked any predictive capability that could be drawn from the data set at all. In fact, the most narrow read of the most accurate data set would suggest that enabling Autosteer actually increased the rate of Tesla accidents by 59 percent.

A government agency hiding key data is putting the public behind the 8-ball

Without the opportunity to look at the data, there’s no way for anyone to check to see if ODOT has made a mistake in its calculations. A black box is no way to inform the public about a half billion dollar investment; you might say, it put us behind the 8-ball. It makes you wonder:  What are they hiding?

What pretends to be an environmental assessment is actually a thinly-veiled marketing brochure

In theory, an environmental impact statement is supposed to be a disclosure document. The idea behind the National Environmental Policy Act was to force thoughtful consideration of potentially environmentally harmful projects and policies, and by providing the public and decision-makers with clear information, enable better choices.

In practice, the environmental review process has simply become a way to manipulate opinion and manufacture consent, or more accurately, the simulacrum of consent.  The preparation of environmental impact statements is left to the agencies that are sponsoring projects, and who have a vested interest in a particular outcome.

When it comes to the proposed half billion dollar I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project, the Environmental Assessment is less of a honest and objective disclosure, and much more a carefully edited and thinly veiled sales brochure.  The hucksterism starts with the name of the project, proceeds through its “communication plan,” and is executed in technical documents that have been carefully edited to remove the most salient information.

It’s not a freeway widening, it’s an “improvement” project.

Let’s start with what it’s called. The project’s carefully chosen moniker is the “Rose Quarter Improvement Project”– nothing about freeways, or pollution or widening.  Just “improvement.” Who can be against that? The trouble of course, is that the word improvement, in this context is argumentative, to the point of being Orwellian.

The trouble is, that’s exactly the slanted tactic that is regularly used to sell road widening projects, without accurately explaining their nature, purpose and effects.  It’s so well understood that even Washington State’s Department of Transportation is specifically educating its staff not to use this deceptive approach.  WashDOT’s Barb Chamberlain gave a presentation, “Words Matter:  Recognizing and address modal assumptions to shift transportation culture”  at Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center on February 22, 2019.  She specifically spoke out against unqualified claims that a project “improves” a neighborhood.

“Improvement” is loaded. “Improvement” says its qualitatively better, but then you have to ask “for whom?” Some of the measures might be better for some, and worse for some, and you may need to be able to measure that, and you just need to say that so people understands what’s happening. . . .  “What do you mean improved?” Explain to this woman what you are doing to her street, don’t just tell her you’re improving it.

Chamberlain’s advice is clear and unambiguous:  Don’t just say improvement.  Improvement is a loaded word.  The Oregon Department of Transportation knows that.  It’s undoubtedly exactly why they’ve chosen the name “Rose Quarter Improvement Project” for their $500 million freeway-widening effort.  If they only could have, we’re pretty sure that they would have called it the “Rose Quarter Double-Plus Good Project.”

Improvement for whom?

The problem, of course, is that the word improvement not only conceals what will happen, but it begs the question of who the improvement is for.  In order to really understand whether a wider highway constitutes an improvement, we have to know both what will happen and who will win and who will lose.  When that question is asked and answered honestly, the public can make a reasoned decision as to whether a project makes sense.  That’s exactly what happen in Portland in the 1970s.

Famously, when he rallied public opinion against the Mt. Hood Freeway in the early 1970s, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt famously challenged the fairness of wrecking the city to benefit suburban commuters.  Willamette Week, in a retrospective “Highway to Hell,” published in 2005, wrote:

Wholly Moses

There’s actually an even long history here.  Branding big transportation projects as “improvements” actually stretches back seven decades in Portland, and touches the most famous freeway builder of all:  Robert Moses.  During World War II, Portland’s town father’s commissioned the power broker and a select team of his “Moses Men,” to come to Portland, to write a plan for the city’s future.  Moses sketched out a grid of freeways that ultimately led to the construction of Interstate 5 through the Rose Quarter.  This was the same Moses who his biographer Robert Caro related felt that in planning in a big city, you “you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” (Quoted in Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and Fall of New York, (1974), p. 849)  Which is exactly what he proposed in New York and Portland.

But even the great builder was a little sensitive to what you called his projects.  In Portland, he devoted two paragraphs to rebranding his highway-oriented development scheme for the city. He worried that “public works” wasn’t a sufficiently promotional moniker for the program he proposed, and instead specifically insisted it be called “Portland Improvement”

Magritte the highway engineer

One of the most famous image of early 20th Century is Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).  Magritte’s point, of course, is that his painting is not actually a pipe itself, but is an image of a pipe, which makes the caption seem like an ironic and incorrect statement.

This is not a pipe                                            This is not a wider freeway

Who would have thought that highway engineers had so much in common with surrealist painters? Talk to anyone associated with the “improvement project,” and they’ll go to great pains to tell you they’re not adding any lanes to the freeway.  Well, at least not “real” freeway lanes.  Instead, what’s being added are “auxiliary” lanes. ODOT even has a video extolling the virtues of the special “auxiliary” lanes. Calling them “auxiliary” lanes means, somehow, that they don’t actually count.  We’re told that an auxiliary lane carries traffic between intersections, facilitating merging and exiting, and isn’t carrying “through” traffic, and so we should disregard it. But, as we’ve pointed out before at City Observatory, if that’s true, then the current freeway consists of just one through lane and one auxiliary lane in each direction, because one of the current lanes functions effectively as an auxiliary lane.  In this case, going from one auxiliary lane and one through lane to one auxiliary lane and two through lanes, still represents and increase of one through lane.

