Advocates for a $5 billion transportation bond that Portland area voters will be deciding in November are making a specious argument about it being an equity measure.

Its largest single project, a multi-billion dollar light rail line serves the some of the region’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods and has as its destination a suburban lifestyle mall.

The bulk of the money in the measure supports projects in highway corridors, including a subsidy to cars driving to the Portland airport.

Because the measure does nothing according to the advocate’s own estimates to reduce greenhouse gases, it’s inequitable to the frontline communities that bear the burden of climate change.

Some of the proponents of a $5 billion tax measure being presented to Portland’s voters on November 3 are claiming that it’s a way to right historic wrongs to the poor and people of color.  CityLab published one such commentary last week, with a headline asserting that the measure will help communities of color; it features a picture of one of Portland’s right rail lines.

But if you look closely at the measure, it’s really just transportation pork barrel politics, like the days of old, and the biggest shares of the money go to projects that disproportionately benefit whiter communities and higher income households. Despite a relative handful of measures—like free and reduced price transit for school aged kids—that make sense on their own, it’s a package that consists mostly of road projects that could and should be paid for by road users through the gas tax.  Instead, car users get the equivalent of a 30 cent a gallon subsidy for driving. What’s worse, is that the measure cannibalizes the payroll tax—which the region has used for 50 years to subsidize transit operations—to fund capital expenditures, at a time when the local transit system is facing desperate financial conditions.

But let’s focus on the biggest single project in the Metro package:  roughly a billion dollars toward the local share of the costs of a $3 billion expansion of the region’s light rail system.  On paper, that seems good, but as long-time Tri-Met planner GB Arrington pointed out, this particular light rail project makes no sense as a transit or urban development measure.

The claim in the CityLab article is that the measure “invests in Black and Brown communities.” But when it comes to the single biggest project in the package, the proposed Southwest Light Rail benefits the whitest, wealthiest part of the region. The same is true of other major components of the package, which chiefly invest in highway corridors, not neighborhoods. Here are the facts.

SW light rail would disproportionately serve Portland’s whitest neighborhoods

At City Observatory, we’ve extensively studied the racial and ethnic diversity of the nation’s largest metro areas, including Portland. While Portland has fewer Black residents than most large metros, it has proportionately more Hispanic and Asian residents, and it is overall, one of the least racially and ethnically segregated metro areas in the nation. But like every large US metro area, it has a share of neighborhoods that are not diverse, and that are disproportionately composed of white, non-Hispanic residents.

As part of our study, America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods, we identified all of the non-diverse predominantly white neighborhoods in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas.  We computed racial diversity using the Racial and Ethnic Diversity Index (REDI), and flagged those tracts that were among the 20 percent least diverse of all tracts in large metro areas nationally, and in which the majority racial/ethnic group was white, non-Hispanic.  Here’s a map of the Portland area’s non-diverse, white neighborhoods.

Source:  American’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighobrhoods (Red-shaded areas are low-diversity white, non-Hispanic neighborhoods.)

The area with the largest concentration of these non-diverse white neighborhoods is the the southwest quadrant of the city of Portland, an area running from the city’s West Hills to the city of Lake Oswego. The route of the proposed Southwest Corridor light rail line bisects this large concentration of non-diverse neighborhoods.  Here’s a close-up of the same data, with the route of the light rail line super-imposed on these low-diversity white neighborhoods.

Light Rail to Portland’s high income suburbs

Not surprisingly, these predominantly white neighborhoods are also among the wealthiest in the region. The neighborhoods of southwest Portland and the suburbs in this part of the region are hardly distressed communities.  Don’t take our word for it:  Let’s look at the Distressed Communities Index just released by the Economic Innovation Group.  It ranks all the zip codes on the US on a 100 point scale of economic distress, based on a combination of income, poverty, and employment indicators.  The proposed SW Light Rail project runs through four zip codes outside of downtown Portland:  97239, 97219, 97223 and 97224.  Three of these four are rated “prosperous”–the highest income of five categories in the EIG ranking, and one is rated “comfortable.”  None are mid-tier, at-risk, or distressed.

