Tag: rose quarter
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Moving the goalposts
The key to being on-time and under-budget: Orwellian double-speak Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget–because the agency simply disappears its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-finished projects are officially described as “On-time and on-budget” Oregon DOT routinely hides its waste, mismanagement and incompetence The last bits of fresh asphalt have been rolled…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Widening Freeways Kills the Planet!
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down. State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit us to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction. April…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Waste Billions Widening Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hell-bent on widening freeways and destroying the planet April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions dollars into three Portland area freeway…
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Let’s use a marketing campaign to solve traffic congestion
Here’s a thought: Let’s fight traffic congestion using the same techniques DOT’s use to promote safety. Let’s have costumed superheroes weigh in against congestion, and spend billions on safety, instead of the other way around. Why don’t we insist that driver’s take responsibility for the length of their commutes? Today marks the first day of…
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Oregon DOT admits it lied about I-5 safety
Oregon’s Department of Transportation concedes it was lying about crashes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter For more than a year, we and others have been calling out the Oregon Department of Transportation for its false claims wider freeways are needed to improve road safety. And we’ve repeatedly show that ODOT’s claim that I-5 at…
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There’s a $3 billion bridge hidden in the Rose Quarter Project EA
ODOT hid its plans to build a $3 billion Columbia River Crossing in the Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Environmental Assessment The carefully crafted marketing campaign for the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is adamant that you don’t call it an expansion. It’s an “improvement project” they say. We’re not widening the freeway, we’re just…
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Safety: Using the big lie to sell wider freeways
Oregon’s Department of Transportation is lying about safety to sell a half billion dollar freeway project Fear-mongering is the one of the lowest, if unfortunately most effective, means of selling anything. Threaten anyone with a danger to their health and safety, and they’ll acquiesce to a sales pitch. Oregon’s Department of Transportation is using an…
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How a freeway destroyed a neighborhood, and may again
Portland’s Albina neighborhood was devastated by the I-5 freeway; Widening it repeats that mistake Freeways and the traffic they generate are toxic to vibrant urban spaces. The great lesson of the urban freeway building boom of the 1960s was that it served chiefly to destroy, devalue and depopulate city neighborhoods throughout the nation. Freeways accomplished…
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How tax evasion fuels traffic congestion in Portland
Tax free shopping in Oregon saves the typical Southwest Washington household $1,000 per year Cross border shopping accounts for 10-20 percent of all trips across the I-5 and I-205 bridges Tax avoidance means we’re essentially paying people to drive and create traffic congestion Those who live in “the ‘Couv”–Vancouver, Washington–often like to poke at their…
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Why Portland shouldn’t be widening freeways
Why Portland’s freeway fight is so important to the future of cities everywhere The plan to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway in Portland, at a cost of $500 million, is a tragic error for one city, and an object lesson to others. A wider freeway will induce more traffic and pollution (and ironically, worsen…
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Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuter’s pollution?
The fundamental injustice of pollution from urban freeways Item: In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. This money will buy an expensive state-of-the-art air filtration system that will make the air inside the school safe…
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Freeway widening for whomst?
There’s a huge demographic divide between those who use freeways and neighbors who bear their costs When it comes time to evaluate the equity of freeway widening investments, it’s important to understand that there are big differences between those who travel on freeways and those who bear the social and costs in the neighborhoods the…
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Backfire: How widening freeways can make traffic congestion worse
Widening I-5 in Portland apparently made traffic congestion worse Oregon’s Department of Transportation (ODOT) is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to add two lanes to Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter in Portland, with the hope that it will help relieve traffic congestion. But practical experience with freeway widenings in this area shows…
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A wider freeway won’t reduce traffic
Widening I-5 actually increased crashes, instead of reducing them, and an even wider freeway won’t be less congested if crashes don’t decline. We’re going to dig deep into Portland’s proposed freeway-widening controversy today, and in the process we’re going to get into some very wonky traffic engineering details. Here’s the background: the Oregon Department of…
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Rose Quarter freeway widening won’t reduce congestion
Spending half a billion dollars to widen a mile of I-5 will have exactly zero effect on daily congestion. The biggest transportation project moving forward in downtown Portland isn’t something related to transit, or cycling (or even bringing back shared electric scooters). It’s a proposal to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile long…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. It isn’t so much Earth Day as a…
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Housing reparations for Northeast Portland
Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished? One of the carefully crafted talking points in the sales pitch for the $450 million proposed Rose Quarter I-5 freeway widening project in Northeast Portland is the idea that it is somehow going to…
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Diverging diamond blues
A key design element of the supposedly pedestrian friendly Rose Quarter freeway cover is a pedestrian hostile diverging diamond interchange One of the main selling points of the plan to spend nearly half a billion dollars widening the Interstate freeway near downtown Portland is the claim that the improvements will somehow make this area safer…
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The great freeway cover-up
Concrete covers are just a thinly-veiled gimmick for selling wider freeways As you’ve read at City Observatory, and elsewhere (CityLab, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week), Portland is in the midst of a great freeway war. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to widen a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5 opposite downtown Portland from 4 lanes…
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The death of Flint Street
A proposed freeway widening project will tear out one of Portland’s most used bike routes At City Observatory, were putting a local Portland-area proposed freeway widening project under a microscope, in part because we think it reveals some deep-seated biases in the way transportation planning takes place, not just in Portland, but in many cities.…
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What Dallas, Houston, Louisville & Rochester can teach us about widening freeways: Don’t!
Portland is thinking about widening freeways; other cities show that doesn’t work Once upon a time, Portland held itself out as a national example of how to build cities that didn’t revolve (so much) around the private automobile. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it recognized that building more freeways just generated more traffic, and…
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Why we’re talking about Portland’s freeway widening proposal
Portland is a bellwether for transportation policy; is it going to take a giant step backward? Last month, the Oregon Legislature passed a $5.3 billion transportation funding bill. A central piece of this legislation is advancing three projects that would widen Portland area highways. HB 2017A makes initial allocations of funding to start (but not…
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Dying to widen highways
Oregon’s DOT seems to be more concerned with making cars go faster than saving lives Yesterday, we took a look at a recent Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) “performance report” on Portland area freeways. One of its main messages–which we found some problems with–deals with congestion. But the report also seems to devote a lot…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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Climate concerns crush Oregon highway funding bill
While headlines focus on the nearly-bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local departments of transportation across the country are facing declining revenues, maintenance backlogs, and an insatiable desire for funding new projects. As a result, this summer, a number of states are working on new highway funding packages. So far in 2015, eight states…