Category: Commentary
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History shows IBR modeling is simply wrong
Highway department’s are selling multi-billion dollar highway widening projects based on flawed traffic projections. The projections prepared for the predecessor of the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project predicted traffic would grow 1.3 percent per year after 2005. In reality, traffic across the I-5 bridges has increased by only about 0.1 percent per year…
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The Week Observed, November 9, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments. Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years. But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more…
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IBR: Planning for a world that no longer exists
The Interstate Bridge Project’s traffic projections pretend that the massive shift to “work-from-home” never happened The IBR traffic projections rely almost entirely on pre-Covid-pandemic data, and ignore the dramatic change in travel patterns. Traffic on I-5 is still 7 percent below pre-pandemic levels, according to Oregon DOT data Traffic on the I-5 bridge is lower…
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IBR’s DSEIS uses the least accurate forecast
Oregon and Washington have commissioned not just one forecast of future traffic levels on I-5 and I-205, but three different forecasts. IBR officials are clinging to the one forecast that is the least accurate, and most error-prone, and have chosen to ignore two more accurate forecasts. IBR relies on Metro’s Kate Model, which has an…
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IBR contradicts region’s climate commitments
IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years. But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more than a 25 percent increase in…
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Needless purposes: How IBR violates NEPA
The $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s two-decade old “Purpose and Need” statement is simply wrong, and provides an invalid basis for the project’s required Environmental Impact Statement. Contrary to claims by project proponents, the “Purpose and Need” statement isn’t chiseled in stone, rather it is required to be evolve to reflect reality and better…
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The Week Observed, November 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week There’s a critical flaw in the planning of the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge project: Metro’s Kate travel demand model is wildly inflating I-5 traffic numbers. The model claims 164,050 vehicles crossed the I-5 bridges daily in 2019, but ODOT’s own traffic counters tell a drastically different story – only…
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Metro’s Kate Model: 25,000 phantom cars a day on the I-5 bridge
How can we trust Metro’s model to predict the future, when it can’t even match the present? Metro’s Kate travel demand model, used to plan the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge, includes 25,000 phantom cars per day in its base year estimates. The existing I-5 bridges over the Columbia River carried 138,800 vehicles on an average…
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IBR traffic modeling violates professional standards and federal rules
Traffic modeling is guided by a series of professional and administrative guidelines. In the case of the proposed $7.5 Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, IBR and Metro modelers did not follow or violated these guidelines in many ways as they prepared their traffic demand modeling. IBR modelers: Didn’t assess accuracy of their previous modeling Failed to…
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Cooking the Books: How IBR used “Post-Processing” to alter the Metro Model
To hear project officials tell it, traffic projections emerge from the immaculate and objective Metro “Kate” traffic model But in reality, IBR traffic projections are not the outputs of the Kate travel demand model. Instead, IBR consultants have altered the Metro numbers, something the label “post-processing.” But what they’ve done, doesn’t meet the professional standards…
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Inventing millions of phantom trucks to sell a wider bridge
The $7.5 billion plan to widen the I-5 bridges across the Columbia River is being sold, in part, based on claims that it will be used by millions of phantom trucks. Metro’s biased truck modeling over-states current I-5 truck traffic by almost 70 percent: more than 2 million phantom trucks per year. Metro’s model says…
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They’re digging in the wrong place
The Interstate Bridge Project proposes spending $7.5 billion to widen I-5, but misses the real bottleneck. A new, independent analysis by national traffic expert Norm Marshall of Smart Mobility, Inc., shows that the proposed IBR project fails to fix the real bottlenecks affecting I-5 traffic. Traffic problems on I-5 are caused by bottlenecks outside the…
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Moving the goalposts: Redefining traffic congestion
IBR re-wrote the definition of congestion to make I-5 traffic look worse For decades, Oregon DOT has defined traffic congestion as freeway speeds below 35 MPH. Now, for the Interstate Bridge project, IBR has moved the goalposts: now any speed under 45 MPH is counted as “congested.” The definition of “congested” matters because its central…
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The Week Observed, October 25, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week They’re digging in the wrong place: A new, independent analysis by national traffic expert Norm Marshall of Smart Mobility, Inc., shows that the proposed IBR project fails to fix the real bottlenecks affecting I-5 traffic. The Interstate Bridge Project proposes spending $7.5 billion to widen I-5, but misses the real bottleneck. …
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The Week Observed, October 18, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Forecasting the impossible: The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is based on deeply flawed traffic models that ignore the bridge’s capacity limits, and predict plainly unrealistic levels of traffic growth if the bridge isn’t expanded. These grossly overestimated projections make future traffic look worse and…
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IBR: Forecasting the impossible
The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is based on deeply flawed traffic models that ignore the bridge’s capacity limits, and predict plainly unrealistic levels of traffic growth if the bridge isn’t expanded. These grossly overestimated projections make future traffic look worse and overstate the need and understate the environmental and financial…
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Kate: Metro’s wildly inaccurate model overstates current traffic levels
The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project is based on traffic projections from Metro’s “Kate” travel demand model. But there’s a huge problem: Kate doesn’t accurately model even current levels of traffic. The model has a high overall error factor, and importantly, consistently over-estimates traffic on the existing I-5 bridges. Metro has…
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The Interstate Bridge Project’s Flawed Traffic Data
The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project simply can’t tell the truth about current traffic levels or recent growth rates. IBR reports inflate the current level of traffic on I-5 bridges by nearly 5,000 vehicles per day IBR reports falsely claim that I-5 bridge traffic is growing twice as fast as ODOT’s own data show IBR officials…
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The Week Observed, August 30, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week There’s no evidence of a housing bubble. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn has a recent blog post proclaiming that the US housing market is the midst of another bubble, similar to 2008. But a closer look at housing market fundamentals, especially mortgage debt, shows few parallels to that earlier debacle.…
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Another housing bubble brewing? Not really
Another housing bubble? Strong Towns Chuck Marohn argues that we’re in the midst of another housing bubble. He claims the housing market is full of fraud and is a bubble that’s “ready to pop,” just like in 2008. Is there really a new housing bubble? Marohn’s cites the surge in house prices and worries about…
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City Observatory’s Joe Cortright on the Housing Bubble–2005
In an op-ed published in the Portland, Oregonian on July 17, 2005, City Observatory director Joe Cortright predicted that the US was in the throes of a housing bubble. The text of this op-ed follows: THE ECONOMIST: High-flying house prices fueled by fervor can’t last July 17, 2005 | Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) Author/Byline: JOE CORTRIGHT;…
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The Week Observed, August 23, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week How Metro’s RTP illegally favors driving and violates state climate rules. Oregon’s planning rules require Portland area transportation plans to prioritize investments that reduce vehicle miles traveled–but the region’s transportation plan illegally prioritizes spending for freeway expansions. Metro’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan devotes most of its resources to providing additional…
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How Metro’s RTP Illegally favors car travel and violates climate rules
Oregon’s planning rules require Portland area transportation plans to prioritize investments that reduce vehicle miles traveled Metro’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan devotes most of its resources to providing additional capacity for car travel Metro’s own climate analysis shows investments in roads are the least effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Transit, biking, walking and…
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The Week Observed, August 16, 2024
Must Read Portland advocates sue to block Rose Quarter Freeway widening. There’s a new chapter in the long-running battle to block the Oregon Department of Transportation’s I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project, a 10-lane mile and a half expansion that has quadrupled in cost to $1.9 billion. Local advocates, led by No More Freeways, have…
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The Week Observed, August 2, 2024
Must Read Induced Demand and Climate Denial. As we’ve long said, the favorite folk tale of state DOTs and highway boosters is the idea that the primary solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is lowering the amount of time cars spend indling in traffic. If we widening the highway so that cars could just go…
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The Week Observed, July 26, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) is going up: But we won’t tell you how much . . . And we’re not going to tell you until a year from now, after the 2025 Legislature adjourns In January, 2024, IBR official publicly acknowledged that their 13 month-old cost…
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Hiding the growing cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement
The cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) is going up: But we won’t tell you how much . . . And we’re not going to tell you until a year from now, after the 2025 Legislature adjourns In January, 2024, IBR official publicly acknowledged that their 13 month-old cost estimate of up to $7.5 billion…
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The Week Observed, July 19, 2024
Must Read Denser cities = Less expensive infrastructure. A new study from New Zealand confirms one of the fundamental intuitions about cities: Places with higher levels of residential density have lower per capita and per dwelling costs of providing physical infrastructure. This study looked at the cost of providing roads, water lines and sewers to…
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The Week Observed, July 12, 2024
Must Read The problem with elevators in America. Market Urbanism’s Stephen Smith has an op-ed in the New York Times opening up a new front in the YIMBY effort to expand housing supply in the US. Smith argues that the development of affordable, sustainable multi-family housing in the US is thwarted by two arcane regulatory…
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The Week Observed, June 28, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Unique Local Experiences: The Hidden Value in Urban Economies. An often-overlooked aspect of urban economics: the value of unique, local, and seasonal experiences. We take as an example the case of Hood strawberries in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, we explore how scarcity and locality can enhance economic and cultural value…
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Strawberries and economic prosperity
Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader. You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around the Summer Solstice in the shadow of this mountain, chances are you have never tasted a Hood strawberry. The Hood is…
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The Week Observed, June 21, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Inventing a “commitment” to megaproject cost-overruns. Oregon’s Department of Transportation is is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to unapproved freeway s and massive cost overruns. They’re using this fiction to argue that the state is somehow obligated to pay for expensive freeway expansions and can’t first fix…
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Inventing a “commitment” to freeway cost overruns
How ODOT is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to freeway cost overruns. The 2017 Legislature authorized zero funding for the I-205 Bridge project In 2024, ODOT now falsely claims that the I-205 project was a “commitment” of the 2017 Legislature The original HB 2017 only directed ODOT to produce a “cost to…
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An 18 month delay for the IBR due to flawed traffic projections
The $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project (IBR) is likely delayed up to 18 months because of flawed traffic modeling. The Oregon and Washington DOTs are in denial about the problem, but previously secret records obtained by City Observatory show ODOT and WSDOT have long known that traffic modeling needed to be fixed, and put…
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The Week Observed, June 14, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project is facing significant delays of up to 18 months. The culprit? Flawed traffic modeling that overestimates future traffic use. City Observatory and others have long pointed up flaws in IBR’s traffic modeling, arguing it overestimates traffic growth and…
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The Week Observed, June 7, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week We grade the city clean energy scorecard. A new scorecard tires to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecard has some serious limitations.This scorecard emphasizes policies and process over measurable progress—only 6 of a possible 250 points are tied directly…
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Grading the City Clean Energy Scorecard
A new scorecard tries to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecard has some serious limitations. This scorecard emphasizes policies and process over measurable progress—only 6 of a possible 250 points are tied directly to lowering greenhouse gas emissions Scores and rankings can help motivate action,…
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How “anti-social” capital varies by city
The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “anti-social” capital We thought we’d take an updated look at one of our favorite indicators of “social-capital”–the number of private security guards as a share of the local workforce. Having lots of security guards is likely an indicator of distrust and…
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The Week Observed, May 24, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week A costly cargo cult in Portland: A proposal to spend $30 million per year subsidizing the revival of container shipping operations at the Port of Portland is misguided effort based on outdated economic thinking. Portland was never more than a very minor player in containerized shipping, handling less than…
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Cargo Cult Comeback: Cost–$30 million a year
Portland’s $30 Million Container Shipping Folly Cargo cults are a well-documented sociological phenomenon: Cargo cults were religious movements that emerged among indigenous people in Melanesia during the early to mid-20th century. The cults were inspired by the arrival of European colonizers and the material goods they brought. The islanders observed the seemingly magical ability of outsiders…
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The Week Observed, May 17, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation can and should mitigate the negative impacts of its highway construction projects, including social and economic impacts. ODOT’s massive $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter highway project is billed as “restorative justice” because it would construct caps over the freeway that decimated Portland’s historically Black…
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Oregon DOT can and should mitigate past damage from highways
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has proposed a $1.9 billion freeway widening project for Portland’s Rose Quarter. The agency proposes to cover a portion of the freeway in what it calls “restorative justice” for the Albina neighborhood, that was decimated by decades of earlier ODOT highway building. But ODOT claims it can’t spend highway…
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The Week Observed, May 10, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Another Oregon Department of Transportation exploding whale.* The cost of one of OregonDOT’s megaprojects, the expansion of the I-205 Abernethy Bridge over the Willamette River south of Portland just jumped $750 million, now triple the amount the agency said the project would cost when it moved forward five years…
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The Interstate Bridge Replacement is Two Years Behind Schedule
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Project is two years behind schedule IBR’s Draft SEIS was supposed to be complete in December 2022—It now won’t be done before December 2024. This two-year delay means the environmental review has taken twice as long as IBR promised Not to worry, because the consultants will continue billing, and their…
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Abernethy Bridge Cost Triples to $750 million
Oregon DOT’s I-205 Abernethy Bridge rebuild, advertised as costing $248 million, will really cost $750 million The project’s estimated cost has tripled in just over five years, and still has further cost overrun risk ODOT’s plans to cover these cost overruns would mean cancelling dozens of other projects around the state, and/or a huge statewide…
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The Week Observed, May 3, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Beware of phony claims that highway projects are “On-time and Under-Budget.” For highway departments, the key to being on-time and under-budget is Orwellian double-speak. Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget–because the agency simply “disappears” its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-finished projects are officially described as…
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Moving the goalposts
The key to being on-time and under-budget: Orwellian double-speak Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget–because the agency simply disappears its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-finished projects are officially described as “On-time and on-budget” Oregon DOT routinely hides its waste, mismanagement and incompetence The last bits of fresh asphalt have been rolled…
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The Week Observed, April 26, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Earth Day: Oregon is spending billions to widen freeways in a move that will only worsen the increase in greenhouse gases from transportation. Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gases in Oregon (and in the US) and unlike other sectors, GHGs from transportation are increasing. That’s the opposite…
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The Week Observed, April 12, 2024
Must Read The high, high cost of “affordable housing.” The Voice of San Diego takes a look at the pricetag of several affordable housing projects in California and finds they’re pushing and breaking through the million-dollar a unit mark. Across the 17 projects it examined, average costs were $574,000 a unit. Many factors contributed to higher…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Widening Freeways Kills the Planet!
