Month: May 2022
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The Week Observed, July 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Failing to learn from the failure of the Columbia River Crossing. Last week, Portland’s Metro Council voted 6-1 to wave on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s plan for a multi-billion dollar freeway widening project branded as a bridge replacement. In doing so, the Council is ignoring the lessons of…
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The Week Observed, July 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A Bridge too low. The Oregon DOT is fundamentally misrepresenting the process and legal standards for setting the height of a proposed new multi-billion dollar I-5 bridge across the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver. Ignoring the Coast Guard’s determination that a new bridge must provide 178 feet of…
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The Week Observed, July 8, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Building a bridge too low–again. In their effort to try to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing (a $5 billion freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver) the Oregon and Washington transportation departments are repeating each of the mistakes that doomed the project a decade ago. The latest blunder: …
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The Week Observed, July 1, 2022
Must read The most gas guzzling states. The sting of higher gas prices depends on where you live, not so much because of the variation in prices, but because in some states, you just have drive a lot more. The website Quotewizard took a look at federal data from the energy and transportation departments, and…
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The Week Observed, June 17, 2022
What City Observatory did this week There’s nothing green about free parking, no matter how many solar panels you put on the garage. The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory brags about its sustainable parking garage, festooned with solar panels. But the garage, designed to hold about 1,800 cars is essentially fossil fuel…
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The Week Observed, May 27, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Our apologies to City Observatory readers for our website outage on 19-22 May. More meaningless congestion pseudo science. A new study from the University of Maryland claims that traffic lights cause 20 percent of all time lost in traffic. The estimate is the product of big data analysis of…
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More Congestion Pseudo Science
A new study calculates that twenty percent of all time “lost” in travel is due to traffic lights Finally, proof for the Lachner Theorem: Traffic signals are a major cause of traffic delay Another classic example of pseudo-science: Big data and bad assumptions produce meaningless results When I was in graduate school, I shared a house…
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The Week Observed, May 20, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Another exploding whale: The cost of the I-205 bridge project doubles in four years. Famously in the 1960s, the Oregon State Highway Department tried to dispose of the carcass of a whale that had washed up on an Oregon beach with several cases of dynamite. They predicted that the…
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Yet another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost doubles
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-205 Abernethy Bridge rebuild, advertised as costing $248 million, will really cost $500 million The project’s estimated cost has doubled in just four years, and still has further cost overrun risk The Oregon DOT has experienced massive cost-overruns on all of its largest construction projects, and has systematically concealed…
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The Week Observed, May 13, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Just Say “No” to freeway widening zealots. George Santayana meet David Bragdon: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat the failures of the past. A year ago, we published this commentary by David Bragdon, now Director of the Transit Center, but a decade ago, President of…
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Just say no: How to deal with highway widening zealots
The Oregon and Washington highway departments are at it again, pushing a 10- or 12-lane, five mile long freeway widening project that’s likely to cost at least $5 billion. They’re responding to objections with a combination of misleading rhetoric and feigned acceptance of “conditions” to minimize the project’s impacts This is exactly what they did…
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How ODOT & WSDOT are hiding real plans for a 10- or 12-lane I-5 Bridge Project
Ignore the false claims that the Oregon and Washington highway departments are making about the number of lanes on their proposed I-5 project: its footprint will be 164 feet—easily enough for a 10- or 12-lane roadway. This commentary was originally published at Bike Portland, and is re-published here with permission. If you followed Tuesday’s Portland City Council…
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The Week Observed, May 6, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Ten questions that deserve answers before making a multi-billion dollar decision. The Portland metro area is being asked by the Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation to give the go ahead to a $5 billion, 5 mile long freeway widening project. It would be one of the biggest infrastructure…
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Ten unanswered questions about the IBR Boondoggle
In the next month or two, regional leaders in Portland are going to be asked to approve the “modified locally preferred alternative” for the I-5 Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project, an intentionally misnamed, $5 billion, 5 mile long, 12-lane wide freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. There’s a decided rush to judgment, with almost…
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The Week Observed, April 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The folly of the frog ferry. One bane of transportation policy discussions is the tendency to believe that miracle technical fixes—self-driving cars, personal aircraft, the Segway, or Elon Musk’s car tunnels–are going to overcome the physics, geometry and economics that make transportation a hard problem. The latest iteration of…