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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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”…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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”…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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. …

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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: …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…