The average incomes of these neighborhoods are higher than for Multnomah County, the region’s most central, urban county.  Median household incomes in zip code 97219 are among the highest in the region, at just slightly less than $100,000.  The following chart shows the county-wide median and the median incomes in the four zip codes directly served by the proposed light rail line.

Destination:  Suburban shopping mall

The southern terminus of the proposed Southwest Light Rail line is a “lifestyle center” shopping mall called Bridgeport Village.

Bridgeport Village is home to a host of national chain stores catering to high-end households.  The mall’s owners describe it as:

. . . an outstanding and enviable array of exclusive, internationally renowned stores and boutiques which include The Container Store, Anthropologie, GAP, Lululemon, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Brandy Melville, Madewell, Sephora, Sundance, Eileen Fisher, MAC Cosmetics, Tommy Bahama, Soft Surroundings and the largest Regal IMAX Theatre in the state.

They too, note the area’s high income demographics.  The mall’s primary trade area has an average household income of $89,000 compared to $74,000 in the rest of the metropolitan area.

Other projects also chiefly benefit white, wealthy populations

Another project subsidized by the bond measure is a massive freeway interchange serving Portland International Airport.  The interchange will make it quicker and easier for people to drive to the airport (and not incidentally, undercut the relative attractiveness of the already existing light rail service that goes direct to the airport terminal). And the users of facilities like the airport have higher incomes that the rest of the region’s population.  According to Statista, person with an income of $80,000 a year is about 6 times more likely to be a frequent air traveler than someone with an income under $40,000 per year.  Ironically, because the Port of Portland charges market rates for parking ($3 an hour; $24/day) it’s the one place where car users actually shoulder something approaching the cost of their trips, and the Port could easily fund this road improvement out of the fees it charges users; but it prefers to ask that the general public subsidize car trips to and from the airport.

The project proponents claim that the proposal will support investments in safety and pedestrian improvements in the region.  But the bulk of these monies are focused on highway corridors. As we’ve discussed at City Observatory, as a practical matter, “pedestrian safety” improvements in and along highways are of dubious value in creating more walkability, and are in many cases, actually highway improvements—designed to facilitate more and faster car travel.

What this tells us about equity

Urban leaders around the nation are grappling daily with the question of how to fashion policies that achieve “equity.”  There’s a cacophony of voices calling for greater equity, but no definitive yardsticks to say what this means, or measure whether we’re making progress, or even moving in the right direction.  If a light rail line through the richest, whitest portion of a region contributes to “equity” than arguably pretty much any investment could.  Likewise projects that expand capacity on suburban highways, or make it easier to drive to the airport, rather than take the light rail system we’ve already built.

There are pieces of the Portland measure that do support equity, like free and reduced price transit fares. But the most expensive items in the package hardly serve disadvantaged front-line communities. Beyond that, we know that low income communities and people of color are those most likely to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change, which means that the Metro bond measure’s abject failure to reduce the region’s transportation greenhouse gases is, itself, highly inequitable.

The point is that without a clear definition of what constitutes “equity,” this criterion is meaningless. Given our current approach to the subject, “equity” is as vague, personal, and subjective as “beauty.”

Our discussions of equity need to be far more specific and quantifiable:  Who benefits, and how much?  And how do we address the underlying inequities that are built into the existing institutional arrangements for transportation, and that are never questioned:  like virtually universal free parking, or policies that prioritize the faster movement of cars over the safety and livability of urban neighborhoods? Is there anything more equitable than adequate funding for bus operations to assure greater frequency?  We should make equity a key criteria for guiding our transportation policies, but we should do so in a way that systematically makes our overall society more equitable, rather than being a subjective talking point for a particular pet project.

