What City Observatory Did This Week
Pretending Work-from-Home Never Happened. Oregon and Washington highway department’s are planning for a $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Project based on assumptions that pretend that the Covid pandemic and work-from-home have done nothing to change predicted travel patterns. They claim that unreferenced and apparently entirely mythical “industry standards” require them to ignore everything that has happened since 2019, even though a wealth of data shows that commuting and travel patterns have permanently changed.
Post-covid travel analyses have shown a permanent shift toward lower growth in vehicle miles traveled. Even the highway department’s own traffic data show that traffic levels continue to be below pre-pandemic peaks and congestion has fallen substantially. Metro, the region’s land use planning agency reports that commuting between Portland and Vancouver has fallen by half , The IBR is literally planning for a world that doesn’t exist.
Must Read
California freeway expansion continues to destroy homes and businesses. CalStreetsblog summarizes the results of a legislatively required report produced by the state’s highway department, Caltrans, documenting the homes and businesses dislocated by freeway widening projects. The biggest takeaway? Caltrans continues to add more and more freeway lanes all over California, contrary to some press and agency accounts asserting that the state’s massive highway building is somehow in the past.
To expand freeways, Caltrans continues to tear down lots of homes and businesses. For the five years in the report, Caltrans reports relocating 317 homes and 306 businesses. The report puts the lie to the frequently repeated claim that the era of freeway-building was in the distance past and is now somehow over; the paving machine just keeps rolling along.
Bloated Megaproject Costs are threatening Washington’s transportation budget. The fiscal pigeons are coming home to roost in Washington State, according to Ryan Packer of the Urbanist. Like its neighbor Oregon, the Evergreen State is facing a huge budget gap for transportation:
The Washington State Legislature is starting to reckon with a massive budget hole in the state transportation budget, and some of the state’s most prioritized highway widening and expansion projects could be put in the crosshairs. As the days start to tick down toward the end of the legislative session on April 27, different options are starting to emerge around how lawmakers might start to make up a nearly $8 billion budget gap over the next six years. Few areas of the budget are fully safe from cuts, and a way forward to closing the gap is unlikely without delaying, or even cancelling, some long-planned highway expansion projects.
And its the huge highway projects that are both the biggest item in the budget, and, thanks to cost overruns, the biggest single contributor to the growing gap between revenue and expenditures.
Highway “improvements”, mostly made up of expansion and widening projects, make up the single biggest set of expenditures in WSDOT’s current budget — and are a major source of the budget crisis. Cost increases on projects like these are a major factor behind the massive budget crunch, along with declining gas tax revenue. Combined together, cost increases on just four projects — the North Spokane Corridor, I-405 widening, I-90 widening at Snoqualmie Pass, and the Puget Sound Gateway program — total $785 million.
For years, Washington has prioritized new capacity expansion over maintaining the existing roadway system. The high cost of expansion projects, coupled with deferred maintenance and legal obligations to fix environmental damage from previous highway construction has created the gap.
Covers in Buffalo are a coverup: Are freeway caps just expensive lipstick on a pig? The latest vogue in highway building, it seems, is building (or at least proposing to build) covers over the tops of urban freeways. But will obscuring the traffic from view do much to undo the damage to the neighborhoods devastated by the freeways and their attendant traffic? Around the country, local groups are questioning of the utility of spending upwards of several hundred million just to hide freeways, rather than actually removing them. Benjamin Schneider, writing at Substack, offers some keen insights into this aspect of the unfolding freeway fights.
In Buffalo, advocates cried foul about the plumes of unfiltered exhaust and particulate that would come out of either end of the tunnel, worsening air quality for the people who live nearby. In Austin, advocates describe a freeway cap as a means of “greenwashing” an otherwise destructive freeway widening. In Portland, advocates I’ve spoken with lament the “opportunity cost” of these billion dollar freeway fixes that don’t really improve transportation or mobility. Even when they represent an improvement over the status quo, freeway covers quite literally entrench urban freeways for generations to come. They foreclose a future with fewer freeways, not just nicer freeways
Ultimately covering a freeway, rather than downsizing it or removing it altogether is inherently a compromise that leaves the damaging infrastructure intact. Maybe its time to ask for something more than a cosmetic fix?
New Knowledge
Federal workers are more common in rural areas and smaller Metros. The Trump/Musk war on federal government workers might seem like an attack on the beltway elites in Washington, DC, but federal workers are disproportionately found in some of the most rural congressional districts, according to Axios.
Interesting, some of the bluest areas (major metro areas) and bluest states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon) have low fractions of federal employment.
In the news
Smart City Memphis republished our updated A to Z list of everything that causes — or gets blamed for causing — gentrification.
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