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down. State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit us to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction. April…
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The Week Observed, April 19, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week A teachable moment: Free Ice Cream Day. Traffic was lined up around the block last Tuesday at your local Ben and Jerry’s, for the same reason roadways are clogged most weekday afternoons: the price is too low. April 16 was Ben and Jerry’s annual free ice cream day. In…
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Bye Containers, Again
Once again, Portland loses container service: the economic effects will be minimal. Economic development has long been obsessed with “cargo cult” thinking: the idea that economic prosperity is caused by ports and highways moving raw materials and finished goods. That may have been partly true in the 19th Century, but today the sources of prosperity…
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A teachable moment: Ben & Jerry’s seminar in transportation economics
They’ll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads Your highway department is broke, and thinks it needs much bigger roads because it gives its produce away for free every day. Charging a fair price for using roads, just like charging a fair price for…
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The Week Observed, April 5, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Thirty seconds over Portland: Spending $7.5 billion on a freeway widening project will save the typical affected commuter about 30 seconds a day, according to the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s yet-to-be-released Environmental Impact Statement. IBR officials have said they fear leaks of the EIS could create a negative perception…
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Another thing IBR doesn’t want you to know: 30 seconds over Portland
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project will save the average commuter just 30 seconds in daily commute time IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project Guess what: We have an advance copy of the draft EIS: You can now see what they don’t want…
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States need honest reporting on transportation greenhouse gases
You can’t tell if you’re winning or losing if you don’t keep score, especially when it comes to transportation greenhouse gas emissions. But a close look at the data shows we’re not making much progress, and not making it fast enough, primarily because we’re driving more. Your state highway department is likely to be in…
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The Week Observed, March 29, 2024
What City Observatory did this week What the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project doesn’t want you to know. The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement. IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project. Guess…
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Carmageddon does a no show, again (Baltimore edition)
On Tuesday, March 26, the containership Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse into the Patapsco River. Tragically, six workers on the bridge were killed, but fortunately the collision occurred in the middle of the night, rather than during peak travel hours, when hundreds of vehicles would likely…
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What IBR doesn’t want you to know
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project Guess what: We have an advance copy of the draft EIS: You can now see what they…
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The Week Observed, March 22, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways. The latest fashion in highway urbanism is “capping” freeways. In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and even create new urban land. They produce gauzy green renderings of what capped freeway might look like. But urban leaders need…
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Freeway covers are an expensive way to create new urban land
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create valuable new urban land by decking over freeways? Turns out, its massively uneconomical, and doesn’t eliminate many of the most negative effects of urban freeways Its massively uneconomical because that “land” thats created by capping freeways costs at least three times more to build than the land…
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The Week Observed, March 15, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans. This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon’s Regional Mobility Pricing Program, which would have imposed per mile fees on major Portland-area freeways. The plan, approved by the legislature seven years ago, has been developed at a snail’s…
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Monkey-wrenching road pricing
R.I.P. Road Pricing in Oregon: Dead before its even tried More than just money, the demise of pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation policy It’s no surprise: ODOT’s attempts to implement pricing have been half-hearted and still-born Without pricing, Portland traffic congestion will grow worse, and this blows a hole in state and regional climate plans This…
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The Week Observed, March 8, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary widely across the nation. We use data from the Economic Innovation Group’s latest distressed communities index to identify clusters of contiguous zip…
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A yawning chasm: Patterns of neighborhood distress in US metros
There’s a yawning chasm of neighborhood level economic distress across US metro areas. While about 1 in 6 US neighborhoods is classed as distressed, some metro areas have large concentrations of distress, while others have almost no distressed neighborhoods at all. Focusing on groups of contiguous zip codes classified as “distressed” shows that in some…
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The Week Observed, March 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of “Missing Massive” housing? This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas. One of the perennial topics was state strategies to promote “missing middle” housing—as evidenced by multiple initiatives to allow duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes…
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Housing: Missing Middle or Missing Massive?
Gradually, more people and elected leaders are admitting that more housing density is needed if we’re to tackle housing affordability, and provide equitable opportunities to live in great cities and neighborhoods. But like a swimmer cautiously dipping a toe in a fresh stream, we’re proceeding slowly: It’s been (relatively) easy to talk about “missing middle”…
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The Week Observed, February 16, 2024
Must Read The freeway cap mirage. Don’t like freeways? Let’s just cover up the problem. It’s increasingly popular to try to repair the damage done to urban neighborhoods by “capping” freeways: building a cover so that the road is less visible. While that’s widely seen as an improvement, some are pushing back that its really…
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The Week Observed, February 9, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. Some of the most important policy decisions are buried deep in seemingly technocratic documents. Case-in-point: Oregon’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. The state’s truckers are using the latest report to claim that they’re being overcharged, but the real story is very…
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Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study
There are good reasons to be dubious of claims that trucks are being over-charged for the use of Oregon roads. The imbalance between cars and trucks seems to stem largely from the Oregon Department of Transportation”s decision to slash maintenance and preservation, and spend more widening highways. ODOT could largely fix this “imbalance” by spending…
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The Week Observed, February 2, 2024
Must Read How CalTrans cheated on its environmental reporting. Some months back, former Deputy Director of CalTrans,Jeanie Ward-Waller blew the whistle on the agency’s effort to evade environmental laws and illegally use maintenance funds to widen I-80 between Sacramento and Davis. Now the National Resources Defense Council has laid out a strong case that the…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and transortation greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Case in point: Portland’s Regional Transportation Plan: It claims to do something about climate, but…
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The Week Observed, January 26, 2024
What City Observatory this week Robert Moses strikes again: One of the most infamous decisions of “The Power Broker” was to build the overpasses on the Long Island Expressway too low to allow city buses to use the roadway, cementing auto-dependency and blocking easy and economical transit access to many suburbs. And eight decades later,…
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Bus on shoulder: Stalking horse for freeway widening
ODOT isn’t giving buses the shoulder, it’s giving transit the finger. IBR is planning a transitway for the new $7.5 billion interstate bridge that can’t be used by buses. It’s sketching in a “bus on shoulder” option as an excuse to justify building an even wider highway crossing. Meanwhile it plans to place light rail…
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The Week Observed, January 19, 2024
What City Observatory this week Why does it take four years and $200 million for consultants to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admitted that he’s just pushing “basically the same” project that failed a decade ago, but in the process, he’s spent $192 million…
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Why spend $200 million on consultants for “basically the same project”?
Why does it take four years and $200 million to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admitted that he’s just pushing “basically the same” project that failed a decade ago, but in the process, he’s spent $192 million on consultants, with the largest single chunk…
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The Week Observed, January 12, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The pernicious myth of “Naturally Occurring” Affordable Housing. One of the most dangerous and misleading concepts in housing reared its ugly head in the form a a new publication from, of all places, the American Planning Association. The publication “Zoning Practice: Preserving Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing” purports to offer…
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The pernicious myth of “naturally occurring” affordable housing
Housing doesn’t “occur naturally” Using zoning to preserve older, smaller homes doesn’t protect affordability There’s no such thing as “Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing”–older, smaller homes become affordable only if supply and demand are in balance, usually because it’s relatively easy to build more housing. The parable of the ranch home shows that old, small homes…
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The Week Observed, January 5, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project? Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the Oregon and Washington DOTs say it will cost even more. We estimate project costs are likely to increase 20 percent or more,…
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It looks like the Interstate Bridge Replacement could cost $9 billion
Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the state DOTs ay it will cost even more We estimate project costs are likely to increase 20 percent or more, which would drive the price tag to as much as $9 billion, almost double the…
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The Week Observed, December 22, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Bad data. What appears, at first glance, to be a big decline in trip-making is really an object lesson in failing to read the footnotes. Every five years or so, the US Department of Transportation produces the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which provides essential information about American travel…
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Bad data: Not a decline in travel
An imagined decline in trip-making is the result of bad data analysis USDOT counted fewer trips in 2022, because it used a different, and less reliable survey method USDOT’s social media created a false perception that 2022 data were comparable with earlier years For all the time we spend talking about transportation, it’s surprising how…
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The Week Observed, December 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle. A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness. The Interstate Bridge Project is a value-destroying proposition: it costs more to build than it provides in economic benefits Federal law requires that highway projects be demonstrated to be “cost-effective” in…
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Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle
A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness The Interstate Bridge Project is a value-destroying proposition: it costs more to build than it provides in economic benefits Federal law requires that highway projects be demonstrated to be “cost-effective” in order to qualify for funding. The US Department of Transportation requires applicants…
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The Week Observed, December 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Tolling i-5 will produce massive traffic diversion. The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers. These tolls will cause tens of thousands of vehicles per day to stop crossing the I-5 bridge; and most traffic will…
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Diversion: IBR tolls will gridlock I-205
The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers. These tolls will cause tens of thousands of vehicles per day to stop crossing the I-5 bridge; and most traffic will divert to the parallel I-205 bridge, producing gridlock, according to IBR consultant…
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Down is not up: The truth about traffic, congestion and trucking
A central message of the highway building sales pitch is that traffic is ever-growing and ever worsening, and that we have no choice but to throw more money at expanded capacity. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) claims that traffic is every-rising, congestion is ever-worsening, and we’re always moving more and more trucks. The reality,…
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The ten lane freeway hiding in Rose Quarter Plans
Secret ODOT plans obtained by City Observatory show ODOT is planning a ten-lane freeway through the Rose Quarter Though the agency claims its “just adding one auxiliary lane” in each direction, the I-5 Rose Quarter project is engineered with a 160-foot wide footprint, enough for 10 full travel lanes and extra wide shoulders. In places…
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The Week Observed, December 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Secret plans show ODOT is planning a 10-lane freeway in the Rose Quarter. City Observatory has obtained previously un-released plans showing that the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter project is being build with a 160-foot wide roadway, enough to accommodate a ten through traffic lanes, contradicting the Oregon Department…
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The Week Observed, November 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week 5 million miles wide of the mark.Portland’s regional government Metro, has proposed a regional transportation plan (RTP) that purports to achieve state and regional policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s a 5 million mile problem: The climate analysis of the Metro RTP assumes that the region will…
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Lying about climate: A 5 million mile a day discrepancy
Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) claims it will meet state and regional climate objectives by slashing vehicle travel more than 30 percent per person between now and 2045. Meanwhile, its transportation plan actually calls for a decrease in average travel of less than 1 percent per person. Because population is expected to increase, so too…
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The Week Observed, November 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Snow-Job: Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) threatens to slash snow-plowing and other safety maintenance unless it is given more money, while spending billions on a handful of Portland area freeway widening projects. ODOT claims it’s too broke to plow state roads this winter, with the not-at-all-subtle message that people…
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ODOT Snow Job: Give us more money, or we’ll stop plowing your roads
Oregon’s Department of Transportation (ODOT) says it doesn’t have enough money to maintain roads, fix potholes or even plow snow. This is a Big Lie: Mega-projects and their cost-overruns, not maintenance, are the cause of ODOT’s budget woes ODOT has chosen to slash operations, while funneling hundreds of millions to billion-dollar-a-mile mega-projects and consultants Plowing is…
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The Week Observed, November 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Killer off-ramps. The Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter widening has been repeatedly (and falsely) portrayed as a “safety” project, but the latest re-design of the project may make it even more dangerous than it is today. An earlier “Hybrid 3” re-design, added one dangerous hairpin…
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Rose Quarter’s Killer Ramps
The proposed re-design of the I-5 Rose Quarter Project now includes two deadly hairpin freeway off-ramps. Just last week, Brandon Coleman was killed at a similar hairpin highway ramp in downtown Portland The Oregon Department of Transportation doesn’t really care about safety. The plan to widen I-5 through the Rose Quarter, at the staggering cost…
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Doubling down on climate fraud in Metro’s RTP
Earlier, we branded Portland Metro’s proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed the region was reducing greenhouse gases, and falsely claimed its transportation investments were on track to meet adopted state climate goals. Metro’ staff has responded to these critiques, but proposes only to fix these mistakes at some vague…
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Britain’s Caste System of Transportation
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaims the primacy of drivers “We are a nation of drivers” Those who don’t own cars, or can’t, or choose not to drive, are second class citizens The transportation culture war is flaring up in Britain. Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has cancelled the nation’s big high speed rail initiative…
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What if we regulated cars like we do houses?
What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? A recent story about Singapore caught our eye: In Singapore, you can’t even buy a car without a government issued “certificate”—and the number of certificates is fixed city wide. The government auctions a fixed number of certificates each year, and the…
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The Week Observed, September 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week This is what victory looks like. Freeway fighting is hard, drawn-out work. StateDOTs and their allies have vast funding for public relations campaigns to sell giant projects; citizen activists work from a shoestring budget, and have to attend interminable meetings that are invariably organized by project proponents. In general,…
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This is what victory looks like, Freeway Fighters
Bad projects die with a whimper, not a bang Freeways are promoted with extravagant—and usually false—p.r. campaigns, but their death is just a bureaucratic footnote Freeway fights are often long, drawn-out affairs, that involve challenging poorly conceived and wasteful projects at a seemingly unending series of public meetings. In practice, freeway fighters generally lose every…
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The Week Observed, October 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More climate fraud in Portland Metro’s proposed regional transportation plan. We branded Metro’s proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed the region was reducing greenhouse gases, and falsely claimed its transportation investments were on track to meet adopted state climate goals. Metro’ staff has…
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The Week Observed, October 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Britain’s Caste system of transportation. In a cynical ploy to revive the Conservative Party’s flagging electoral hopes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has engaged in some blatant pro-motorist posturing. Saying that drivers “feel under attack” Sunak has declared that Britain is “a nation of drivers.” Sunak’s claim highlights what we’ve…
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The Week Observed, October 20, 2023
Must Read Portland: Four Floors and Corner Stores–Upzoning for urban development and housing affordability. A coalition of community, enviornmental and social justice groups is advocating for a YIMBY strategy for more housing in Portland’s close-in Eastside neighborhoods. Like many US cities, Portland faces tight housing markets, affordability challenges. This strategy aims at improving affordability by…
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The Week Observed, October 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? Getting a building permit for a new house is difficult, expensive, and in some places, simply impossible. In contrast, everywhere in the US, you can get a vehicle registration automatically, just for paying a prescribed…
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The Week Observed, September 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What apartment consolidation in New York tells us about housing markets and gentrification. A new study shows that over the past several decades, New York City lost more than 100,000 homes due to the combination of smaller, more affordable apartments into larger, more luxurious homes When rich people can’t…
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Gentrification and Housing Supply
New York lost more than 100,000 homes due to the combination of smaller, more affordable apartments into larger, more luxurious homes When rich people can’t buy new luxury housing, they buy up, and combine small apartments to create larger homes. This is a negative sum game: the number of housing units gained by high income…
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Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bloated boondoggle
For years, we’ve been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland. The past few months show this project is in serious trouble. Here’s a summary of our reporting of key issues Another exploding whale: The cost of the Rose Quarter has quadrupled to…
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The Week Observed, September 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bungled boondoggle. For years, we’ve been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland. The past few months show this project is in serious trouble. Here’s a summary of our reporting of…
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The Week Observed, August 25, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Metro’s Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan. Portland’s regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportation investments for the next two decades, and ostensibly, aiming to deal with transportation greenhouse gas emissions, the largest source of climate pollution in the region. But unfortunately, the RTP,…
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Metro’s Climate-Denying Regional Transportation Plan
Portland Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases Metro falsely asserts that because its overall plan will be on a path to reduce GHGs (it wont), it can simply ignore the greenhouse gas emissions of spending billions to widen freeways The RTP’s climate policies don’t apply…
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The Week Observed, August 18, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP. Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland. For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it…
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The climate fraud in Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan
Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland. For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it is planning to meet a state law calling for reducing greenhouse gas emissions…
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The Week Observed, August 11, 2023
Must Read Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin. TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they’re producing project renderings showing lengthy caps over portions of the widened freeway. One hitch though: while TXDOT will pay to build the highway, it…
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The Week Observed, August 4, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Eating local: Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality. Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.” While much of our food scene is dominated by national chains, some cities have many,…
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Local flavor: Independent restaurants indicate city vitality
Which US cities have the most independent restaurants? One of the chief advantages of cities is the range of consumption choices they afford to their residents. In general, larger cities offer more choices than smaller ones. One of the things that makes a city special and distinctive is its food and culture. Too much of…
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The Week Observed, July 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Myth-busting: Idling and greenhouse gas emissions. Highway boosters are fond of claiming that they can help fight climate change by widening highways so that cars don’t have to spend so much time idling. It’s a comforting illusion to think that helping you drive faster is the solution to climate…
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Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions
Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire Widening roads to reduce idling simply induces more travel and more pollution Cities with faster travel have higher greenhouse gas emissions Time for another episode of City Observatory’s Urban Myth Busters, which itself is an homage to the venerable Discovery Channel series “Mythbusters” that featured co-hosts Adam Savage…
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The Week Observed, July 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Few highway construction dollars for Black-owned firms in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged business enterprises. One-tenth of one percent of construction contracts for the I-205 Abernethy Bridge, ODOT’s largest current project, went to Black construction firms. ODOT…
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ODOT’s I-205 Bridge: 1/10th of 1 Percent for Black Contractors
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged business enterprises One-tenth of one percent of I-205 contracts went to Black construction firms ODOT professed a strong interest in helping Black contractors as a selling point for the I-5 Rose Quarter project, but instead advanced the I-205…
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The Week Observed, July 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We have an in-depth series of reports on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s imploding I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. The cost of the I-5 Rose Quarter project has now quadrupled to $1.9 billion—it was a mere $450 million when it was sold to the Legislature in 2017. ODOT…
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Rose Quarter: So expensive because it’s too damn wide
The cost of the $1.9 billion Rose Quarter freeway is driven by its excessive width ODOT is proposing to more than double the width of the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway through the Albina neighborhood ODOT could easily stripe the roadway it is building for ten traffic lanes The high cost of building freeway covers stems…
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Who sold out the HAAB?