It’s worth imagining what a real, equity-driven regional agenda would look like. For starters, it wouldn’t be based on the premise that everything has to be viewed through the lens of transportation. While inequity manifests itself in the transportation system, the problem is much broader and more fundamental, and is rooted in land use and housing policies, like the prevalence of single family zoning in the Southwest corridor that this proposal does nothing about. An equity focused agenda might also try to learn from and adapt based on the lessons of the Covid pandemic. Arguably right now, widespread and free or inexpensive access to high-speed Internet is a more salient equity issue. Framing this single largest investment in the region’s history solely as a transportation issue forces all communities to play a transportation game rather consider more broadly the range of investments that would provide the livability and opportunity communities are asking for.  Finally, a real equity measure should pay as much attention to how monies are raised as it does to how they’re spent, and be funded by assessing the costs to users.  People are adaptable, transportation systems much less so.  Investing in steel and concrete before investing in new patterns of cost allocation and usage is today short-sighted and should be unthinkable.

The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities.

US Post Office data show that the supposed urban exodus was just a trickle, and Americans moved even less in the last quarter than they did a year ago.

At City Observatory, we’ve regularly challenged two widely repeated myths about the Coronavirus.  The first is that urban density is a cause of Covid-19, and the second, and closely related, is a claim that fear of density in a pandemic era is sending people streaming to the suburbs and beyond.

Are we moving more?

If there were any truth to the urban exodus stories, you’d expect it to clearly show up in increased migration. But are more people moving now that pre-Covid-19?  One of the clearest ways to get a handle on this is through the US Postal Service.  When people move from one home to another, they fill out a change-of-address form.  The USPS tabulates this data monthly, and helpfully distinguishes between temporary and permanent moves.

MyMove.Com, a moving services website has prepared a new report summarizing these data.  The most compelling chart shows monthly data on permanent changes of address for 2019 and 2020.

If we believe the “urban exodus” theory, we’d expect to see a large and sustained increase in changes-of-address in the months after the advent of the virus, compared to the same month in the previous year.  The data show nothing of the kind.  While there’s a jump upward in moves in the first months of the virus—total moves up by about 21 percent compared to the year earlier in March and 10 percent in April, that surge didn’t persist..  (The month to month variation in 2019 and 2020 is pretty similar, suggesting that the variation in movement is normal, rather than unusual).  Moreover, though, total changes-of-address declined in May and June compared to the same months in 2019—precisely the opposite of what one would expect if the Coronavirus had prompted people to migrate.  Perhaps the most charitable explanation one can attach to the data is that the pandemic accelerated some moves–moves that would have happened in the summer, happened earlier; that would explain the jump up in March and April and the subsequent slide in May and June.

In the last three months for which there is data—that is, combining data for May, June and July—changes of address are down 2.5 percent compared to 2019. Bottom line:  If the pandemic permanently changed expectations, we should be seeing a steady increase in moving, compared to a year ago:  we don’t.  The “more moving” myth is busted.

Spinning the moving data

The lack of any increase in permanent moves should completely puncture the “urban exodus” claims, but that’s such a durable meme that those who write about the data can’t seem to bring themselves to concede it’s wrong.  In releasing its report, MyMove breathlessly plays up the urban flight story.  It’s release is titled, “Coronavirus Moving Study: People Left Big Cities, Temporary Moves Spiked In First 6 Months of COVID-19 Pandemic.” The body of the release claims (with no data) that:

Now that people can continue with their life remotely, they can do so from anywhere. And so people are leaving big, densely populated areas and spreading out to suburbs or smaller communities across the country — at least for now.

The report’s subhead shouts out the plays up the statistic that:

Over 15.9 million people have moved during the coronavirus, according to USPS data.

But lots of Americans are always moving. You have to dig a bit deeper to see that 15.4 million people moved in the same months of the preceding year, which means that there’s been only about a 4 percent increase in total moves.  In addition, most of that increase is due to temporary moves, not permanent ones; permanent moves are up just 2 percent.

Once again we have a report that implies that there’s an urban exodus, but then presents data that shows there’s been virtually no change in the level or pattern of moves compared to pre-Covid days.

