Month: January 2023
-
The Week Observed, January 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving stakes, selling bonds, overdosing on debt. The Oregon Department of Transportation is following a well trodden path to push the state toward a massive highway expansion project. For example, Oregon DOT has kicked off the half billion dollar I-205 project with no permanent funding in place, instead relying…
-
Driving stakes, selling bonds: ODOT’s freeway boondoggle plan
The Oregon Department of Transportation is launching a series of boondoggle freeways, with no idea of their ultimate cost, and issuing bonds that will obligate the public to pay for expensive and un-needed highways. Future generations will have to pay off the bonds AND suffer the climate consequences The classic Robert Moses scam: Drive stakes,…
-
The Week Observed, January 20, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. We’re reminded this year of Dr. Martin Luther King’s observation that our cities, and the public policies that shape them, are deeply enmeshed in our history of racism. Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges…
-
Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor
It’s a long road to redressing inequality Fifty-five years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the stilted rhetoric used use to talk about public spending to promote the social good: Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and…
-
The Week Observed, January 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week A reporter’s guide to congestion cost studies. For more than a decade, we and others have been taking a close, hard and critical look at congestion cost reports generated by groups like the Texas Transportation Institute, Tom-Tom, and Inrix. The reports all follow a common pattern, generating seemingly alarming,…
-
Another flawed Inrix Congestion Cost report
Sigh. Here we are again, another year, and yet another uninformative, and actively misleading congestion cost report from Inrix. More myth and misdirection from highly numerate charlatans. Burying the lede: Traffic congestion is now lower than it was in 2019, and congestion declined twice as much as the decline in vehicle travel. Today, Inrix released…
-
A reporter’s guide to congestion cost studies
Reporters: read this before you write a “cost of congestion” story. Congestion cost studies are a classic example of pseudo-science: Big data and bad assumptions produce meaningless results Using this absurd methodology, you can show: Waiting at traffic signals costs us $8 billion a year—ignoring what it would cost in time and money to have…
-
The Week Observed, January 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening. This week marked the end of public comment on the Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposed $1.45 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening projects. At a billion dollars a mile, its one of the world’s most…
-
The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening
Portland is weighing whether to spend as much as $1.45 billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter near downtown. We’ve dug deeply into this idea at City Observatory, and we’ve published more than 50 commentaries addressing various aspects of the project over the past four years. Here’s a…