The members of ODOT’s “Historic Albina Advisory Board” (HAAB) are hopping mad. As related by Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland, they feel board betrayed by a decision to postpone construction of the $1.6 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. For years, the staff of the Oregon Department of Transportation have been promising the HAAB…
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Pens down!
The price of ODOT’s trouble plagued Rose Quarter project has quadrupled to $1.9 billion, and the agency has no way to pay for it, because it spent the money the Legislature provided in 2017 on another project. And agency staff is telling the state Transportation Commission there’s nothing that can be done to consider modifying…
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Extend and Pretend: ODOT’s Zombie Rose Quarter project
The Oregon Department of Transportation is playing “Extend and Pretend” with the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project The cost of the 1.5 mile freeway widening has quadrupled from $450 million in 2017 to $1.9 billion today. Meanwhile, the agency has diverted money earmarked for the Rose Quarter to other projects, and now…
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The Week Observed, July 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Yet another exploding whale: One of the Internet’s most popular videos shows employees of the Oregon Department of Transportation blowing up a dead whale carcass stranded on an Ocean beach, with bystanders running in terror from a rain of blubber. ODOT’s latest fiasco is the exploding price tag of…
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Another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost quadruples
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter $450 million freeway widening project will cost more than $1.9 billion The project’s estimated cost has nearly quadrupled in just six years, and still has further cost overrun risk Even OTC commissioners question whether it’s worth more than a billion dollars to widen a 1.5 mile stretch…
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Testimony to the Oregon Transportation Commission
On June 28, 2023, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Transportation Commission about the agency’s dire financial situation. Background: The Oregon Department of Transportation is pushing a multi-billion dollar freeway widening program in Portland, dubbed the “Urban Mobility Plan.” The agency has never fully identified how the plan would be paid for, and…
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The Week Observed, June 30, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Scratch one flat top! That was the famous cry of US Naval aviators, when, early in World War II they chalked up their first victory, sinking the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho. Portland’s freeway fighters, who’ve been battling for years against the multi-billion dollar expansion plans of the Oregon Department…
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Scratch one flat top!
Oregon freeway fighters chalk up a key victory—but the fight continues On June 26, the Oregon Department of Transportation finally bowed to reality that it simply lacks the funds to pay for a seven-mile long widening of I-205 just outside of Portland. Predictably, ODOT conceded defeat in the most oblique possible terms; the I-205 project…
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The Week Observed, June 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We took the week off to celebrate the Summer Solstice and gorge on Hood strawberries! We’ll be back next week. Must Read The amazing non-appearance of Carmageddon. Echoing the point we made a City Observatory in the days—Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly —after the I-95 freeway closure in Philadelphia,…
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The Week Observed, June 16, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly. A tanker truck caught fire and the ensuing blaze caused a section of I-95 in Philadelphia to collapse. This key roadway may be out of commission for months, and predictably, this led to predictions of “commuter chaos.” But on Monday morning, traffic in…
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Carmageddon does a no show, again (Philadelphia edition)
On Sunday June 11, a tanker truck caught fire on I-95 and the intense heat caused a section of the freeway to collapse. I-95 is one of the nation’s principal north-south connections, and carries 160,000 vehicles per day. It’s expected that repairs to the roadway could take months. What would commuters and travelers do without…
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The Week Observed, June 9, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Guest contributor Miriam Pinski observes that getting the prices right could produce dramatic improvements in how US transportation systems perform. New York is on the verge of implementing congestion pricing, and other US cities are strongly considering similar policies. Pricing turns out to be the cornerstone of encouraging widespread…
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Getting prices right to improve urban transportation
City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Miriam Pinski. With the needed federal environmental approvals in hand, New York looks set to be the first American city to implement congestion pricing. This may be a watershed moment in transportation policy: if it can make it there, it can make it anywhere. Other cities, including Los…
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The Week Observed, June 2, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What computer renderings really show about the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project: It’s in trouble. The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer graphic renderings showing possible designs for a new I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland. But what they show is a project in real trouble. And they…
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What new computer renderings really show about the IBR
The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer graphic renderings showing possible designs for a new I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland. But what they show is a project in real trouble. And they also conceal significant flaws, including a likely violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. Here’s what they really show: IBR…
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The Week Observed, May 26, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a half of I-5 in Portland—that’s right about $1 billion per mile. But a new analysis prepared by ODOT…
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The Week Observed, May 19, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls: Available, but not foreseeable? There’s a glaring–and illegal–contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.45 billion Rose Quarter project. While ODOT’s financial plan claims that needed funds for the project will come from tolling I-5, the project’s environmental analysis claims that there’s no…
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Pedestrian safety: There’s no technical fix
Engineers would have us believe that we’re just one shiny new technology away from making streets safer for people walking Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country. While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road…
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The Week Observed, May 12, 2023
What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40…
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What Cincinnati’s Brent Spence Bridge can tell Portland
There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40 percent without causing delays due to…
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The Week Observed, May 5, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why can’t Oregon DOT tell the truth? Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question: How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement they want to build? Seems like a simple question for an engineer. But in testimony submitted to the Legislature, Oregon DOT officials…
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Why can’t ODOT tell the truth?
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) can’t tell the truth about the width of proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project ODOT is more than doubling the width of the bridge from its existing 77 feet to 164 feet. The agency can’t even admit these simple facts, and instead produces intentionally misleading and out of…
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The Week Observed, April 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state? Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily commuters, and two-thirds of all traffic on the bridge are Washington residents. On average, these commuters earn more than…
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A blank check for the highway lobby: HB 2098-2
The HB 2098 “-2” amendments are perhaps the most fiscally irresponsible legislation ever to be considered by the Oregon Legislature. They constitute an open-ended promise by the Oregon Legislature to pay however much money it costs to build the Interstate Bridge Replacement and Rose Quarter freeway widenings—projects that have experienced multi-billion dollar cost overruns in…
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Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state?
Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily commuters, and two-thirds of all traffic on the bridge are Washington residents. On average, these commuters earn more than Portland residents. The 80/20 rule: When it comes to the I-5 bridge replacement, users will…
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The Week Observed, April 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the Interstate Bridge Project. We offer 16 reasons why Oregon and Washington lawmakers should question the current plans for the proposed $7.5 billion I-5 freeway expansion project between Portland and Vancouver. Here’s reason #10 (but click through to read all 16!) 10. IBR traffic projections have…
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Put a bird on it: Highway Greenwashing
There’s no shortage of cynical greenwashing to sell climate-killing highway widening projects GeorgiaDOT and AASHTO have a new PR gimmick to promote the same old product In a famous season one sketch of Portlandia, Fred Armisten and Carrie Brownstein popularized the catch-phrase, “Put a bird on it” about a hipster couple who transformed all manner…
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The Case Against the Interstate Bridge Replacement
Here are our 16 top reasons Oregon and Washington need to re-think the proposed Interstate Bridge Replacement Project. The bloated size of the project and its $7.5 billion cost, and the availability of better alternatives, like a bascule bridge, call for rethinking this project, now. It’s not a bridge, it’s a freeway widening and interchange…
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The Week Observed, April 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR’s plan to sabotage the “moveable span” alternative. The proposed $7.5 billion Portland area freeway widening project is supposedly looking at a moveable span option to avoid illegally impeding water navigation. But state DOT officials are planning to sabotage the analysis of a moveable span options as part of…
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Wile E. Coyote hits bottom: Portland’s inclusionary zoning
Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment permits are down by sixty percent in the City of Portland, while apartment permitting has more than doubled in the rest of the region Inclusionary zoning in Portland has exhibited a Wile E. Coyote pattern: apartment starts stayed high initially, until a backlog of grandfathered units…
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IBR’s plan to sabotage the moveable span option
IBR officials are planning to sabotage the analysis of a moveable span options as part of the Interstate Bridge Project The Coast Guard has said a replacement for the existing I-5 bridges would need a 178 foot navigation clearance. The highway departments want a 116′ clearance fixed span. The Oregon and Washington DOTs say they…
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The Week Observed, March 31, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding? Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it…
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The Color of Money: Bailing out highways with flexible federal funds
ODOT grabs a billion dollars that could be used for bikes, pedestrians and transit, and allocates it to pay highway bills. Oregon highways are out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the cost of fixing them can–and should–be paid for out of the State Highway Fund. But instead, ODOT plans to take…
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What are they hiding? Why highway builders won’t show their $7.5 billion freeway
Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it really is. The bridge will blot out much…
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The Week Observed, March 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Oregon’s transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature’s budget-writing committee about the financial crisis confronting the state’s transportation agency. The Oregon Department of Transportation’’s traditional sources of revenue are collapsing, and will certainly…
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Oregon’s transportation fiscal crisis
Oregon’s transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature’s budget-writing committee about the financial crisis confronting the state’s transportation agency. The Oregon Department of Transportation’’s traditional sources of revenue are collapsing, and will certainly decline further in coming years. The…
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Housing affordability? Localism is the problem, not the solution
Do we need a federal commission on housing affordability? Bruce Katz, author of “The New Localism” is calling for a national commission to come up with recommendations for dealing with the nation’s housing crisis. A truly serious, national discussion of housing affordability, and what we could do to expand housing supply, is a…
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The Week Observed, March 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion? For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over the Columbia River connecting Portland and Vancouver. Late last year, they announced that the total cost of the project…
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The Week Observed, April 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance. City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated freeway widening projects in the Portland Metropolitan area. As we’ve previously reported at City Observatory, proposed amendments to this bill would give the…
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Houston’s I-45: Civil rights or repeated wrongs?
Editor’s Note: For the past two year’s the Federal Highway Administration has been investigating a civil rights complaint brought against the proposed I-45 freeway expansion project in Houston. This week, FHWA and TxDOT signed an agreement to resolve this complaint. Urban freeways have been engines of segregation and neighborhood destruction for decades, a fact that…
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The Week Observed, March 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion? For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of something they call the “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project, which is a warmed-over version of the failed Columbia River Crossing. The project’s budget…
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Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion?
The “bridge replacement” part of the Interstate Bridge Replacement only costs $500 million, according to new project documents So why is the overall project budget $7.5 billion? Short answer: This is really a massive freeway-widening project, spanning five miles and seven intersections, not a “bridge replacement” Longer (and taller) answer: The plan to build half-mile…
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The Week Observed, March 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More induced travel denial. Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel. We offer our rebuttal to a reason column posted at Planetizen, attempting to minimize the importance of induced demand for highways. Induced travel is a well established scientific fact: any increase in roadway capacity in…
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More induced travel denial
Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel Induced travel is a well established scientific fact: any increase in roadway capacity in a metropolitan area is likely to produce a proportional increase in vehicle miles traveled Highway advocates like to pretend that more capacity improves mobility, but at best this is a short…
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The Week Observed, February 24, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR admits its bridge is too steep. After 15 years of telling the region that the only feasible alternative for crossing the Columbia River was a pair of side-by-side double-decker bridges, the IBR project let slip that it was now thinking about a single level crossing, ostensibly because it…
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I-205 tolls will cost you $600 per year
ODOT’s planned I-205 tolls will cost the average local household $600 annually. Regular commuters on I-205 will have to pay $2,200 per year in tolls under the ODOT plan The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to pay for its widening of the I-205 Interstate South of Portland by charging tolls. These tolls will represent…
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IBR floats new bridge design, proving critics right
For four years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing a revival of the failed multi-billion dollar I-5 Columbia River Crossing. Their key sales pitch is that the size and design of the project can’t vary in any meaningful way from the project’s decade-old record of decision, for fear of delaying construction or…
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The Week Observed, February 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15. Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-way, at the peak hour. Drive from Vancouver to a job in Wilsonville? Get ready to shell out as much…
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Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15
Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-way, at the peak hour. Drive from Vancouver to a job in Wilsonville? Get ready to shell out as much as $30 per day. Tolls don’t need to be nearly this high to better manage traffic flow and…
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The Week Observed, February 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project. Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the cost of the I-5 Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) had ballooned 54 percent, to as much as $7.5 billion. To allay…
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CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project
Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the cost of the I-5 Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) had ballooned 54 percent, to as much as $7.5 billion. To allay fears of poor management and further cost overruns, IBR officials testified they had completed a “Cost…
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The Week Observed, February 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Groundhog’s Day for Climate. So you think you’re not Bill Murray in the classic “Groundhog’s Day?” Oregonians, ask yourself: are we anywhere closer to seriously addressing the climate crisis than we were a year ago? Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing, chiefly because we’re driving more, and our policies…
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What the City of Portland said about the Rose Quarter
City of Portland raises big questions about the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project (translated). Last month was the deadline for comments on the supplemental environmental analysis for the proposed $1.45 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. Our friends at Bike Portland got a copy of the city’s comment letter, signed by then Portland…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress If it seems to you like you’ve read this before, you have: We’re marking this year’s…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Flat Earth Sophistry
The science of induced travel is well proven, but state DOTs are in utter denial Widening freeways not only fails to reduce congestion, it inevitably results in more vehicle travel and more pollution The Oregon Department of Transportation has published a technical manual banning the consideration of induced travel in Oregon highway projects. The Oregon…
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Traffic is declining at the Rose Quarter: ODOT growth projections are fiction
ODOT’s own traffic data shows that daily traffic (ADT) has been declining for 25 years, by -0.55 percent per year The ODOT modeling inexplicably predicts that traffic will suddenly start growing through 2045, growing by 0.68 percent per year ODOT’s modeling falsely claims that traffic will be the same regardless of whether the I-5 freeway…
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The truth about Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter MegaFreeway
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) desperately wants to build a mega-freeway through NE Portland, and is planning to double the freeway from 4 lanes to 8 or 10 lanes. But it has hidden its true objective, by claiming only to add two “auxiliary” lanes to the existing 4 lane freeway, and arguing (falsely) that…
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The IBR project: Too much money for too many interchanges
The real expense of the $5 billion I-5 bridge replacement project isn’t actually building a new bridge over the Columbia River: It’s widening miles of freeway and rebuilding every intersection north and south of the river. A decade ago, an independent panel of experts convened by OR and WA governor’s strongly recommended to ODOR and WSDOT…
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The Week Observed, December 16, 2022
Editor’s Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project Between now and January 4, 2023, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you’re interested, you can make your voice heard. For more information on how to comment, we urge…
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Blame inflation now: Lying about the latest IBR Cost Overrun
The price of the I-5 “bridge replacement” project just increased by more than 50 percent, from $4.8 billion to $7.5 billion ODOT and WSDOT are blaming “higher inflation” for IBR cost overruns As we’ve noted, the Oregon Department of Transportation has a long string of 100 percent cost-overruns on its major projects. Almost every large…
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Pricing works better than spending $1.45 billion to fix I-5 traffic
A recently disclosed ODOT memo shows that congestion pricing would do a better job of fixing I-5 congestion than spending $1.45 billion widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter Congestion pricing would would be more than a billion dollars cheaper, would make traffic on I-5 move faster, and would produce less pollution than widening…
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ODOT doesn’t care about covers, again
ODOT’s Supplemental Environmental Analysis shows it has no plans for doing anything on its vaunted freeway covers It left the description of cover’s post-construction use as “XXX facilities” in the final, official Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement The report makes it clear that “restorative justice” is still just a vapid slogan at the Oregon Department of…
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ODOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter “Improvement”: A million more miles of local traffic
ODOT’s proposed relocation of the I-5 Southbound off-ramp at the Rose Quarter will add 1.3 million miles of vehicle travel to local streets each year. Moving the I-5 on ramp a thousand feet further south creates longer journeys for the 12,000 cars exiting the freeway at this ramp each day. The new ramp location requires…
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The Week Observed, December 2, 2022
Editor’s Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project In the next month, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you’re interested, you can make your voice heard. For more information on how to comment, we urge you to…
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Why won’t ODOT tell us how wide their freeway is?