The MyMove report also repeats the false claim about a connection between urban density and Covid:

The impact of urban density on coronavirus moving trends:

. . .  it’s only logical that large, densely populated cities and crowded spaces present a higher risk of spreading and contracting COVID-19, and that people would relocate to areas with fewer people, where the risk of infection could be lower.

True, denser cities were hit first, but we and others have presented detailed statistical evidence discrediting the “density=covid” claim.  Moreover, in the past two months, the character of the pandemic has completely reversed:  Covid-19 is now a rural and red state plague. New cases are far more prevalent in rural American and small metro areas, while the nation’s densest urban counties now have the lowest number of new cases per capita.

The anti-urban bias that conceals the continued strength of cities

While the copywriters haven’t seemed to have figured this out yet, the underlying data shows that there hasn’t been a surge in permanent migration, and the cities aren’t hemorrhaging residents. The data, unlike the copy, puncture the myth of an urban exodus.

Our recent report, Youth Movement, confirmed the depth and breadth of the long-term trend of well-educated adults moving in large numbers to close-in urban neighborhoods. And the real-time data from real estate market search activity confirmed that cities were still highly attractive, gaining market share in total search activity from suburbs and more rural areas, according to data gathered in April by Zillow and Apartment List.com

As we pointed out this summer, real-time data on apartment search activity showed that interest in cities increased, rather than decreasing.  Data compiled by  Apartment List.com economists Rob Warnock and Chris Salviati for nation’s 50 largest metro areas between the first and second quarters of 2020 showed interest in cities actually increased in the second quarter compared to the first, relative to other locations, including suburbs, other less dense cities, and rural areas. The findings are the exact opposite of what one would expect if the headlines about an urban exodus were correct. Rather than looking to less dense suburbs, or exploring other states, apartment search activity is focusing more on dense city locations.

In a fact-based world, that would put an end to these “fleeing the cities” stories. What the claims of urban exodus reflect are a persistent anti-urban bias embedded in many of these accounts.  The “teeming tenements” view of cities underlies many of the misleading anecdote fueled stories about people leaving cities. Sadly, the idea-virus that is the urban exodus myth seems just as persistent as the Coronavirus itself. But at City Observatory, we’ll keep working on the vaccine.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Carmaggedon never comes, Portland edition. It’s a favored myth that any reduction in road capacity will automatically trigger gridlock, and highway engineers regularly inveigh against reallocating road capacity to promote safety or facilitate other users.  But real world experience with abrupt and significant reductions in road capacity shows that traffic declines in response.  Portland just closed half of its key I-5 freeway bridge for a week, and forecasts of gridlock and four-mile long queues simply didn’t occur.  Portland’s Oregonian reported that “forecasts calling for a nightmarish region-wide traffic catastrophe failed to materialize … travel patterns largely followed the normal cycle.”

The reason?  Travelers rapidly change their behavior in response to changes in road capacity, as many road users have choice about when, whether, by what route and how they travel.  The fact that carmaggedon never comes should remind us of the hollow and self-serving nature of highway engineer forecasts.

2. Gentrification’s big disconnect. We’re pleased to publish this guest commentary from Akron’s Jason Segedy, who stresses the profound disparity between the plight of low income neighborhoods in most of the nation’s cities and exaggerated concerns about the adverse effects of new investment, aka “gentrification.”

Must read

1. Matt Yglesias:  Much more housing. In the wake of World War II, many feared that peace would cause the US to lapse back into the doldrums of the Great Recession.  That fear was a major impetus to big federal subsidies to housing, highways (and sprawl). But the postwar housing boom did help power the economy, and Vox’s Matt Yglesias argues its time for another dose of this medicine:

A combination of rental assistance for consumers, capital funding for affordable housing, and regulatory relief for builders of all kinds could unleash a massive boom in new construction, creating countless blue-collar jobs and laying the foundation for a new era of inclusive prosperity.

