"Mobility Standards" -- the genetic code of the traffic planner determined to destroy livable places

One of the smartest things said yet in the discussion of the idea for a third Willamette River Bridge comes from Doug Parrow, a local bicycle activist and member of the "Willamette River Crossing Task Force."

The Oregon Transportation (read Highway) Plan was showing its age on the day it was adopted. While the plan lays out a number of sound-good, multi-modal concepts, implementation of the plan has fundamentally been limited to widening roads. The state Highway Department (I deliberately decline to refer to them as Transportation oriented) has employed the one tool that they consider legitimate--the construction of more lanes and new roads--in pursuit of the mobility standard described in the plan. When these "improvements" are plopped down in an urban environment, all other modes of transportation inevitably suffer. In particular, pedestrians must deal with wider streets and the impossibility of safely crossing at unsignalized intersections. Bicyclists must cross multiple turn lanes if they intend to continue straight through an intersection.

The Willamette River Crossing study serves as a sterling example. I serve on the task force that is providing advice to the effort. During the two years since the inception of the study, the task force has been fed a variety of big bridge configurations that are designed to achieve the mobility standard based on 20-year projections of motor vehicle traffic. According to the planning team, the only way to accomplish this is through the construction of a huge bridge at an enormous cost that would connect to city streets using a maze of freeway style ramps. Only recently, with preparation of a draft-EIS already underway, has the project team begun to develop a low-build, multi-modal alternative. It is hard to imagine that, at this point in the process, the alternative will be anything more than a straw man. Further, even the "no-build" alternative that is in play contemplates that significant "improvements" will be made under the Salem TSP. These "improvements" involve widening roads and the construction of dedicated turn lanes that will inevitably damage walking and bicycling.

The public subsidy that is provided to motor vehicles is enormous. The gas tax would have to be increased to more than $3.50 per gallon to cover the full costs to the highway system of the use of motor vehicles. Local governments have tried to make up the difference using property taxes and system develop charges, neither of which recognize the transportation mode choices that the people paying these taxes make, or send the appropriate price signal to those people. Given the subsidy, some form of rationing is necessary to compensate for the imbalance of supply and demand. A bsent the political willingness to adopt appropriate transportation pricing strategies, we have effectively defaulted to using congestion as the rationing mechanism.

It will be interesting to see how congestion pricing and tolls play at the legislature. To what extent will the public, in particular the trucking industry, be able and willing to substantially increase the amount they pay to use the road system? The percentage of household income spent on transportation has been historically been increasing. It can't continue to do so indefinitely. We are already seeing significant changes in the transportation choices that people are making as a result of the increases in fuel costs to date. We haven't really experienced the effects of peak oil and global warming on prices yet. Given recent legislative history, I suspect that the current path of shifting transportation funding away from a mileage/use based approach toward general taxation will prevail, to the detriment of the planning and delivery of an efficient transportation system.

Certainly the Governor's announced plans are encouraging. However, the way in which the plans are implemented by the agencies is what really matters and the state Highway Department is continuing to redraw 4-lane lines using 6-lane pens in a fruitless and doomed effort to achieve the elusive mobility standard.

Doug Parrow