What City Observatory Did This Week
The ODOT accountability charade. The pat political answer to the problem of chronic cost-overruns on Oregon DOT highway projects running into the hundreds of millions of dollars is that the Legislature will insist on “accountability” in its new multi-billion dollar transportation package. But all of the so-called accountability measures are just transparent gimmicks—re-arranging the organizational deck chairs, or management buzzwords—none of which have any demonstrated effectiveness in lowering or even managing costs. Case in point, the new “transportation package” bill, HB 2025, claims it will increase accountability by having the Governor appoint the head of ODOT. That is exactly the opposite of what the 2017 Legislature claimed it was doing to “increase accountability” by taking the appointment power away from the Governor, and vesting it in the Oregon Transportation Commission.
Just as in 2017, we’ve hired consultants to tell us how to fix ODOT, and the Governor has solemnly pledged to implement these recommendations. Trouble is, most of these recommendations are cosmetic, or have already been done–like creating a project dashboard, and centralizing authority for mega-projects. Many were included in the 2017 “reforms,” and we’ve seen exactly how well they work. “ODOT accountability” is a charade, or perhaps an oxymoron; either way, its a gimmick to provide political cover for throwing more money at a wasteful and failing agency.
Must Read
If you only count cars, cars are all that count. A key part of the technocratic rationalization of massive highway investments is the pseudo-science based on “traffic” counts, which in reality means counting cars and trucks. Because highway agencies have copious data on car travel volumes and speeds, optimizing both takes precedence over pursuing other goals which don’t have the same throw-weight of data. As a result, biking, walking and transit get short shrift, as do safety, air pollution and accessibility. Writing at Streets.MN, Joe Harrington reflects on efforts in Minneapolis to gather comparable data on bikes and pedestrians for some projects; its endouraging but is only a start.
If we study streets as public spaces, we can understand how they work and how people really use them, and most importantly, why. We need to grow a deeper understanding of these interactions and human needs — both movement and stationary activity — if we want to build streets for people and restore the damage that car culture has dealt our cities. Failing to do so can lead to public spaces that hinder urban vibrancy. ..
The danger is we allow gathered data to become the “reality” that we plan for, something which is not an accident, but has been a conscious means of control for decades. It will take time to overcome this bias.
What sports stadiums say about public priorities. Cities and states across the nation are dropping billions of dollars in subsidies for baseball, football, soccer and basketball stadiums and arenas, usually cloaked in the guise of an economic development strategy. Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times writes that the reality is that spending money subsidizing sports facilities is about as regressive a redistribution plan as you can imagine: franchise owners and ball players are some of the wealthiest and most highly compensated people in the country, and public subsidies chiefly help prop up their wealth and earnings. Likewise, those who attend sporting events skew wealthier and higher income than the rest of the population.
Because the system makes it hard to build anything other than luxury projects, cities are increasingly for rich people. And make no mistake: Stadiums are playgrounds for the wealthy, thinly disguised as public spaces.
Despite a manifest shortage of housing, and high and rising rents, cities are plowing subsidies into projects that do almost nothing to address this fundamental problem. Maybe we need abundance for something other than sports venues?
New Knowledge
Where the electric vehicles are. Electric vehicles are becoming more common in the US, but very unevenly. While the uptake is strong in some places, its relatively slow in others. The Visual Capitalist has a useful map of the number of EV’s per 100,000 residents.
EV adoption is highest on the West Coast:
California tops the list with 3,026 electric vehicles per 100,000 residents. That’s more than twice the per capita registrations of Washington (1,805), the next highest state. Hawaii (1,686), Oregon (1,422), and Colorado (1,405) also rank in the top five—each benefiting from supportive EV policies and infrastructure investments.
While it is true that policies (like tax credits) and subsidized infrastructure give a push to EV adoption, there are also important network effects: if your neighbors want EVs and will buy them, its more likely you will as well. Poorer and more rural states, and red states also seem to have much lower rates of EV adoption than higher income, more urban states and blue states.
Jeff Desjardins, Mapped: Electric Vehicles Per Capita by U.S. State, June 7, 2025
(USAFacts). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-electric-vehicles-per-capita-us-states/