Yglesias claims that we have a shortage of housing, but in our view, it’s more accurate to say we have a maldistribution of housing:  too much housing in the hands of empty-nesters in suburbs, too little housing in prosperous cities and high-opportunity neighborhoods.  Agree with Yglesias or not, this is a productive debate to be having.

2. A surge in biking, big data from Strava. Many dedicated cylcists use the Strava app to track their trips and measure their performance against other cyclists. With millions of trips in its database, Strava provides one indicator of the growth of cycling in cities across the US. Strava published some of this data, which show a significant uptick in cycling activity during the pandemic  Here are the data for New York City.

Strava has compiled this aggregated data into a new web-based tool called “Metro” that lets planners track cycling data for specific locales.

3. Covid cuts a diagonal slice through cities and suburbs. The inimitable Johnny Sanphillippo of Granola Shotgun has one of his signature photo-laden essays about how commercial and public spaces in cities and suburbs are faring in the wake of the CoronaVirus. While many are quick to proclaim the end of cities, Sanphillippo argues that the effects aren’t simple and clear cut, and the pandemic is creating winners and losers in every geography.

There’s a lot of talk on the interwebs these days about the mass exodus from big cities. . . .. The migration of frightened people seeking safety in the hinterland…. But the reality is more nuanced than suburbanites or country folks grasp. We aren’t seeing the end of cities and the triumph of the outskirts. Instead we’re experiencing a complex patchwork of winners and losers everywhere.

Parks and other civic spaces in cities are flourishing as people look to social-distance while experiencing the public realm.  In the suburbs, many big box stores, like WalMart and Home Depot still thrive, by much of the rest of retail, especially the small in-between stores that fill out malls and strip centers are being decimated.

New Knowledge

In the News

Strongtowns featured our analysis of the overwrought predictions of Carmaggedon that traffic engineers use to scare the public in its article, “Carpocalypse Never?”

What City Observatory did this week

Let’s fight congestion with a PR campaign.  For decades, when pressed to do something to improve road safety, city and state transportation officials have responded with . . . marketing campaigns. As the federally funded publicity around October’s National Pedestrian Safety Month makes clear, this mostly amounts to shifting blame for dangerous roads to vulnerable road users. We’re told safety is a “shared responsibility.”

Our modest proposal suggests that transportation officials ought to apply this same approach to fighting congestion:  A good marketing campaign could make it clear that traffic congestion is a product of lots of poor decisions by travelers, and that we should all take personal responsibility for our contribution to and exposure to traffic congestion. If we used that approach to congestion, the billions we save could be used to dramatically improve safety.

Must read

1. Environmental Justice has to be more than just a procedural step. It’s well known that the nation’s urban freeways sliced through and devastated many communities of color, and that’s prompted requirements that today’s environmental review processes for big transportation projects require a consideration of environmental justice (EJ).  But too often, highway builders treat these EJ requirements as just another check-box to tick off in a largely bureaucratic process. Maryland Delegate Sara Love, who represents a district bisected by freeways, points out that this purely procedural approach to EJ ignores the ongoing damage that roads (and the traffic and pollution they generate) continue to have today.  She writes:

In the 1960s the construction of Interstate 495 cut through the heart of many communities of color and low-income communities without consideration of their existence, their survival or their character and caused them great harm. Here we are, 60 years later and the Hogan administration is doing the same thing with its I-495 highway widening project. . . . The responsibility of the government — and the right thing to do — is not to exacerbate prior injustices, but to reverse them.

Tweeting about a similar dynamic in the Portland metro area, Transit Center’s David Bragdon likens the efforts to superficially address environmental justice as asking local residents to design the artwork that can be stenciled on the sides of the napalm bombs the DOT has already determined it will be dropping on your neighborhood. As long as we treat environmental justice as a procedural step, rather than a measurable, substantive requirement, we’ll get these kinds of results.