Washington Department of Transportation’s Barb Chamberlain is right:  Words matter.  Whether this, or any other project is an “improvement” should be a a subject of inquiry and analysis, not a pre-determined outcome.  In this case, it’s questionable whether and for whom this is an “improvement.” Attaching the adjective “auxiliary” to the added freeway lanes you build doesn’t mean that the freeway isn’t wider and doesn’t generate more traffic, pollution, and ultimately congestion. ODOT owes the citizens of the state a clear and honest explanation of what it’s up to:  What we have so far is fraught with deception. It’s tragic that a process that was legislated to provide information and inform discussion has instead been twisted to promote a single, predetermined outcome.

We can calculate how much added freeway lanes will induce additional car travel

The takeaway:  the I-5 freeway widening project in Portland lead to 10 to 17 million more miles of vehicle travel annually, which will in turn produce thousands of tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions.

A key part of the selling point for the proposed $500 million Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is the improbable claim that widening the freeway will reduce traffic congestion and not stimulate additional vehicle travel. That claim flies in the face of decades of experience and widely published research showing that, with great predictability, more freeway capacity generates proportionately more traffic, traffic congestion and pollution. The phenomenon is now so well established in the literature that it is called the “Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.”

It’s also so well-established that researchers at the University of California Davis have built an on-line calculator that allows you to compute how many more vehicle miles of travel a wider freeway will produce.  Their calculator is based on a careful review of the research on induced demand, and generates an estimate of the number of additional vehicle miles of travel that will be produced by each additional lane-mile of freeway in a city. Here’s the calculator showing how much adding 1.6 lane miles of freeway would increase travel in the San Diego metropolitan area (about 11 million miles per year).

Because it’s based in California, the model is calibrated for California metro areas and not Portland. To get a rough idea of what kind of impact we might expect from a freeway widening project in Portland based on this model, we looked at the model’s computations of the impact of freeway widening projects in the three California metropolitan areas most similar in population size to Portland–Sacramento, San Diego and San Jose).  For each city, we used the calculator to generate estimates of the additional vehicle miles of travel associated with adding 1.6 lane miles of interstate freeway.  Here are the results:  in these California cities, adding 1.6 lane miles of freeway would be expected to generate between 8 million and 12 million additional miles of vehicle travel.

Of course, Portland isn’t exactly like any of these three cities.  So using the data from the model, we developed our own estimate of the likely effects of induced demand from freeway expansion in Portland.  The section of I-5 that would be widened as part of this project carries about 120,000 vehicles per day, and has four lanes in each direction.  According to the Environmental Assessment Traffic Technical Report, page 9), the segment to be widened is about 4,300 or 0.8 miles long; adding two lanes therefore adds about 1.6 lane miles of freeway. The Induced Travel Calculator shows that there is a unit-elasticity of vehicle miles traveled to added capacity:  Therefore a 1 percent increase in lane-miles generates a 1 percent increase in freeway travel.

We applied this unit elasticity factor to the expansion of the freeway in the Rose Quarter area.  This .8 mile stretch of freeway currently has about 96,000  vehicle miles of travel daily ((120,000 *0.8), or about 35 million vehicle miles of travel per year.  This project increases the number of lane miles of freeway by 50 percent, from 3.2 lane miles (4 * 0.8) to 4.8 lane miles (6 * 0.8).  The unit elasticity of lane miles to vehicle miles traveled means that a 50 percent increase in lane-miles should produce a 50 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled or about 17.5 million additional vehicle miles of travel.

This estimate is higher than the estimate for the three California cities presented above.  It’s important to keep in mind that the results from the calculator are based on the average traffic volume on all freeways in a metro area; because this area is much more central and more heavily used, it has a higher base of traffic than the typical freeway in a metro area.  Taken together, the evidence from the UC Davis calculator and our application of its methods to the Rose Quarter project, we estimate that widening the I-5 freeway by adding one lane for about 0.8 of a mile would be expected to add between 10 million and 17 million additional vehicle miles of travel in the Portland metro area.

We can go one step further, and estimate approximately how much additional greenhouse gas emissions will results from this added driving. Transportation planning firm Fehr and Peers has yet another calculator for converting additional vehicle miles of travel into greenhouse gas emissions, with estimates calibrated to Western US metropolitan areas. Their calculator suggests that each additional thousand miles of driving is associated with about .466 tons of greenhouse gases; that means the Rose Quarter freeway widening project will produce between 4.7 and 7.9 thousand tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions per year.

It doesn’t matter what you call the added lanes

And we don’t buy for a minute that it matters in any way that ODOT wants to call the additional lanes its building “auxiliary lanes”.  If the point is that the right hand lane on I-5 at the Rose Quarter is handling merging traffic, that is true whether the facility is 2 lanes in each direction or three.  If we apply ODOT’s logic and nomenclature to the current setup, the freeway now consists of one through lane and one auxiliary lane–and the proposed project would increase that to two through-lanes and one auxiliary lane. Using sophistry and shifting definitions doesn’t change the fact that this project adds lane miles of freeway. And more lane miles of freeway, as these calculators show, produces millions more miles of driving and thousands of tons more greenhouse gas emissions every year.