After more than three years of public debate, ODOT still won’t tell anyone how wide a freeway they’re planning to build at the Rose Quarter ODOT’s plans appear to provide for a 160-foot wide roadway, wide enough to accommodate a ten lane freeway, not just two additional “auxiliary” lanes ODOT is trying to avoid NEPA,…
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The black box: Hiding the facts about freeway widening
State DOT officials have crafted an Supplemental Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals The Rose Quarter traffic report contains no data on “average daily traffic” the most common measure of vehicle travel Three and a half years later and ODOT’s Rose Quarter’s Traffic Modeling is still a closely guarded secret The new SEA…
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The Week Observed, November 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve? The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from Interstate 5. This supposed “safety” project may really creating a new “Deadman’s Curve” at the Moda Center. A key part of the project’s re-design is moving an off-ramp about…
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ODOT: Our I-5 Rose Quarter safety project will increase crashes
A newly revealed ODOT report shows the redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project will: creates a dangerous hairpin turn on the I-5 Southbound off-ramp increase crashes 13 percent violate the agency’s own highway design standards result in trucks turning into adjacent lanes and forcing cars onto highway shoulders necessitate a 1,000 foot long “storage area”…
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The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve?
The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from a Interstate 5 Is ODOT’s supposed “safety” project really creating a new “Deadman’s Curve” at the Moda Center? Bike riders will have to negotiate on Portland’s busy North Williams bikeway will have to negotiate two back-to-back freeway ramps that carry…
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ODOT reneges on Rose Quarter cover promises
The soon-to-be released Rose Quarter I-5 Revised Environmental Assessment shows that ODOT is already reneging on its sales pitch of using a highway widening to heal Portland’s Albina Neighborhood. It trumpeted “highway covers” as a development opportunity, falsely portraying them as being covered in buildings and housing—something the agency has no plans or funds to…
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The Week Observed, November 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are blundering ahead with a $5 billion plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, and are making many of the same mistakes they made with the failed Columbia River Crossing a decade ago. A key difference: last time, there was…
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Highway officials misrepresent Coast Guard permit requirements
The Interstate Bridge Project falsely claimed to a legislative committee that the USDOT/Coast Guard agreement on bridge permits doesn’t apply to the IBR project. This is part of a repeated series of misrepresentations about the approval process for bridges and the impact of the Coast Guard’s preliminary navigation determination that a new crossing must provide…
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The Week Observed, November 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges: If you’re going to spend several billion dollars, you might want to get some independent expert advice. Oregon and Washington are on the verge of committing 5 billion dollars to the construction of the so-called I-5 “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project between Portland and Vancouver. But they’re doing…
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The Week Observed, October 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A toll policy primer for Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to finance billions in future road expansions with tolling. While we’re enamored of road pricing as a way to better manage our transportation system, the movement to raise moeny with tolls, and in particular by borrowing…
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Risky Bridges: Deja vu all over again
Needed: An independent review of technical mistakes that could cost billions The proposed multi-billion dollar Interstate Bridge Replacement is shaping up a repeat of the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) fiasco because the two states haven’t done anything to independently verify the work of their staff. Oregon DOT and WSDOT are repeating all the key mistakes…
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A Toll Policy Primer for Oregon
Oregon doesn’t have tolls on any of its major roads or bridges. But faced with stagnant gas tax revenues, and with an appetite for huge freeway expansion projects, the Oregon Department of Transportation has committed itself to using tolls to generate billions of dollars in revenue. And let’s be clear, as economists, we support the…
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The Week Observed, October 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Using phony safety claims to sell a billion dollar freeway widening. This past week, Sarah Pliner, a promising young Portland chef was killed when she and her bike were crushed by a turning truck at SE Powell Boulevard and 26th Avenue. This intersection is an Oregon Department of Transportation…
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ODOT’s safety lie is back, bigger than ever
Oregon DOT is using phony claims about safety to sell a $1.45 billion freeway widening project People are regularly being killed on ODOT roadways and the agency claims that it lacks the resources to fix these problems Meanwhile, it proposes to spend billions of dollars widening freeways where virtually no one is killed or injured…
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The Week Observed, October 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Two of the three candidates for Oregon Governor are Climate Deniers. Oregon will elect a new Governor next month, and two of the three candidates for the job insist on repeating the discredited myth that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by widening freeways so that people don’t spend…
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Two out of three candidates for Oregon Governor are climate denialists
The Republican and Independent candidates for Oregon Governor are happy to spout a convenient myth that we can fight climate change by widening highways. That myth has been completely disproven: wider roads encourage more driving and more greenhouse gases Advocating for more and wider roads is climate change denial Oregon has been one of the…
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The Week Observed, July 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Fix it Last. The Oregon Department of Transportation claims that it has a “Fix-it” first policy–prioritizing spending funds to preserve existing roads and bridges. But their actual budget priorities make it clear that they routinely short change maintenance and repair in favor of costly and ineffective road expansion projects. …
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ODOT’s “Fix-it first” fraud
ODOT claims that its policy is “fix-it first” maintaining the highway system. But it is spending vastly less on maintenance and restoration than is needed to keep roads and bridges from deteriorating It blames the Legislature for not prioritizing repair over new construction But it chooses to advance policies that prioritize spending money on new…
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Failing to Learn from Failed CRC
Metro Council voted on July 14th to wave on the proposed “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project which is really a bloated, 5 mile long, 12-lane wide freeway that will cost $5 billion and likely much more. It’s a scene-for-scene remake of the disaster that was the failed Columbia River Crossing a decade ago. Metro’s then-President David…
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A bridge too low . . . again
Ignoring the Coast Guard dooms the I-5 Bridge Project to yet another failure The Oregon and Washington DOTs have again designed a I-5 bridge that’s too low for navigation In their rush to recycle the failed plans for the Columbia River Crossing, the two state transportation departments have failed to address Coast Guard navigation concerns…
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Oregon and Washington DOTs plan too low a bridge–again.
The Coast Guard has told Oregon and Washington that a new I-5 bridge must have a 178-foot vertical clearance for river navigation–vastly higher than the 116-foot clearance the state’s have proposed A fixed span with that clearance would be prohibitively expensive and would have to be huge–nearly 2 miles long, and would have steep grades. …
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The Week Observed, June 24, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The economics of fruit, time, and place. It’s berry time in Portland, and that got us thinking about how special local products are in defining quality of life. Recently, Paul Krugman, fresh off a European vacation, waxed poetic about the fleeting joy of summer fruit, and true to form,…
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Fruit and economics: Local goods
Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader. You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around the Summer Solstice in the shadow of this mountain, chances are you have never tasted a Hood strawberry. The Hood…
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“Free parking” isn’t green
No matter how many solar panels it has, your parking garage isn’t green, and especially if you don’t charge parking (This commentary is cross-published at the Parking Reform Network) Almost five years ago, we called out the folks at the National Renewable Energy Lab for claiming that their shiny new LEED-platinum candidate parking structure was…
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The Week Observed, June 10, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon DOT’s “reign of error”—chronic cost overruns on highway projects. The Oregon Department of Transportation is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar freeway expansion plan in Portland. That poses a huge risk to state finances because the agency has a demonstrated track record of cost overruns. We show that…
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ODOT’s Reign of Error: Chronic highway cost overruns
Nearly every major project undertaken by the Oregon Department of Transportation has ended up costing at least double its initial estimate As ODOT proposes a multi-billion dollar series of highway expansions, its estimates pose huge financial risks for the state ODOT refuses to acknowledge its long record of cost-overruns, and has no management strategy to…
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Flying blind: Why public leaders need an investment grade analysis
Portland and Oregon leaders shouldn’t commit to a $5 billion project without an investment grade analysis (IGA) of toll revenues Not preparing an IGA exposes the state to huge financial risk: It will have to make up toll revenue shortfalls, The difference between an IGA and ODOT forecasts is huge: half the traffic, double the…
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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…
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Frog Ferry: The slow boat to nowhere
A proposed Portland area ferry makes no economic or transportation sense. Why the Frog Ferry is a slow boat to nowhere A ferry between Vancouver and Portland would take 20 minutes longer than existing bus service From flying cars to underground tunnels to ferry boats, there’s always an appetite for a seemingly clever technical fix…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Waste Billions Widening Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hell-bent on widening freeways and destroying the planet April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions dollars into three Portland area freeway…
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The Week Observed, April 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways. The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile stretch of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver. The case for the widening is based on the need to accomodate…
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Sprawl and Tax Evasion: Driving forces behind freeway widening
Sprawl and tax evasion are the real forces fueling the demand for wider freeways Highway widening advocates offer up a a kind of manifest destiny storyline: population and traffic are ever-increasing, and unless we accommodate them we’ll be awash in cars, traffic and gridlock. The rising tide of cars is treated as a irresistible force…
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The Week Observed, April 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars. One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”–a payment made to every household to assure it had enough for basic living expenses. While there have been…
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A Universal Basic income . . . for Cars
California is the first in the nation to establish a Universal Basic Income . . . for cars One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head-on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”—a payment made to every household to assure it has enough for basic living expenses. While there…
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The NIMBYs made $6 trillion last year
In 2021, US residential values increased by $6.9 trillion, almost entirely due to price appreciation Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2021 were ten times larger than the total income of the bottom 20 percent of the population. Little of this income will be taxed due…
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The Week Observed, April 1, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. To illustrate how misleading these fictitious numbers are, we’ve used the same methodology and actual data to compute the value of time lost standing in…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with waiting in lines…
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The Week Observed, March 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Who’s most vulnerable to high gas prices? Rising gas prices are a pain, but they hurt most if you live in a sprawling metro where you have to drive long distances to work, shopping, schools and social activities. Some US metros are far less vulnerable to the negative effects…
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Which metros are vulnerable to gas price hikes?
Green cities will be less hurt by higher gas prices; Sprawling cities are much more vulnerable to gas price hikes. In sprawling metros like Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Nashville and Oklahoma City, higher gas prices will cost the average household twice as much as households living in compact metros like San Francisco, Boston, Portland and Seattle.…
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The Week Observed, March 18, 2022
Must read The problem with the “reckless driver” narrative. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn eloquently points out the deflection and denial inherent in the emerging “reckless driver” explanation for increasing car crashes and injuries. Blaming a few reckless drivers for the deep-seated systemic biases in our road system is really a convenient way to avoid asking…
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The Week Observed, March 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst: Woke-washing the survey data. Highway builders are eager to cloak their road expansion projects in the rhetoric of equity and have become adept at manipulating images and statistics. In their efforts to sell the $5 billion I-5 freeway widening project in Portland, ODOT and WSDOT…
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Biased statistics: Woke-washing the I-5 Boondoggle
The Oregon and Washington transportation departments are using a biased, unscientific survey to market their $5 billion I-5 freeway widening project. The survey over-represents daily bridge users by a factor of 10 compared to the general population. The IBR survey undercounts lower and middle income households and people of color and overstates the opinions of White…
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The Week Observed, March 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon. Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon’s historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening the road, ODOT will use pricing to limit demand. This shows Oregon can quickly implement road pricing on existing roads under current law without a cumbersome…
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Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon
Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon’s historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening the road, ODOT will use pricing to limit demand This shows Oregon can quickly implement road pricing on existing roads under current law: No EIS, No equity analysis If you can do it there, why…
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The Week Observed, February 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst? Woke-washing is all the rage among those pushing highway projects these days, and there’s no better example that Portland’s I-5 “bridge replacement” project (really a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide, $5 billion road expansion). It’s being sold as a boon for low income workers…
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Freeway widening for whomst?