2. We’re holding on to cars and trucks longer, and that’s a threat to the environment. One of the key assumptions in many climate strategies is that we’ll start building cleaner vehicles (either electric or lower emission internal combustion cars), and that as consumers replace their existing vehicles, we’ll reduce emissions. Plans that call for all cars to be electric by 2035 or 2040 invariably refer only to newly purchased cars. But consumers are hanging on to their cars longer now than ever, and these older, dirtier cars mean higher levels of pollution, and less impact from new car requirements.  Over the past two decades, the average age of cars on the road has increased about 30 percent; and since the average is 11.6 years, many of the cars on the road are more than 15 or 20 years old.  This means that many of the cars sold today will be on the road in 2035 or 2040.

It’s possible we’ll look more and more like Cuba, where in 1950s era Fords and Chevies have been kept on the road indefinitely. Ultimately, we need strategies, like carbon pricing, that discourage the use of high polluting vehicles.

New Knowledge

In the News

GreenBiz republished Joe Cortright’s commentary on the inequity of charging fares for the use of transit while allowing people to use the public right of way for private car storage either for free or at vastly discounted prices.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Covid-19 is now worst in rural areas and red states. Early on in the pandemic, it seemed like everyone attributed the spread of the Coronavirus to big cities and density. It turns out, more than half a year on, that’s not the case. The epidemic is now far worse in the nation’s rural areas, which have 21 percent of new cases but just 14 percent of US population. A broad swath of rural and small metro America from the Gulf Coast to the Dakota’s, the politically red heartland is now the redzone for the virus.

The gap between urban and rural areas has widened in the past month, and we’re still waiting for the nation’s reporters to start filing stories about rural residents fleeing to the safety of the nation’s big cities, which now have, by far the lowest new case rates.

2. Equity and Parks. We’re pleased to present a guest commentary from Carol Coletta, President and CEO of Memphis Riverparks.  Her remarks to the International Downtown Association’s 66th annual meeting make a strong connection between vibrant urban spaces, particularly parks, and promoting the kind of social mixing that’s needed to promote social mixing, break down the growing divisions in America, and broaden empathy.  Downtown parks and public spaces are particularly important because they are the spaces most widely available to people from throughout the community.  As Carol writes:

Successful downtowns increasingly depend on great public space.  And great public space located in a downtown is more likely to be equitable space because of its location, not despite its location.

The pandemic has reminded us of the importance of these public spaces to our daily lives. One hopes that out of this crisis will grow a greater realization of the role they can play in bringing us closer together.

Must read

1. Building more roads won’t help America’s economy.  From “infrastructure week” to presidential campaign shibboleths, the idea that we can revive our economy by building more roads and bridges is a commonplace. While it may have been true in the middle of the 20th Century, it’s flat out wrong today, as Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns argues in a commentary for CNN:

When local governments don’t maintain what they already have, can they credibly justify building more? Instead of pursuing economic growth through system expansion, recovery must be based on a firm commitment to maintaining what has already been built and squeezing higher returns out of these existing infrastructure investments.

Additionally, a statewide upzoning that allows developers to build in the most affluent, exclusive communities would take some of the pressure off moderate-income neighborhoods such as East Boston and Malden, which have been providing much of the region’s new housing. Allowing new construction in affluent, mostly white communities is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk of gentrification and displacement in lower-income Black and Latino or Hispanic communities.

Following instructions from the White House, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) disqualified transit agencies in New York City, Seattle, and Portland from participating in a new grant program to research methods to slow the spread of coronavirus on buses and trains. This move puts transit operators’ and riders’ safety at risk and sets a dangerous precedent that could undermine future economic recovery efforts.

New Knowledge

In the News

Bike Portland called our analysis of the proposed $5 billion transportation bond measure in Portland “a scathing takedown” and a “serious critique” of the measure.

The Portland Mercury also cited our analysis of the proposed Portland Metro transportation bond measure in its election editorial.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Now we are six. We marked City Observatory’s sixth birthday this week, and took a few moments to reflect back on the journey, and to thank all those who helped us on our way, and to look forward to the vital role that cities will continue to play in tackling tough national problems.

