The Road to Better Roads

In today's Oregonian, Ryan Frank reports on a new initiative by Commissioner Sam Adams to raise $263 million for paving, bridge and bike lane work. Portland is estimated to have a backlog of over $420 million in needed repairs, from potholes to sidewalks to street repaving. The Portland Office of Transportation also reports that 3,941 miles of streets and 32% of arterials are in poor condition; 22% of bridges are in poor condition and the same for 43% of traffic signals. That last one really gets me, by the way. If there's anything I hate, it's badly timed traffic lights.

Although I was and remain vehemently against the Commissioner's Burnside couplet plan, I support his efforts 100% this time around.

On Saturday I got a postcard in the mail advertising a series of neighborhood town hall meetings that the Portland Office of Transportation will be holding, which I wanted to pass on. They are scheduled for Tuesday, June 19 @ 7PM at the Multnomah Center (7688 SW Capitol Hwy); Wednesday, June 20 at St. Philip Neri Church (a Belluschi-designed one, BTW) Carvlin Hall (2408 SE 16th Ave); Tuesday, June 26 at the King Neighborhood Facility (4815 NE Seventh Ave); Wednesday, June 27 at Friendly House (1737 NW 26th Ave); and Monday, July 2 at Firehouse #12 (4415 NE 87th Ave). You can also go here to participate in an online conversation.

Adams is proposing numerous different ways to pay for the transportation work: a gas tax (which has not been raised locally since 1993 - I find that preposterous given all our funding problems), property owner fees, etc. I don't know which means is best, and it'll be a gigantic uphill battle to get even the progressive Portland area to agree to the spending/taxation increase. But virtually everyone ought to realize that infrastructure is the lifeblood of the economy.

At the same time, there is also the chance to address long overdue state-wide transportation needs.

Last Sunday, two members of the Oregon Transportation Committee, Gail Achterman and Janice Wilson, wrote a letter to the editor of The Oregonian calling for the Legislature to increase funding for transportation.

"Oregon once led the nation with the first scenic highway, the first gas tax and with investments in light rail, bike and pedestrian improvements," they write. But now, "Oregon is falling other states...Once there were no sacred cows in Oregon. Elected officials and citizen commissions debated transportation needs for current and future generations. They were not afraid to think big or to talk about how to pay for their ideas."

Sam Adams is doing just that with the potentially unpopular move of raising taxes to pay for much needed transportation improvements. And crucially this time around, he's targeting transportation funding that we can virtually all agree on. The Burnside couplet has a little more than half of concerned people behind it at best.

Incidentally, I'd love to hear from people as to transportation fixes in Portland they'd like to see. Much of what Adams is proposing is unsexy, unnoticed work such as pot holes and wheelchair-accessible sidewalk corners. But part of what Achterman and Wilson were calling for was for us to dream big. What do we want? I'd of course like to see the east bank freeway moved, more streetcar lines, etc. How about the rest of you?

Comments

[Doug Roberts]

Kudos to Sam for taking this on. Personally, I think some sort of direct user fee is best. A gas tax is best, but what about freeway tolling? Or on/off ramp tolling to exempt through traffic? Property owner fees are the wrong way to go because it won't accurately capture the demand an individual places on the system. A downtown condo owner commuting to Hillsboro in a Hummer with studded tires (and a pinky ring) would likely get off lightly because a downtown condo would be assumed to generate little traffic. But an individual in a single family house who commutes daily by bicycle might get hit harder.

As far as projects that should be funded:

- Road repair and maintanence foremost. It's the only way to guarantee broad support of this plan.

- Significant increases in bicycle infrastructure funding. Designate 9th or Park as bike-only with signals at each intersection timed to the city grid. More bike-only infrastructure will increase the perception of safety, leading to more bike commuters and less stress placed on the auto-based infrastructure. Dedicated bicycle infrastructure gets bikes out of the way of cars; everyone wins. 0.7% of PDOT money currently goes to bicycle infrastructure. Increase that to match the commute share: currently 3.5% and growing. We can only get so far with white paint.

- Cap I-405! Our city has been torn in half for long enough. Users of the freeway add air pollution, noise pollution, and visual blight. Logic dictates that the users should pay the cost to mitigate the damage they're causing.

- Continue aggressively building out the streetcar system. By the time the eastside loop is operational, the westside line will have been running for over a decade. That's far too slow.

[alexander]

I think prioritizing the projects in a PR-savvy way could help show Portland Transiters (car, bike, foot, bus, etc) that potential tax hikes were being well spent:
Start with synchronizing ALL traffic lights - this saves people money, and lowers their blood-presure.
Then set up a comprehensive pot-hole fixing plan, to help deal with infrastructure repairs throughout downtown - that way the City can strategize how to fix the necessary mess downtown. And this would of course include immediate pot-hole fixes, so people could start feeling a smoother ride.
Then comes bridges - and everyone agrees that un-safe bridges in a city built in-and-amungst fault lines is a mandatory fix. So looking at that.
Also, funding studies that examine options for fixing various trouble-spots throughout the city.
Oh, and to help pay for all this, the City needs to go on an agressive installation spree: adding photo-ticketers to all intersections that have a higher-than-average accident rate. this way, people can get more paranoid about running yellow/red lights (a problem I see downtown) in the city, and at the same time, the city can make more money off the bastards who do run red lights. Making sure the extra money earned in these tickets is spent in a highly visable, solution-based way would be an important thing.

Oh, and let's continue looking at how we can get more streetcar lines! it's more glamorous, and it brings more taxes into an area/more money for future, "un-glamorous" road fixes!