Widening freeways is no way to promote equity. The proposed $5 billion widening of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver is purportedly being undertaken with “an equity lens,” but widening Portland’s I-5 freeway serves higher income, predominantly white workers commuting from Washington suburbs to jobs in Oregon. The median income of peak hour, drive alone commuters…
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The Week Observed, February 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon’s highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge. ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it forecasts revenue, it says it will ignore adopted policies—especially ones that will reduce its revenue. When it forecasts greenhouse gas emissions, assumes policies that don’t…
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ODOT’s forecasting double standard
Oregon’s highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it forecasts revenue, it says it will ignore adopted policies–especially ones that will reduce its revenue. When it forecasts greenhouse gas emissions, assumes policies that don’t exist–especially ones that will magically…
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The Week Observed, February 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The “replacement” bridge con. It’s telling that perhaps the largest single consulting expense for Oregon and Washington transportation departments’ efforts to revive the failed multi-billion Columbia River Crossing project is $5 million for “communications” consultants. The project has emphasized a misleading rebranding to call it mere “bridge replacement” project,…
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The I-5 bridge “replacement” con
Oregon and Washington highway builders have re-branded the failed Columbia River Crossing as a “bridge replacement” project: It’s not. Less than 30 percent of the cost of the nearly $5 billion project is actually for replacing the existing highway bridge, according to independent accountants. Most of the cost is for widening the freeway and rebuilding…
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The Week Observed, February 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Climate and our Groundhog Day Doom Loop. It’s Groundhog Day—again—and we’re stuck in exactly the same place when it comes to climate policy. Scientists are regularly offering up increasing dire warnings and every more irrefutable evidence of climate change. Extreme weather events: fires, floods, drought, hurricanes are becoming increasingly…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Another year, another Groundhog Day, and another bleak report that we’re not making any progress on…
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Portland: Don’t move or close schools to widen freeways
Adah Crandall is a sophomore at Grant High School. She is the co-lead of Portland Youth Climate Strike and an organizer with Sunrise PDX’s Youth Vs ODOT campaign, a biweekly series of rallies fighting for the decarbonization of Oregon’s transportation systems. City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Adah Crandall on a proposal currently…
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The Week Observed, January 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Metro’s “Don’t look up” climate strategy. In the new film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who find that the nation’s leaders simply refuse to take seriously their warnings of an impending global catastrophe. Their efforts even produce a backlash, as skeptics simply refuse to look at the…
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Metro’s “Don’t Look Up” Climate Policy
Metro, Portland’s regional government, says it has a plan to reduce transportation greenhouse gases But in the 8 years since adopting the plan, the agency hasn’t bothered to look at data on GHGs—which have increased 22 percent, or more than one million tons annually. Metro’s Climate Plan is “Don’t Look Up” In the new movie…
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The Week Observed, January 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week What does equity mean when we have a caste-based transportation system? Transportation and planning debates around the country increasingly ponder how we rectify long-standing inequities in transportation access that have disadvantaged the poor and people of color. In Oregon, the Department of Transportation has an elaborate “equitable mobility” effort as…
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Transportation trends and disparities
If you aren’t talking about our two-caste transportation system, you’re not really addressing equity. Portland’s regional government is looking forward at trends in the transportation system and their implications for equity. In December, City Observatory submitted its analysis of these trends for Metro’s consideration. Local and regional leaders are increasingly promoting concerns of equity in…
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The Week Observed, January 7, 2022
What City Observatory did this week 1. Metro’s failing climate strategy. Portland Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure. Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses are up 22 percent since the plan was adopted: instead of falling by 1 million tons per year, emissions have increased by 1 million tons annually, to more…
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The Week Observed, January 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Why Portland shouldn’t be moving elementary and middle schools to widen freeways. We’re pleased to publish a guest commentary from Adah Crandall, a high school sophomore and climate activist, who recently testified to the Portland School Board in opposition to move two schools to accommodate the Rose Quarter I-5…
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Oregon, Washington advance I-5 bridge based on outdated traffic projections
The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are advancing their $5 billion freeway widening plan based on outdated 15-year-old traffic projections. No new projections have been prepared since the 2007 estimates used in the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, The two state DOTs are essentially “flying blind” assuming that out-dated traffic projections provide a reasonable…
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Why the proposed $5 billion I-5 bridge is a climate disaster
The plan to spend $5 billion widening the I-5 Bridge Over the Columbia River would produce 100,000 additional metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to the induced travel calculator Metro’s 2020 transportation package would have cut greenhouse gases by 5,200 tons per year– 20 times less than the additional greenhouse gases created by freeway…
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Metro’s failing climate strategy
Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses are up 22 percent since the plan was adopted: instead of falling by 1 million tons per year, emissions have increased by 1 million tons annually, to more than 7 million tons, putting us even further from our…
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The Week Observed, December 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The financial fallout from Louisville’s I-65 boondoggle. As we showed earlier, Kentucky and Indiana both wasted a billion dollars on doubling the capacity of I-65 across the Ohio River, and also showed how to eliminate traffic congestion. The $1 to $2 tolls it charges I-65 users slashed traffic in…
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Louisville’s financial disaster: Deep in debt for road capacity that will never be used
Louisville’s I-65 bridges: A huge under-used roadway and hundreds of millions in debt for their kids—who will also have to cope with a climate crisis. Their financial plan kicked the can down the road, saddling future generations with the cost of paying for unneeded roads. The two states mortgaged future federal grant money and borrowed…
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The Week Observed, December 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. ODOT’s real climate strategy: Pollution as usual. Oregon’s highway builders are keeping two sets of books, one claiming that it cares about climate issues, the other shows that its financial plans depend on never reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation has a glossy, highly promoted…
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Drive-thrus are ruining cities and helping kill the planet
Your 12 ounce latte comes with a pound of carbon emissions, just from the drive-thru. How convenience for cars makes cities less livable for everyone, and contributes to climate change. Last week, twitter user Maris Zivarts posted this telling image of 20 car queue wrapping around the block of a Starbucks, all lined up to…
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Oregon DOT’s Real Climate Plan: Keep on polluting
The Oregon DOT’s “Climate Action Plan” claims that the agency wants to decrease greenhouse gases, but its financial plans show otherwise The agency’s revenue projections show it is planning for gasoline consumption not to decline at all, meaning that carbon emissions don’t decline ODOT’s fuel tax projections imply that cars and trucks will continue to produce…
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The Week Observed, December 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week How Portland powered Oregon’s economic success. After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon’s income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: It’s not. It all about a flourishing Portland economy, especially in the central city of the region. This success has been powered by an…
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Oregon’s economic success: The triumph of the city
After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon’s income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: It’s not. It all about a flourishing Portland economy, especially in the central city of the region This success has been powered by an influx of talent, especially well-educated young adults drawn to close-in…
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The Week Observed, November 19, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Why we shouldn’t be whining about higher gas prices. Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for gas. Even with a recent uptick, gas prices are still lower than they were a decade ago. Cheap…
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The Week Observed, November 12, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Has this city discovered how to solve traffic congestion? Why aren’t they telling everyone else how this works? A miracle in Louisville. Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65. After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes…
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Let’s stop whining about gas prices: Gasoline is cheap, too cheap.
Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for gas. Even with a recent uptick, gas prices are still lower than they were a decade ago. Cheap gas is burning the planet, and undercuts all of our efforts to…
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How to solve traffic congestion: A miracle in Louisville?
Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65. After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes to 12, tolls slashed traffic by half, from about 130,000 cars per day to fewer than 65,000. Kentucky and Indiana wasted a billion dollars on highway capacity…
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The Week Observed, November 5, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The Opposite of Planning: Why Portland’s Metro government needs to turn down the highway department request for more money to plan future freeway widenings. On paper, and to admirers, Portland has a pretty potent regional government. Metro is directly elected, and empowered to make important regional transportation decisions. It’s…
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The opposite of planning: Why Metro should stop I-5 Bridge con
Portland’s Metro regional government would be committing planning malpractice and enabling lasting fiscal and environmental damage if it goes along with state highway department freeway widening plans The proposed $5 billion, 5-mile long, 12-lane freeway I-5 bridge project is being advanced based on outdated traffic projections using 2005 data. ODOT is pushing freeway plans piecemeal,…
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The Week Observed, October 22, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America’s least and most segregated metro areas: Evidence from Census 2020. Racial segregation remains a chronic problem in US metropolitan areas. Data from Census 2020 provides a hyper-detailed, decadal check-in on the state of segregation. The good news is that Black-white segregation continues, slowly, to decline in virtually all…
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America’s least (and most) segregated metro areas: 2020
The latest Census data show that Black/White segregation is decreasing in large metro areas. Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is one of America’s least segregated metros One pervasive and lingering hallmark American geography is racial residential segregation: our metropolitan areas have literally been divided by…
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The Week Observed, October 15, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Ten reasons you can’t trust DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution. Highway departments are fond of ginning up traffic projections and air quality analyses claiming that wider highways will reduce pollution. It’s an elaborate con. We take a close look at Portland’s proposed $1.2 billion I-5 Rose Quarter…
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Here’s what’s wrong with Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter pollution claims
10 reasons not to believe phony DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution We know that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and that our car dependent transportation system is the reason Americans drive so much more and consequently produce far more greenhouse gases per capita than residents of…
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Where we embrace socialism in the US: Parking Lots
How we embrace socialism for car storage in the public right of way Florida Senator Marco Rubio has denounced President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending program as un-American socialism. Rubio claims: In the end, Americans will reject socialism because it fundamentally runs counter to our way of life. That’s not accurate, of course. Socialism is well-established…
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The Week Observed, September 24, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence. The Oregon Department of Transportation has been trying to sell its $1.25 billion freeway widening project as a way of restoring the historically Black Albina neighborhood that was decimated by three highways the agency built in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It’s absurd…
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Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence
The Oregon Department of Transportation’s glossy mailer to sell its $1.25 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is a cynical, error-ridden marketing ploy. ODOT doesn’t show or tell about its wider freeway and more traffic, but instead tries to sell the project based on buildings it won’t contribute any money for building. ODOT sent…
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The Week Observed, September 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The cost of Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter project has nearly tripled to $1.25 billion. Just four years ago, the Oregon Department of transportation sold its mile-and-a-half long I-5 freeway widening project through Portland as costing a mere $450 million. Earlier this month, it revealed new cost estimates that show…
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Another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost triples
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter $450 million freeway widening project will cost more than $1.25 billion The project’s estimated cost has nearly tripled in just four years, and still has further cost overrun risk Even OTC commissioners question whether it’s worth more than a billion dollars to widen a 1.5 mile…
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The Week Observed, September 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Talkin’ ’bout my gentrification. Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we’re concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrification is far from the biggest problem we face. Gentrification is surprisingly rare, and while it brings inequality into sharp focus, there’s precious little evidence of widespread…
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Talkin’ ’bout my gentrification
Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we’re concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrification is far from the biggest problem we face. Gentrification is surprisingly rare, and while it brings inequality into sharp focus, there’s precious little evidence of widespread harms. The bright spotlight shining on a…
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The Week Observed, September 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Portland’s Clean Energy Fund needs accountability. Portland voters approved a ballot measure creating a $60 million annual fund to invest in community-based clean energy projects, particularly ones that promote equity. It’s a well-intended program, but in practice the review process that’s been developed does too little to establish measurable…
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Climate efforts must be cost effective
Portland’s $60 million a year clean energy fund needs climate accountability Any grant writer can spin a yarn that creates the illusion that a given project will have some sort of climate benefits, but if you’re actually investing real money, you should insist on a payback in the coin of the climate realm: a measurable…
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The Week Observed, August 27, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Is the campus 100 percent clean energy? (Only if you don’t count the cars and parking lots). Stanford University announced that its near to realizing a goal to move all of its campus electricity to solar production, and that predictably generated a lot of positive press, some of which…
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A net zero blind spot
Stanford claims its campus will be 100 percent solar powered . . . provided you ignore cars. A flashy news release caught our eye this week. Stanford University is reporting that its campus will be 100 percent powered by solar energy very soon. In the echo chamber that is social media, that claim got a…
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The Week Observed, August 20, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Cost of Living and Auto Insurance. We often compare the affordability of different cities with a clear focus on housing prices and rents. This week at City Observatory we are interested in the role that insurance plays in the cost of living across metropolitan areas. Location has a major influence in the…
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Insurance and the Cost of Living: Homeowners Insurance
Yesterday, we explored the differences in car insurance premiums in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Today, we will take a look at homeowners insurance rates. Unlike car insurance, homeowners insurance is not required in states. Still, this insurance can be required by a mortgage lender, and it is an important action to protect one’s home.…
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Insurance and the Cost of Living: Auto Insurance
Everyone loves to compare the affordability of different cities, and most of the attention gets focused on differences in housing prices and rents. Clearly, these are a major component of living costs, and they vary substantially across the nation. But as we’ve regularly pointed out at City Observatory, transportation costs also vary widely across cities,…
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BIB: The bad infrastructure bill
Four lamentations about a bad infrastructure bill From the standpoint of the climate crisis, the infrastructure bill that passed the Senate is, at a minimum, a tremendous blown opportunity. Transportation, especially private cars, are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. We have an auto-dependent, climate-destroying transportation system because we’ve massively subsidized…
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To solve climate, we need electric cars—and a lot less driving
Electric vehicles will help, but we need to do much more to reduce driving Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to offer this guest commentary by Matthew Lewis. Matthew is Director of Communications for California YIMBY, a pro-housing organization working to make infill housing legal and affordable in all California cities. For 20 years, he has…
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The Week Observed, August 13, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Tackling climate change will require electric cars, and a lot less driving. We’re pleased to publish a guest commentary from CalYimby’s Matthew Lewis looking at the challenge of addressing the role of transportation in climate change. Electric vehicles are a step in the right direction, to be sure,…
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America’s berry best cities
Why Boston and Portland are the berry-best metros, and why it matters Summer is the height of berry season in most of the US, and nothing beats a fresh, locally grown blackberry, blueberry or raspberry. Today we’re ranking large metro areas in the US based on how many berries they grow (which we’re proxying using…
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The Week Observed, August 6, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America’s berry best cities. It’s the height of the summer fruit season and berries are ripening across the country. Nothing beats a fresh local berry in season. We’ve ranked the nation’s most populous metro areas based on their commercial production of all kinds of berries: cranberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries…
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The Week Observed, July 30, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Oregon Department of Transportation’s Climate Fig-Leaf. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Oregon, and the state’s Department of Transportation is—yet again—advancing PR heavy strategy documents that contain no measurable objectives or accountability. The latest plan, a so-called “Climate Action Plan,” repeats disproven climate myths (that idling…
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Burn, baby, burn: ODOT’s climate strategy
The Oregon Department of Transportation is in complete denial about climate change Oregon DOT has drafted a so-called “Climate Action Plan” that is merely perfunctory and performative busywork. The devastation of climate change is now blindingly manifest. Last month, temperatures in Oregon’s capital Salem, hit 117 degrees. The state is locked in drought, and already…
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The Week Observed, July 23, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Selling Oregon into highway bondage. Oregon is moving ahead with plans to issue hundreds of millions—and ultimately billions of dollars of debt to widen Portland-area freeways. And it will send the bill to future generations, and perversely, commit the state to ever increasing levels of traffic in order to…
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Selling Oregon into highway bondage
Borrowing billions to widen roads endangers the climate and finances It’s doubly wrong to burden future generations with the environmental costs of wider roads, and then also send them the bill Bond financing of new capacity puts expansion ahead of repair and endangers the financial soundness of the transportation system Oregon Governor Kate Brown has just signed…
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The Week Observed, July 16, 2021
What City Observatory did this week An open letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his visit to Oregon. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came to Oregon this week to look at some local transportation innovations. The group No More Freeways, which opposes an Oregon Department of Transportation plan to widen I-5 through Portland’s Rose Quarter wanted…
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Welcome to Portland Secretary Pete! Now about the Rose Quarter Freeway
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is visiting Oregon to learn more about local transportation issues. The local advocacy group No More Freeways has sent him an open letter to provide some background for his visit. Here’s what Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg needs to know about Oregon DOT’s proposed $800 million neighborhood-wrecking, climate-destroying I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway…
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The Week Observed, July 9, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Miami’s double standard for charging road users. The City of Miami is hoping to make their streets a safer place for bikes and scooters by building protected lanes along three miles of the city’s downtown. The city plans to pay for this infrastructure by taxing each registered scooter…
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In the bag: Pricing works
Denver’s new bag fee is another object lesson on how to use economics to achieve environmental objectives. Now do it for greenhouse gases Starting this month, you’ll have to pay 10 cents for each disposable paper or plastic bag you fill with groceries in Denver. The requirement goes statewide in 2023, under a Colorado law that is…
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Miami’s E-Scooters: Revisiting the Double Standard
In Miami, e-scooters pay four to 50 times as much to use the public roads as cars If we want to encourage greener, safer travel, we should align the prices we charge with our values Florida is home to some of the most unsafe cities to be a pedestrian or a cyclist. Miami is currently attempting…
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The Week Observed, July 2, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Texas Transportation Institute is back, and it’s still wrong about traffic congestion. Every year or so, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University produce report purporting to calculate the cost of congestion in US metro areas. Their flawed and biased methodology has been discredited multiple times,…
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It’s back, and it’s even dumber than ever: The Urban Mobility Report
There was an unprecedented decline in traffic congestion in the US last year. According to the Urban Mobility Report, there’s essentially nothing we can learn from this experience The Texas Transportation Institute has always been apologists and propagandists for the highway lobby TTI reports fail the basic scientific test of responding to repeated detailed critiques…
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Lower interest rates = More expensive homes
The decline in interest rates in 2020 is a huge factor in explaining the recent surge in home prices. Population growth, a key driver of housing demand, actually slowed dramatically in the past year. The current surge in home prices may be a short-term phenomenon. We’re constantly being told that the housing market is hot,…
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The Week Observed, June 25, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cars kill city neighborhoods. Across the nation, America’s cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile. Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishing homes and businesses, but more than that, the sprawling, car-dependent transportation system which is now firmly rooted across the nation is simply toxic to…
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The Bum’s Rush
The $800 million project transitions from “nothing has been decided” to “nothing can be changed” There’s a kind of calculated phase-shift in the way transportation department’s talk about major projects. For a long, long time, they’ll respond to any challenges or questions by claiming that “nothing has been decided” or that a project is still…
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The Week Observed, June 18, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Race and economic polarization. In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased. This is nowhere more apparent than in the residential patterns of Black Americans. A recent analysis by David Rusk looks at the growing economic polarization of urban neighborhoods…
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More proof of ODOT’s Rose Quarter Freeway coverup
Newly revealed documents show its roadway is vastly wider than needed for traffic, and also makes “buildable” freeway covers prohibitively expensive If you really want just two additional lanes, you can do so much more cheaply and with less environmental destruction The reality is ODOT is planning a 10 lane freeway at the Rose Quarter,…
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Race and economic polarization
The growth of concentrated poverty has been fueled by the secession of successful African Americans David Rusk has summarized his research on race and economic polarization in a series of three commentaries on “The Great Sort,” for the DC Policy Center. The essence of the sorting in question is the sorting of the nation’s African…
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The Week Observed, June 4, 2021
What City Observatory this week What ultimately destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood: Highways. This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the Black Greenwood neighborhood, killing hundreds. The Greenwood’s residents were resilient, rebuilding a neighborhood that thrived for almost 50 years. According to a new…
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How highways finally crushed Black Tulsa
Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood survived the 1921 race massacre, only to be ultimately destroyed by a more unrelenting foe: Interstate highways Black Tulsans quickly rebuilt Greenwood in the 1920s, and it flourished for decades, but was ultimately done in by freeway construction and urban renewal Even now, Tulsa has money for more road widening, but apparently…
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The Week Observed, May 28, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why highway departments can and should build housing to mitigate road damage. For decades, American cities have been scarred and neighborhoods destroyed by highway construction projects. Many places are contemplating measures to fix these problems, from freeway removals to pledges of “restorative justice.” Given that highways directly and indirectly…
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Single-Family Zoning and Exclusion in L.A. County: Part 2
Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher white and Asian population shares, and lower Black and Latino population shares. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning are more segregated relative…
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State DOTs can and should build housing to mitigate highway impacts
If OregonDOT is serious about “restorative justice” it should mitigate highway damage by building housing Around the country, states are subsidizing affordable housing to mitigate the damage done by highway projects Mitigation is part of NEPA requirements and complying with federal Environmental Justice policy The construction of urban highways has devastating effects on nearby neighborhoods. …
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Single-Family Zoning and Exclusion in L.A. County: Part 1
Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher median incomes, more expensive housing, and higher rates of homeownership. Single-family zoning blocks renter households and low- and moderate-income households from accessing…
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The Week Observed, May 21, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Needed: A bolder, better building back. In response to an invitation from its authors, we take a look at a “grand bargain” proposed by Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger for breaking the political log jam around infrastructure. If there is something to be gleaned from Eisenhower and Lincoln (in…
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What about reparations for people?