2. The amazing disappearing urban exodus. The meme that the urban density causes or aggravates the Coronavirus, and is leading people to flee cities is every bit as persistent as the pandemic itself. New data on postal change-of-address filings shows that there’s been at best a minor blip in people moving—up just 2 percent since the virus first spread.  In fact, over the past three months for which data is available, the rate of permanent moves is actually lower than it was in the same three months in 2019. Despite the fact that the data show there’s no significant change in migration, press accounts insist on repeating myths out people leaving cities.

Must read

1. Elon Musk’s hyperloop vaporware. The Boring Company’s claims that its hyperloop technology is going to disrupt urban transit are evaporating even before its Las Vegas demonstration project is complete. What was pitched originally as a exciting new automated underground system, is now just Teslas in a tunnel, and probably with human drivers. Tech Crunch reports that not only will individual vehicles only carry 5 passengers maximum, but the logistics of loading passengers will likely slash the system’s actual capacity to as little as a quarter of what Musk’s team claimed.  As Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker always reminds us, these car-based solutions run up against barriers of fundamental geometry, that can’t be disrupted.

2. The urban interstate and the damage done (Indianapolis edition).  Across the nation in the 1950s and 1960s, highway engineers demolished vibrant, walkable urban neighborhoods, chiefly to speed suburban car commuters through an increasingly sprawling landscape. Daniel Bradley of WRxx-TV has a terrific essay relating the story of the construction of Interstates 65 and 70 through Indianapolis, and the destruction of the neighborhoods (and renting of the urban fabric they caused).  More than 8,000 buildings were demolished and 17,000 persons displaced by the freeways. And the freeways dealt a body-blow to what had been the kind of urban spaces cities are struggling today to re-create:

“They don’t really realize it was a huge network of neighborhoods,” said [Paula] Brooks, an environmental health senior associate with the Hoosier Environmental Council and a Ransom Place neighborhood advocate. “It was a truly mixed-use urban neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood these young urbanists are fantasizing about now. You could get everything you needed. There were grocery stores and dry cleaners. Restaurants and beauty shops. For recreation, people could go to the park, a bowling alley or a skating rink.

You can tell the same stories for scores of other US cities.  It was a monumentally expensive and unthinking commitment to reshaping the places we live for the convenience of those driving through, and we’re still struggling to overcome the damage today.

3. Traffic safety: Something is 94 percent wrong. Dan Kostelec, writing at StreetsblogNYC debunks the oft-repeated claim that 94 percent of traffic deaths are due to “human error.” This framing of the causes of “accidents” is a favorite both of highway engineers and autonomous vehicle advocates.  The latter imagine that eliminating human’s from driving will, automatically, eliminate nearly all crashes. The highway engineers rely on the claim to deflect responsibility for designing and building roads that create dangerous conditions and that are unforgiving of the likely “errors” that they cause. For example, wide straight roads, with few pedestrian crossings, prompt speeding and give those on foot few options.  The trouble, Kostelec, argues, is the 94 percent number is a fabrication:

Simply put: It’s not true. Crashes are more complex than that and we need to understand all those factors to stand a chance at reducing traffic deaths in the United States.

New Knowledge

In the News

Oregonian columnist Steve Duin cited our analysis of the proposed $5 billion Portland Metro bond measure in his commentary, “Your father’s transportation plan.”  Duin called our analysis “pointed and persuasive,” writing:

Cortright argues the wage tax “is unrelated to transportation, effectively taxing those who use the system least, and subsidizes those who drive and pollute the most.” It “cannibalizes the principle source of funding for transit operations” at a time when TriMet is in crisis.

And even though Metro trumpets its imperative to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for a climate-changing future,” Measure 26-218 does virtually nothing, Cortright says, to reduce emissions.

Our analysis also figured prominently in the Oregonian’s coverage of the debate over the ballot measure.