The fundamental injustice of pollution from urban freeways Item:  In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. ... →

Portland's Albina neighborhood was devastated by the I-5 freeway; Widening it repeats that mistake Freeways and the traffic they generate are toxic to vibrant urban spaces. The great lesson of the urban freeway building... →

ODOT hid its plans to build a $3 billion Columbia River Crossing in the Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Environmental Assessment The carefully crafted marketing campaign for the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project i... →

Why Portland's freeway fight is so important to the future of cities everywhere The plan to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway in Portland, at a cost of $500 million, is a tragic error for one city, and an object lesson... →

There's a huge demographic divide between those who use freeways and neighbors who bear their costs When it comes time to evaluate the equity of freeway widening investments, it's important to understand that there are ... →

Widening  I-5 in Portland apparently made traffic congestion worse Oregon's Department of Transportation (ODOT) is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to add two lanes to Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter in Portl... →

Spending half a billion dollars to widen a mile of I-5 will have exactly zero effect on daily congestion. The biggest transportation project moving forward in downtown Portland isn't something related to transit, or cyc... →

Tax free shopping in Oregon saves the typical Southwest Washington household $1,000 per year Cross border shopping accounts for 10-20 percent of all trips across the I-5 and I-205 bridges Tax avoidance means we're  ... →

Oregon's Department of Transportation concedes it was lying about crashes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter For more than a year, we and others have been calling out the Oregon Department of Transportation for its false claims... →

Oregon's Department of Transportation is  lying about safety to sell a half billion dollar freeway project Fear-mongering is the one of the lowest, if unfortunately most effective, means of selling anything. Threaten a... →

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-fini... →

Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished? One of the carefully crafted talking points in the sales pitch for the $... →

A key design element of the supposedly pedestrian friendly Rose Quarter freeway cover is a pedestrian hostile diverging diamond interchange One of the main selling points of the plan to spend nearly half a billion dolla... →

Concrete covers are just a thinly-veiled gimmick for selling wider freeways As you've read at City Observatory, and elsewhere (CityLab, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week), Portland is in the midst of a great freeway war... →

Widening I-5 actually increased crashes, instead of reducing them, and an even wider freeway won't be less congested if crashes don't decline. We're going to dig deep into Portland's proposed freeway-widening controvers... →

A proposed freeway widening project will tear out one of Portland's most used bike routes At City Observatory, were putting a local Portland-area proposed freeway widening project under a microscope, in part because we ... →

Portland is a bellwether for transportation policy; is it going to take a giant step backward? Last month, the Oregon Legislature passed a $5.3 billion transportation funding bill. A central piece of this legislation is... →

Portland is thinking about widening freeways; other cities show that doesn't work Once upon a time, Portland held itself out as a national example of how to build cities that didn't revolve (so much) around the private ... →

Oregon's DOT seems to be more concerned with making cars go faster than saving lives Yesterday, we took a look at a recent Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) "performance report" on Portland area freeways.  One... →

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... →

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 t... →

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 ... →

If you're serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to drop more than a bil... →

Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (A... →

While headlines focus on the nearly-bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local departments of transportation across the country are facing declining revenues, maintenance backlogs, and an insatiable desire for fu... →