ODOT proudly spends road funds on mitigating the impact of its highways: if you’re an invertebrate. The highway department mitigates noise pollution, rebuilds jails, and even compensates neighborhoods But if we repeatedly pushed highways through your neighborhood, all you’ll get is condolences, wider overpasses, and a pictures of housing for which there’s no money The…
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For a grand bargain, think bigger and bolder
Right diagnosis, weak medicine, wrong metaphor In a far ranging thought piece for James Fallows’ Our Towns Civic Foundation—”Learning from Eisenhower and Lincoln: A Grand Bargain for Transportation,” Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger invoke Abe Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower as role models for a Biden Administration infrastructure policy. There’s a lot to like in this…
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The Week Observed, May 14, 2021
What City Observatory this week Don’t be fooled again. The Oregon and Washington state highway departments are up to their old tricks in trying to push a multi-billion dollar highway building boondoggle in the POrtland area. A guest editorial from David Bragdon, formerly President of Portland’s regional government, recounts the lies and deceptive tactics the…
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Don’t Repeat the Hard Earned Lessons of the Failed CRC
ODOT has repeatedly lied and misled Portland’s leaders about major highway projects No one should take at face value its assurances or representations A warning from one of Portland’s past leaders about the deceptive high pressure sales tactics used to sell a bloated freeway boondoggle Editor’s Note: David Bragdon was the President of the Metro…
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The Week Observed, May 7, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. It’s not a bridge replacement, it’s a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide freeway that just happens to cross a river. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are trying to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing project, peddling it as the “I-5 bridge replacement” project. That’s incredibly misleading moniker. …
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Who got trillions? We found the real speculators profiting from higher housing costs
In 2020, US residential values increased by $2.2 trillion Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2020 were more than three times larger than the total income of the bottom 20 percent of the population. Little of this income will be taxed due to the exemption on…
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The real “I-5” project: $5 billion, 5 miles, $5 tolls
The intentionally misleading re-brand of the failed Columbia River Crossing conceals the key fact that it is a 12-lane wide, 5 mile long freeway that just happens to cross a river, not a “bridge replacement.” It’s vastly oversized and over-priced, with current cost estimate ranging as high as nearly $5 billion (before cost-overruns), which will necessitate…
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The Week Observed, April 30, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Restorative justice without funding is a sham. Portland’s Albina neighborhood was decimated by the construction of three Oregon Department of Transportation highway projects in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, causing the neighborhood’s population to drop by more than 60 percent. Part of the marketing pitch for the current effort…
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Alexa: What is Cascadia Vision 2050?
A tech-centered vision of the future of the Pacific Northwest envisions creating a series of new urban centers 40 to 100 miles away from the region’s current largest cities—Seattle, Vancouver and Portland. The answer to sustainability isn’t building new cities somewhere else, it’s making the urban centers we already have more inclusive, prosperous and sustainable.…
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ODOT consultant: Pricing is a better fix for the Rose Quarter
Oregon DOT’s own consultants say congestion pricing would be a better way to fix congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter than spending $800 million. Pricing would improve traffic flow and add capacity equal to another full lane of traffic, according to WSP who called it “our best alternative” for dealing with the Rose Quarter Failing…
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Getting real about restorative justice in Albina
Drawings don’t constitute restorative justice ODOT shows fancy drawings about what might be built, but isn’t talking about actually paying to build anything Just building the housing shown in its diagrams would require $160 million to $260 million Even that would replace only a fraction of the housing destroyed by ODOT highway building in Albina…
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The Week Observed, April 23, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Fighting climate change is inherently equitable. While there’s a growing recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, it’s becoming increasingly frequent to pit equity concerns against decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be this way. Climate change disproportionately affects those…
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The freight fable: Moving trucks is not longer the key to economic prosperity
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair It’s even harder to get a trucking industry lobbyist or a highway department booster to understand something when their salaries depend on not understanding it. Oregon’s economy has de-coupled from freight movement; our economic success stems from doing…
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Fighting Climate Change is Inherently Equitable
Happy Earth Day, Everyone! If we care about equity, we need to make rapid progress on climate change Equity needs to be defined by substantive outcomes, not vacuous rhetoric and elaborate process. Ultimately equity is about outcomes, not merely process. The demonstrable results a decade or two from now have to be measurably more equitable…
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The Week Observed, April 16, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Taking Tubman: The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to widen the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland into the backyard of Harriet Tubman Middle School. The $800 million widening project doubles down on the historical damage that ODOT highway construction has done to this neighborhood, and literally moves the…
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ODOT’s peer review panel admits it didn’t validate Rose Quarter travel forecasts
ODOT has claimed a “peer review panel” vindicated its air pollution analysis Now the panel says they didn’t look into the accuracy of ODOT’s travel forecast Travel forecasts are critical, because they determine air and noise pollution impacts In short: the peers have done nothing to disprove the critiques of ODOT’s flawed traffic modeling A…
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Why cheap gas is our real climate and transportation policy
Forget about lofty greenhouse gas reduction goals and vision zero, our real climate and transportation policy is cheap gas The fall in gas prices in 2014 led to more driving, more SUV purchases, less transit ridership, more deaths and more greenhouse gas emissions In retrospect, 2014 was a turning point for driving, climate and safety. …
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Taking Tubman: ODOT’s plan to build a freeway on school grounds
ODOT’s proposed I-5 Rose Quarter project would turn a school yard into a freeway The widened I-5 freeway will make already unhealthy air even worse Pollution from high volume roads has been shown to lower student achievement ODOT also proposes to build sound walls in Tubman’s school yard Portland’s Harriet Tubman Middle School is one of…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina, part 3: The Fremont Bridge ramps
ODOT’s Fremont Bridge wiped out multiple blocks of the Albina neighborhood A freeway you’ve never heard of leveled dozens of blocks in North and Northeast Portland The stub of a proposed “Prescott Freeway” still scars the neighborhood This is the third of a three-part series looking at how ODOT freeways wiped out much of the…
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Wholly Moses: Pave now, pay later
Oregon legislation goes whole hog on highways HB 3065 would launch a whole new round of freeway boondoggles, and plunge the state into debt to pay for them The classic Robert Moses scam: Drive stakes, sell bonds The Oregon Legislature is considering a bill, HB 3065, which while it sounds technical and innocuous, is really…
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The Week Observed, April 2, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How the Oregon Department of Transportation destroyed a Portland neighborhood, Part 2: The Moses Meat Axe. We continue our historical look at the role that freeway construction (and the traffic it brought) destroyed Portland’s Albina neighborhood. Our story began in the early 1950s with the construction of a waterfront…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with waiting in lines…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina: The I-5 Meat Axe
Interstate 5 “Meat Axe” slashed through the Albina Neighborhood in 1962 This was the second of three acts by ODOT that destroyed housing and isolated Albina Building the I-5 freeway led to the demolition of housing well-outside the freeway right of way, and flooded the neighborhood with car traffic, ending its residential character and turning into…
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The Week Observed, March 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina. Urban freeways have been lethal to neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, in cities throughout the nation. While the construction of Interstate freeways gets much of the attention (as it should), the weaponization of highway construction in minority neighborhoods actually predates the Interstate system. In Portland,…
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Greenwashing auto infrastructure: Natick’s diverging diamond
A proposed interchange in Natick, Mass. is a classic example of greenwashing The diverging diamond is an idea entirely given over to making things better for cars, and creates a disorienting, circuitous and dangerous world for pedestrians and cyclists. The intersection of highways 9 and 27 in Natick Massachusetts, just east of Boston, is no…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina: The untold story
I-5 wasn’t the first highway that carved up Portland’s historically black Albina Neighborhood. Seventy years ago, ODOT spent the equivalent of more than $80 million in today’s dollars to cut the Albina neighborhood off from the Willamette River. ODOT’s highways destroyed housing and isolated Albina, lead to a two-thirds reduction in population between 1950 and…
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The Week Observed, March 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. For more than two years, City Observatory and others have been shining a bright light on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposed $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland. All that time, ODOT has maintained its planning a…
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An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission
For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has concealed its plans to build a ten lane freeway through Portland’s Rose Quarter We’re calling on the state to do a full environmental impact statement that assesses the impact of the project they actually intend to build. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. Regular readers…
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Is the pandemic driving rents down? Or up?
