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 […]
Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuter’s pollution? Read More »
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
Freeway widening for whomst? Read More »
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
Backfire: How widening freeways can make traffic congestion worse Read More »
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
A wider freeway won’t reduce traffic Read More »
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
Rose Quarter freeway widening won’t reduce congestion Read More »
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
Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways! Read More »
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
Housing reparations for Northeast Portland Read More »
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
Diverging diamond blues Read More »
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
The great freeway cover-up Read More »
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.
The death of Flint Street Read More »