Since Covid started, rents are down in some cities, but up in most “Superstar” cities have experienced the most notable declines; the demographics of renters in these cities are different than elsewhere. Rent declines are also much more common in larger cities, with higher levels of rents. City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest…
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Inclusionary Zoning: Portland’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived
Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment completions are down by two-thirds, and the development pipeline is drying up This will lead to slower housing supply growth and increasing rents for everyone over the next two to three years Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) creates perverse incentives to under-utilize available land In December 2016, Portland’s…
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Progress Zero: Lofty vision but increasing deaths and injuries
Vision Zero is a popular and widely embraced safety campaign, but the latest data shows Portland is not only not on track, it’s going in the wrong direction when it comes to road safety Multi-lane, car-dominated urban arterials are the big killers, and instead of fixing them, the Oregon DOT is wasting billions on widening…
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The Week Observed, April 9, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina: Part 3 the Phantom Freeway. Even a freeway that never got built played a key role in demolishing part of Portland’s Albina neighborhood. In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we showed how construction of state highway 99W in 1951 and Interstate 5 in…
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The Week Observed, March 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The failure of Vision Zero. Like many regions, the Portland metropolitan area has embraced the idea of Vision Zero; a strategy of planning to take concrete steps over time to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries from road crashes to zero. A key step in Vision Zero…
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The Week Observed, March 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The fundamental global law of traffic congestion. For years, urbanists have stressed the concept of induced demand, based on the nearly universal observation that widening urban roadways simply leads to more traffic and recurring congestion. Repeated studies in the United States have confirmed that any increase in urban roadway…
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A new framework for equitable economic development
Editor’s Note: Darrene Hackler is a consultant and a senior advisor with Smart Incentives. Darrene brings economic development expertise in economic equity and inclusive growth, entrepreneurship and small business, and innovation. She helps policy makers, economic developers, and foundations build partnerships that can strengthen local economic development ecosystems through strategic plans, policy analysis, incentives analysis,…
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The Fundamental, Global Law of Road Congestion
Studies from around the world have validated the existence of induced demand: each improvement to freeway capacity in urban areas generates more traffic. The best available science worldwide—in Europe, Japan and North America—shows a “unit-elasticity” of travel with respect to capacity: A 1 percent expansion of capacity tends to generate 1 percent more vehicle miles…
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The Week Observed, February 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Revealed: Oregon Department of Transportation’s secret plans for a ten-lane I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter. For years, ODOT has been claiming that its $800 million freeway widening project is just a minor tweak that will add two so-called “auxiliary” lanes to the I-5 freeway. City Observatory has obtained…
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Revealed: ODOT’s Secret Plans for a 10-Lane Rose Quarter Freeway
For years, ODOT has been planning to build a 10 lane freeway at the Rose Quarter, not the 6 lanes it has advertised. Three previously undisclosed files show ODOT is planning for a 160 foot wide roadway at Broadway-Weidler, more than enough for a 10 lane freeway with full urban shoulders. ODOT has failed to…
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Oregon’s I-5 bridge costs just went up $150 million
Buried in an Oregon Department of Transportation presentation earlier this month is an acknowledgement that the I-5 bridge replacement “contribution” from Oregon will be as much as $1 billion—up from a maximum of $850 million just two months earlier. The I-5 bridge replacement project (formerly known as the Columbia River Crossing) is a proposal for…
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The Week Observed, February 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Covid migration: Disproportionately young, economically stressed and people of color. Data shows the moves prompted by Covid-19 are more reflective of economic distress for the vulnerable than a reordering of urban location preferences of older professionals. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shines a bright light on…
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Equitable Carbon Fee and Dividend
An equitable carbon fee and dividend should be set to a price level necessary to achieve GHG reduction goals; kicker payment should be set so 70% of people receive a net income after paying carbon tax or at least break even. By Garlynn Woodsong Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by…
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Covid Migration: Temporary, young, economically insecure
There’s relatively little migration in the wake of Covid-19 Most Covid-related migration is temporary, involves moving in with friends or relatives, and not leaving a metro area It’s not professionals fleeing cities: Covid-related movers tend to be young (many are students), and are prompted by economic distress From the earliest days of the pandemic, pundits…
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How freeways kill cities
Freeways slash population in cities, and prompt growth in suburbs Within city centers, the closer your neighborhood was to the freeway, the more its population declined. In suburbs, the closer your neighborhood was to the freeway, the more it tended to grow. It’s been obvious for a long, long time that the automobile is fundamentally…
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The Week Observed, February 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How housing segregation reduces Black wealth. Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas. There’s a strong correlation between metropolitan segregation and black-white housing wealth disparities. Black-owned homes in less segregated metro areas suffer a much smaller value reduction…
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How housing segregation reduces Black wealth
Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas There’s a strong correlation between metropolitan segregation and black-white housing wealth disparities More progress in racial integration is likely a key to reducing Black-white wealth disparities It’s long been known that US housing markets and…
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Congestion Pricing: ODOT is disobeying an order from Governor Brown
More than a year ago, Oregon Governor Kate Brown directed ODOT to “include a full review of congestion pricing” before deciding whether or not to do a full environmental impact statement for the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project. ODOT simply ignored the Governor’s request, and instead is delaying its congestion pricing efforts, and…
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The Week Observed, February 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Calculating induced travel. Widening freeways to reduce traffic congestion in dense urban areas inevitably fails because of the scientifically demonstrated problem of induced demand; something so common and well-documented it’s called the “fundamental law of road congestion.” Experts at the UC Davis National Center for Sustainable Transportation have developed…
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Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
The price of new housing is a poor gauge of housing affordability Increasing housing supply over time, coupled with individual housing units moving down-market as they age, provides affordability New cars are unaffordable to most households; used cars are the source of affordable driving Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ran for fourteen seasons before…
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America’s K-shaped housing market
Home prices are soaring, rents are falling The disparate impact of the recession on high income and low income households in driving the housing market in two directions at once. Job losses have been concentrated among the lowest earning workers, who are disproportionately renters. Meanwhile high earning workers have seen no net job losses, and…
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Again, it’s Groundhog’s Day, again
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Another year, another Groundhog’s Day, and another bleak report that we’re not making any progress on…
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Albina Then and Now
Albina then and now Basically, Albina was wiped out by Interstate Ave 99E (ODOT) 1951 Memorial Coliseum (City) 1958 I-5 1962 Emmanuel Hospital (PDC) 1970s Blanchard Center (PPS) 1980 Convention Center 1990 (expanded 2003) Moda Center/Rose Garden 1995 But ODOT’s two highways cut all this off from the rest of the city. 99E/Interstate cut the…
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Calculating induced demand at the Rose Quarter
Widening I-5 at the Rose Quarter in Portland will produce an addition 17.4 to 34.8 million miles of vehicle travel and 7.8 to 15.5 thousand tons of greenhouse gases per year. These estimates come from a customized calibration of the induced travel calculator to the Portland Metropolitan Area. It’s scientifically proven that increasing freeway capacity…
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The Week Observed, January 29, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why Portland’s Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening project has no impact on greenhouse gas emissions. We examine traffic data produced by ODOT which shows that the widening will increase average daily traffic…
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Widening I-5 at the Rose Quarter will increase greenhouse gases
Adding more freeway capacity at the Rose Quarter will thousands of tons to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions If you say you believe in science, and you take climate change seriously, you can’t support spending $800 million or more to widen a freeway. SYNOPSIS: Wider freeways—including additional ramps and “auxiliary lanes”—induce additional car travel which increases…
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More performative pedestrian infrastructure
Houston’s “Energy Corridor” gets a pedestrian makeover, but just one thing seems to be missing. Bollards and better landscaping can’t offset the increased danger from wider, faster slip lanes. Most “pedestrian” infrastructure projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic. Houston’s “Energy Corridor” is a commercial district west…
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The Week Observed, January 22, 2021
What City Observatory this week Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion: Fair housing complaints were less likely to be filed in higher income, higher priced predominantly white neighborhoods than in lower income neighborhoods that were predominantly Black. The study’s authors were puzzled by the…
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Housing discrimination is baked into zoning
The real housing discrimination today is institutional, not personal The unfinished business of dismantling the institutional racism built into zoning Overt, personal discrimination in housing is just the tip of the iceberg, the great and devastating mass of discrimination is below the surface, in the form of apartment bans and minimum lot sizes. Is there…
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The Week Observed, January 15, 2024
What City Observatory this week 1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” Highly equal cities…
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Why parking should pay its way instead of getting a free ride
Hartford Connecticut considers a pioneering move to make parking pay its way A higher parking tax works much like a “lite” version of land value taxation (LVT) Surface parking lots are highly subsidized polluters As Donald Shoup lays out in exhaustive detail in his 733-page masterpiece, The High Cost of Free Parking, the subsidies we…
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The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards, again
The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” We all want our cities to be more inclusive. While it’s an agreed…
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The Week Observed, January 8, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change. We’ve boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points: Pledges alone won’t accomplish anything. Saying you support the Paris Accords and plan to emit much less greenhouse gas a two or three decades…
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A regional green new deal for Portland
by Garlynn Woodsong Editor’s note:City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Garlynn Woodsong. Garlynn is the Managing Director of the planning consultancy Woodsong Associates, and has more than 20 years of experience in regional planning, urban analytics and real estate development. Instrumental in the development and deployment of the RapidFire and UrbanFootprint urban/regional scenario…
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Portland carbon tax should apply to all big polluters
By all means, Portland should adopt its proposed healthy climate fee, a $25 ton carbon tax But make sure it applies to the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases in the region The healthy climate fee should apply to freeways and air travel, not just 30 firms who produce 5 percent of regional…
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2021: Time to get serious about climate
Our new year’s resolution should be to take climate action seriously. Time is running out to actually do something that will reduce the steady growth of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, which is triggering irreversible damage to ecosystems around the planet. There are four big takeaways you should know about climate: 1. We’re falling further…
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2020: The Year Observed
2020 was a trying, tumultuous and often tragic year. Here are some of the top commentaries that marked the year. Like so many, we were preoccupied with global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic. Early on there was a chorus of voices blaming cities and urban density for the rapid spread of the pandemic. We pushed…
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City Observatory on housing supply and affordability
Here’s just some of what we’ve had to say about research on housing markets at City Observatory. Building more housing lowers rents for everyone December 14, 2020 A new study from Germany shows that added housing supply lowers rents across the board. A 1 percent increase in housing is associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent…
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The Week Observed, December 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Want lower rents? Build more housing! A new study from Germany provides more evidence that the fundamentals of economics are alive and well in the housing market. The study looks at how increments to housing supply affect local rents, and finds that a one percent increase in the…
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Sustainability is about more than electrification
Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this guest commentary by Kevin DeGood, Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress. This commentary originally appeared as a tweetstorm, and is republished with his permission. The text has been consolidated and edited for publication at City Observatory. Earlier City Observatory essays have questioned the sustainability of…
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Highway to Hell: Climate denial at the TRB
The Transportation Research Board, nominally an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is engaged in technocratic climate arson with its call for further highway expansion and more car travel. The planet is in imminent peril from global warming, with much of the recent increase in emissions in the US coming from increased driving. In…
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Building more housing lowers rents for everyone
A new study from Germany shows that added housing supply lowers rents across the board A 1 percent increase in housing is associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent decrease in rents Housing policy debates are tortured by the widespread disbelief that supply and demand operate in the market for housing. In our view, its…
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The Week Observed, December 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The only reason many people drive is because we pay them to. There’s an important insight from recent applications of tolling to urban highways. When asked to pay even a modest amount for using a fast (and expensive) asset, many drivers vote with their feet/wheels and choose other…
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City Beat: Another sketchy claim of Covid-driven urban flight
Again: It’s anecdotes, not data that are fueling claims of an urban exodus due to Covid-19 The virus is now deadlier in the nation’s rural areas than it is in cities, undercutting the basis for the urban flight theory Since the early days of the Coronavirus, the media has regularly trumpeted anti-city screeds, a kind…
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The only reason some people drive is because we pay them to
Here’s an insight from tolling: A substantial portion of the people driving on our roadways are only there because we’re subsidizing the cost of their trip. When we charge a toll to use a road, suddenly many of those using it find they don’t value it enough to pay even a fraction of the cost…
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Phoenix: Climate Hypocrisy
You can’t be a climate mayor—and your city can’t be a climate city — if you’re widening freeways Phoenix says it’s going to reduce greenhouse gases 90 percent by 2050, but the city’s transportation greenhouse gases have risen 1,000 pounds per person since 2014, and it’s planning to spend hundreds of millions widening freeways. Around the…
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The real $3.4 billion hole in the I-5 bridge project
The Oregon and Washington transportation departments understated the funding gap for a revived I-5 Columbia River Bridge by more than $1 billion Correcting for an arithmetic error increases the gap between identified revenues and potential costs from $2.3 billion to $3.4 billion. ODOT & WSDOT also used too low an inflation factor for escalating project…
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Black Friday, Cyber-Monday and the myth of gridlock Tuesday
Far from increasing traffic congestion, more on-line shopping reduces it, by reducing personal shopping trips Delivery trucks generate 30 times less travel than people traveling to stores to make the same purchases The more deliveries they make, the more efficient delivery services become The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced “Zoom Thanksgiving” we’ll…
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The Week Observed, November 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gridlock Tuesday? The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced “Zoom Thanksgiving” we’ll look to see how the pandemic affects the traditional “Black Friday” shopping spree. It seems likely that more retail sales than ever will gravitate to on-line shopping. That’s got many self-styled…
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More cynical greenwashing from the highway industry
There’s no shortage of cynical greenwashing to sell climate-killing highway widening projects GeorgiaDOT and AASHTO have a new PR gimmick to promote the same old product AASHTO—the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials—was touting one of their innovative environmental programs, something called “Planning and Environmental Linkages.” Its currently being deployed by the Georgia…
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The Week Observed, November 13, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Seven reasons you should be optimistic about cities in a post-pandemic world. There’s widespread pessimism about the future of cities. With the pandemic-induced advent of work-at-home, many people reason that soon there won’t be any reason to go into the office, or have offices, or even cities. We…
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Why—and where—Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond measure failed
Portland voters resoundingly defeated a proposed multi-billion dollar payroll tax to pay for transportation projects The two areas slated for the biggest benefits voted against the measure: The Southwest Corridor and East Portland both opposed the measure A generous electorate didn’t want to spend billions on transportation A few months back, we laid out the…
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Covid & Cities: Reasons for optimism
There are several compelling reasons—the seven “C’s”—to believe cities will thrive and prosper in a post-pandemic world: Competition: Zooming it in works when everyone has to do it, but if you work remotely while others are in the office, you are at a competitive disadvantage in contributing to and advancing in your work, especially if…
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The Week Observed, November 6, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Achieving equitable transportation: Reallocate road space and price car travel. New York has recorded a kind of “Miracle on 14th Street.” By largely banning through car traffic, its speeded bus travel times 15 to 25 percent, with virtually no effect on traffic on adjacent streets. Buses now run…
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Systemic racism and automobile insurance
Does geographic rating of car insurance amount to 21st Century redlining? Car insurance rates vary more based on who your neighbors are than on your driving record The premium penalty for living in a Black neighborhood is twice as large as for being an aggressive driver. States should ban using small geographies, like zip codes,…
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Achieving equitable mobility: Reallocate road space, price driving
Reallocating street space to buses is inherently equitable Charging a very high price to cars for using scarce road space promotes equity Just a year ago, New York took the bold step of of restricting traffic on 14th Street in Manhattan to buses and a relative handful of local deliveries. The improvement in local travel…
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Equity and Metro’s $5 Billion Transportation Bond
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…
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The Week Observed, October 23, 2020
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…
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The amazing disappearing urban exodus
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…
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Now we are six.
We’re six! On October 17, 2014, we launched City Observatory, with the aim of providing solid, data-driven research on cities, and offering a timely and informed voice on urban policy issues. Six years—and more than a thousand posts later—we want to reflect on the journey we’ve taken and those who’ve helped, and spend a few…
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The Week Observed, October 16, 2020
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…
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Equity and Parks
Last week, our friend and colleague, Carol Coletta delivered a “master talk” to the 66th Annual Conference of the International Downtown Association. Carol is President & CEO, Memphis River Parks Partnership, and a recognized thought leader on urban issues. Here are her reflections on the role of parks and public spaces in meeting the key challenges of our…
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Red states are now the red zone for Covid-19
Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. Rural counties have 14 percent of US population and 21 percent of new Covid-19 cases. The nation’s largest, densest urban counties now have Covid-19 rates lower than mid-sized and smaller metros and rural areas. This shift to a largely rural…
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The Week Observed, October 9, 2020
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…
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Let’s use a marketing campaign to solve traffic congestion
Here’s a thought: Let’s fight traffic congestion using the same techniques DOT’s use to promote safety. Let’s have costumed superheroes weigh in against congestion, and spend billions on safety, instead of the other way around. Why don’t we insist that driver’s take responsibility for the length of their commutes? Today marks the first day of…
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The Week Observed, October 2, 2020
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…
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The Great Disconnect: The perverse rhetoric of gentrification
The Great Disconnect By Jason Segedy City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Akron’s Jason Segedy. It originally appeared on his blog. As this decade draws to a close, the story of urban America is increasingly about the great disconnect between a small number of large cities that are thriving, and…
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Carmaggedon does a no-show in Portland
Once again, Carmaggedon doesn’t materialize; Shutting down half of the I-5 Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River for a week barely caused a ripple in traffic It’s a teachable moment if we pay attention: traffic adapts quickly to limits in road capacity The most favored myth of traffic reporters and highway departments is the notion…
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The Week Observed, October 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Equity and Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond. This week, Portland residents are voting on a proposed $5 billion payroll tax/bond measure to fund a range of transportation projects. A favorite talking point of advocates is that the measure advances equity, because it will expand transit to black and brown…
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The Week Observed, September 25, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why free parking is one of the most inequitable aspect of our transportation system. There’s a lot of well-founded anger over the inequitable aspects of transportation: the burdens of policing, fare enforcement, and road crashes all fall disproportionately on low income households and communities of color. But a…
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Parking and equity in cities
The average price of a monthly parking permit in cities is $2.25, compared to $70.00 for a transit pass. Everything you need to know about equity and privilege in urban transportation is reflected in how much we charge for parking compared to transit The triumph of asphalt socialism is reflected in providing unlimited free or…
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How to make gentrification even worse
Banning new construction is a great way to push up home values and accelerate gentrification Cities are conflicted and confused about how to protect affordability “Stop the world – I want to get off” was the title of Anthony Newley’s 1961 musical, but it seems like the core policy vision of a growing number of…
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Vancouver Columbian: Suburban drivers matter
Who are the real beneficiaries of the $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter project? Vancouver, Washington commuters, who won’t pay a dime for its construction. Wider freeways just double down on the damage done to city neighborhoods and privilege suburban commuters over communities of color. The editors of a suburban newspaper say the quiet part out…
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The Week Observed, September 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Lived segregation in US cities. Our standard measure of urban segregation, whether people reside in different neighborhoods, doesn’t really capture the way people from different racial and ethnic groups interact in cities on a daily basis. A new paper uses data gathered from cell phone records to look…
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City Beat: No flight to Portland’s suburbs
Another anecdote-fueled, data-starved article repeats the “suburban flight” meme, this time for Portland. Actual market data show the central city’s market remains strong Janet Eastman, writing in the Portland, Oregonian, offers up yet another example of a popular journalistic trope, the “Coronavirus is triggering a flight to the suburbs.” Never mind, of course, the point…
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The toxic flood of cars, not just the freeway, crushed Albina
Restorative Justice & A Viable Neighborhood What destroyed the Albina community? What will it take to restore it? It wasn’t just the freeway, it was the onslaught of cars, that transformed Albina into a bleak and barren car-dominated landscape. In the 1950s, Portland’s segregation forced nearly all its African-American residents to live in or near…
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Covid-19 is now a rural and red state pandemic
Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. OK, reporters, we’re waiting for the stories about rural Americans decamping to cities (or suburbs) and from red states to blue ones, where they will be safe from the pandemics. In the early months of the pandemic, reporters were quick…
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Lived segregation in US cities
We’re much less segregated during the day, and when we’re away from home Commercial and public spaces are important venues for interaction with people from other racial/ethnic groups Patterns of experienced segregation tend to mirror residential segregation across metro areas. In the US, we measure racial and ethnic segregation using census data that reports where…
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Why this Portland transit veteran is voting no on Metro’s bond
Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to present this guest commentary from GB Arrington, longtime veteran of Portland’s transit and land use planning systems, explaining why he’s against a proposed $5 billion transportation bond measure proposed by Metro that will be voted in the Portland region this November. By GB Arrington When I stepped down…
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Manufacturing consent for highway widening
ODOT doesn’t want to hear the questions its Community Advisory Committee raises about the proposed $800 million Rose Quarter Freeway widening project–so it fires them. Agency staff misrepresent public testimony to public officials, minimizing objections, and failing to report substantive critiques of agency errors. An ever-shifting set process with constantly changing committees lacks legitimacy. As…
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Is there anything “smart” about smart cities?
Big data and new technology make bold promises about solving urban problems, but not only fall well short of solutions, but actually can end up making things worse. Why we’re skeptical of the “smart city” movement. You can’t be an urbanist or care about cities without hearing—a lot—from the folks in the “Smart Cities” movement.…
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The Week Observed, September 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Manufacturing consent for highway widening. In the early days of freeway battles, state highway departments were power blind and tone-deaf, and citizen activists often triumphed in the court of public opinion. In the past several decades though, highway builders have become much more adept at manipulating the process…
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The Week Observed, September 4, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Why most pedestrian infrastructure is really car infrastructure. One of the most misleading terms you’ll hear in transportation is “multi-modal” which in practice means a highway for cars and trucks, with largely decorative provisions for pedestrians and bicyclists. We look at a couple of examples of pedestrian overpasses in…
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The myth of pedestrian infrastructure in a world of cars
Big money “pedestrian” projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic. One of the biggest lies in transportation planning is calling something “multi-modal.” When somebody tells you a project is “multi-modal,” you can safely bet that its really for cars and trucks with some decorative frills appended for…
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The Week Observed, August 28, 2020
What City Observatory did this week The case against Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond. Portland’s regional government, Metro, is asking voters to approve a $5 billion package of transportation improvements, to be funded by borrowing against an increase in payroll taxes. We take a close look at the proposal, and conclude that its a bad…
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The case against Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond
Metro’s proposed $5 billion transportation measure makes no sense for the region, for transportation, for our economy, for our kids and for our planet. Portland’s regional government, Metro, will be asking voters in November to approve a $5 billion transportation bond measure. There’s a strong case to be made that this is a badly flawed…
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The Week Observed, August 21, 2020
What City Observatory did this week America’s most and least segregated cities. Residential racial segregation is a fundamental and persistent aspect of system racism in the United States. Segregation cuts of disfavored groups from economic and social opportunity, and cities with higher levels of segregation tend to have lower levels of intergenerational economic mobility. In…
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America’s least (and most) segregated cities.
Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is the nation’s least segregated large city. The murder of George Floyd by police has reignited national interest in making more progress toward racial justice. It’s prompted a new round of introspection about the racism that’s deeply embedded in many…
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“Let them drive Teslas” is not a climate or a justice plan
Portland’s climate emergency efforts are tarnished by an inability to plainly speak the facts about climate change But the tragic fact is that the city is utterly failing to meet even its own previous goals, and more alarmingly, isn’t owning up to the failure of its 2015 plan to reduce emissions. Instead, the Bureau of…
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The Week Observed, August 7, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is it random, or is it Zumper? Are rents going up or down in your city? Listicles showing which places have the biggest jumps (or declines) in rents are a perennial media favorite, but as we’ve warned before, when it comes to data on rent changes, caveat rentor. …
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Climate Fail: Metro’s 2020 Transportation Package
Metro’s multi-billion dollar transportation package does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions Spending $5 billion reduces Portland’s transportation greenhouse gases by .05 percent This package costs $50,000 per ton in reduced GHG emissions Metro Portland knows that climate change is one of the most serious problems we face. We know that transportation, particularly automobiles are…
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Is it random, or is it Zumper?
Pay no attention to Zumper’s claims about rent trends Zumper claims rents for one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are moving in opposite directions in about a fifth of all markets There’s a lot of hyperventilation in the media about falling rents in different places in the US. It’s certainly likely that in the midst of the…
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The Week Observed, July 31 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The abject failure of Portland’s Climate Action Plan. Last month, Portland issued the final report on its 2015 Climate Action Plan. It emphasizes that the city took action on three-quarters of the items on the plan’s checklist, but glosses over the most important measure of results: the fact…
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Portland awards itself a participation trophy for climate
Portland is utterly failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, but not to worry, its ticking lots of boxes in its bureaucratic check-list. The city walks away from its 2015 Climate Action Plan after an increase in greenhouse gases, but promises to do better (and more equitably) in the future. Portland’s greenhouse gas emissions…
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A world of fewer cars and less driving
Auto industry consultants KPMG see fewer cars and less driving in our future That may be bad for the car business, but good for the environment and cities One clear implication: hold off building new road capacity There’s little question that the pandemic has altered the way we live in the present, the big unresolved…
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The Week Observed, July 24 2020
What City Observatory did this week The exodus that never happened. You’ve probably seen stories bouncing around the media for the past few months claiming that fears that density makes people more susceptible to the pandemic are prompting people to leave cities in droves. While and enterprising reporter can always find an anecdote to build…
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The Exodus that never happened
The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities. The latest data show an increase in interest in dense urban locations. At City Observatory, we’ve regularly challenged two widely repeated myths about the Corona Virus. The first is that urban density is a cause of…
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The Week Observed, July 17, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Dominos falling on Portland’s Rose Quarter freeway widening project. In the space of just a few hours two weeks ago, local political support for an $800 million freeway widening project collapsed, after local African-American groups pulled out of the project’s steering committee. We trace the rapid-fire chronology of local…
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Dominos falling on Rose Quarter freeway widening
Last week, over the space of about 24 hours, the prospects for Portland’s proposed the Rose Quarter freeway widening dimmed almost to extinction. Leaders of Portland’s African-American community have concluded that the Oregon DOT had no intention of altering the project in response to community concerns, and when they withdrew, a host of local leaders…
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The Week Observed, July 10, 2020
What City Observatory did this week CityBeat: NPR urban flight story. The pack animals of the media have settled on a single, oft-repeated narrative about cities and Covid-19; that fear of the virus will lead people to move to the suburbs. The latest iteration of this trope is an NPR story, focused on a couple…
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CityBeat: NPR’s suburban flight story
Yet another entry in the trumped-up pandemic-fueled suburban flight narrative Anecdotes aside, there’s no data that people are fleeing cities to avoid the Coronavirus The data show young, well-educated adults moving to urban centers everywhere, and no decline in interest in urban markets during the pandemic As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, there’s a welter…
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Covid-19: Surging in Sunbelt cities
The pandemic is exploding in Sunbelt Cities, from the Carolinas to California Covid-19 is subdued in the North and surging in the South Hotter southern temperatures and a move indoors, coupled with looser reopening regulations, may explain the Southern surge In June, there’s been a dramatic change in the geography of the Covid-19 pandemic. For…
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The Week Observed, June 26, 2020
What City Observatory did this week When NIMBYs win, everyone loses. Two land use cases from different sides of the country are in the news this week. In both cases, local opponents of new housing development have succeeded in blocking the construction of new apartments in high demand neighborhoods. The high profile case is in…
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Triumph of the NIMBY’s: Less affordable, more displacement
When NIMBYs win, everybody loses Constricting housing supply drives up the price of housing further, and accelerates displacement, in rich neighborhoods and in poor ones. Two recent cases from different sides of the country illustrate the perverse effects of NIMBY fights against the construction of new housing. One from California, was a community effort to…
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The Week Observed, June 19, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Youth Movement: Our latest CityReport. America’s urban revival is being powered by the widespread and accelerating movement of well-educated young adults to the densest, most central neighborhoods in large metro areas. Our new report looks at the latest census data and finds that the number of college-educated 25-…
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City Beat: When workers can live anywhere
Another anecdote-fueled tale predicting of urban decline Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Rachel Feintzeig and Ben Eisen add another story, this one headlined “When workers can live anywhere” to the growing pile of claims that fear of Covid-19 and the possibility for remote work are likely to lead to the demise of cities. “Still,…
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COVID Lessons for Portland (and others)
COVID Lessons for Portland (and others) by Ethan Seltzer (. . . with profound thanks to anonymous reviewers) Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this essay by City Observatory friend Ethan Seltzer, reflecting on our experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, with widespread civic unrest over police violence and racism, and what the experience of the…
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Youth movement: A generational shift in preference for urbanism
Well-educated young adults are increasingly moving to city centers Real estate search activity shows no decline in interest in city living due to the pandemic Our new report—Youth Movement: Accelerating America’s Urban Renaissance—confirms a powerful and still growing generational shift toward urban living. Increasing numbers of well-educated young adults are living in close-in urban neighborhoods…
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Youth Movement Dashboard
See how your city’s close-in neighborhoods did in attracting well-educated young adults Our CityReport, Youth Movement: Accelerating America’s Urban Renaissance, charts the growing concentration of well-educated young adults in the most central neighborhoods in the nation’s large metro areas. The trend is universal and accelerating. Every one of the 52 largest metro areas recorded an…
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The Week Observed, June 12, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 rates are spiking in five cities. Stay-at-home policies and social distancing have dramatically slowed the spread of the pandemic in the US, but as many state’s begin re-opening, there’s a concern that the virus could rebound. Looking at the data for the 50 largest US metro areas shows…
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Covid-19: A catalyst for more inclusive cities
Will the Covid-19 pandemic be a catalyst for better, more inclusive cities? The media fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic has been a series of largely baseless stories predicting a panicky flight from cities to avoid the virus. As we’ve pointed out the correlation between urban density and the prevalence of disease is spurious; some of…
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Covid-19 accelerating in five cities
New Covid-19 cases are increasing in five metro areas: Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Tampa and Raleigh These are the places to watch to see how well re-opening plans manage to avoid re-igniting the pandemic. Metro areas, not states, are a better lens for monitoring Covid-19. We’ve been tracking the spread of the Coronavirus for the…
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Covid-19 and segregation
Segregated cities seem to be harder hit by the pandemic Covid-19 prevalence is more strongly correlated with metropolitan racial and economic segregation than with urban density The New York City metro area has been the epicenter of the nation’s Covid-19 pandemic and because it is the nation’s most densely settled area, it is easy to…
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The Week Observed, June 5, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 and Cities: An uneven pandemic. We’ve been following the progress of the Covid-19 virus in the nation’s metropolitan areas for the past three months, and with the benefit of hindsight we can now trace out some key facts and trends. Overall, its apparent that the pandemic has…
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Whitewashing the freeway widening
A so-called “peer review” panel was kept in the dark about critiques of the highway department’s flawed projections This is a thinly veiled attempt These are the products of a hand-picked, spoon-fed group, asked by ODOT to address only a narrow and largely subsidiary set of questions and told to ignore fundamental issues. As we’ve…
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The convention business is cratering, and cities are getting stuck with the bill
By Mike McGinn and Joe Cortright Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this commentary jointly authored by former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and City Observatory’s Joe Cortright. Mike McGinn served as Mayor of Seattle from 2010 to 2013. He is also a former lawyer, Sierra Club state chair, neighborhood activist, and founder of sustainability non-profit Great…
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Memo to the Governor: Recovering from Covid-19
Some advice on economic policy for states looking to rebound from the pandemic City Observatory’s Joe Cortright has served as Chair of the Oregon Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers under three Governors. The Council met (virtually) with Oregon Governor Kate Brown on May 29, to discuss how the state’s economy could recover from the effects…
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Covid-19 and Cities: A very uneven pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has played out very differently in different metro areas; some have been devastated, others only lightly touched and these patterns have shifted over time. Among US metro areas with a million or more population there is a more than 20-fold difference in cases per capita between the hardest hit and the least…
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The Week Observed, May 29, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. LA Covid correlates with overcrowding and poverty, not density. City Observatory is pleased to publish a guest analysis and commentary from Abundant Housing LA’s Anthony Dedousis. Los Angeles County has released detailed geographic data on the incidence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Anthony offers a series of charts, maps and…
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Coronavirus in L.A. County: Separating Fact from Fiction
Are cities the latest victim of coronavirus? Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary by Anthony Dedousis of Abundant Housing LA. Some elected officials and journalists have drawn a link between urban density and the spread of COVID-19. A few anti-urban pundits have gone further, arguing that suburban living patterns are reducing…
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City Beat: Why Portland is not like NYC when it comes to Covid
Once again, there’s a naive and unsubstantiated association between urbanism and the pandemic Portland and Multnomah County have some of the lowest rates of Covid-19 cases of any large metro area The big drivers of Covid-19 susceptibility are poverty, housing over-crowding and a lack of health care. Like many states, Oregon is starting to re-open. …
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The Week Observed, May 22, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Postcards from the Edges: Looking at the relationship between density and the pandemic. There’s a widely circulating meme associating urban density with the spread of the Covid-19 virus, undoubtedly because people know that the virus has hit New York City particularly hard, and well, it is America’s densest city. …
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Postcards from the edges: Density is not Destiny
There’s a meme equating density with Covid-19 risk. Two polar cases shows that density (or lack thereof) has little to do with the spread of the pandemic. Many, including New York’s Governor, have been quick to blame density for the spread of Covid-19. Last month, we looked at data for one of North America’s densest…
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Is the pandemic worse in cities or suburbs?
Using county-level data, it depends on who’s classification system you use Counties may not be the right basis for diagnosing the contributors to Covid. One of the oft-repeated claims in the pandemic is the notion that cities and density are significant contributors to the risk of being infected with the Covid-19 virus. Some of this,…
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What is urban?
Shape of the urban/suburban divide: Views differ There’s a lot of debate about the relative merits and performance of cities and suburbs. You’ll read that the migration to cities has come to a halt, that suburbs are growing faster than cities or that cities have a higher rate of Covid-19 infections than suburbs. All those…
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The Week Observed, May 15, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. City Beat: We push back on a New York Times story claiming that people are decamping New York City on account of pandemic fears. You can always find an anecdote about someone leaving New York (or any city, for that matter) because people are always moving out of…