Land Use Learning: Let's Talk about Freeways

Today was my first day of Land Use Leadership Institute. What a big and kinda overwhelming day. I learned a lot. Today's sharing is going to be about freeways and politics.

I met the Council Chair for Metro (Oregon is the only place in the country with a tertiary level regional government that is elected, not appointed). Before learning who she was I scolded her for brusquely telling me to sit down at the start of the breakfast networking session. "Exsqueeze me? Autism cares greatly where it sits."

Once she got talking about things that were actually in her lane, she was very interesting. Over her career she's been a county director, a city chair, and now the chair of a three county metropolitan government entity that encompasses land planning, conservation, farmland portfolios, all of the fine arts auditoriums in my city, the entire multi-county bus and light rail system, and a bunch of other weird crap.

One of the many land use issues we talked about is the ever present need to replace one of the interstate bridges between Oregon and Washington. The bridge is rated functionally obsolete and every few years it comes up again, develops a lot of fear and hoopla, and then gets squashed again (usually by Washington state, from my Oregon perspective).

Everyone who lives here knows this. What none of us really understand is how the politics work and how that impacts the project and the people. To understand the politics, you have to understand the entities at play: City gov on Oregon side, County gov on Oregon side, Regional gov on Oregon side | City gov on Washington side, County gov on Washington side.

You also have to understand that every single one of those entities has different priorities driven by different priority stakeholders (and their votes and wallets).

Also at play - the technical realities of freeways, bridges, and property values.

Freeways have interchanges, yeah? Junctions where two or more freeways and/or roads come together. Engineering standards and prudence say that you should only have an interchange every X unit of measure or it wreaks havoc and makes your freeways dysfunctional. Capitalism and history say that everywhere you have a freeway interchange you have significantly higher property values. Developers put pressure on political entities to have more interchanges, so more interchanges there are, and the less our freeways function.

When your freeways don't function especially well you add auxiliary lanes to help with onramp traffic flow. Aux lanes make your freeways wider which has environmental impacts and also jacks costs way up. They improve merging traffic flow immediately at their location but also generally worsen it overall by adding to the density of vehicles on the road at a given time. If they're not designed very well they create zipper/merging issues which leads to more traffic accidents and more road rage.

Then you add a bridge to the mix, a bridge connecting two freeways that each come from a different state, budget, and orientation to environmental issues.

[Side bar on bridges: Did I mention the bridge is in desperate peril of collapsing, cutting off the food systems of both states in the event of an earthquake of any significance whatsoever? There are 15 gd bridges in this town, 3 of which connect to another state, 37.7% of which are rated poor. Some are privately owned, leaving questions as to whether you can compel expensive bridge updates.]

Okay, back to the bridge in question. Portland, an ever greenwashed city, wants fewer lanes across the river to Washington; fewer aux lanes; and, hey throw in light rail into the the neighboring county in Washington. County and Metro are good with this also, it makes everyone look like an environmental justice warrior.

The City across the river is good with light rail since lots of their people work in our City/State; however, the County across the river is largely suburban/rural and doesn't understand why anyone wants to ride tiny fast trains. County residents just want to come here on the weekends to buy things without sales tax. The City over there would really like an additional lane each way, and aux lanes on all sides - after all, their people commute across the river every day and elected them on claims of bringing down traffic. Their County doesn't care a lot about this particular issue, so "yeah, what they said!"

Here comes the political negotiation. We really want there to only be 3 lanes on each side, let's make it harder to just jump in your car solo dolo and commute to Oregon, dammit. Metro gov says we are ready to make concessions if we can get the dang 3 lanes. City over there says, "Mmkay, that's gonna cost you an additional aux lane." But but but an additional aux lane, when we already let them put too many interchanges on each side of the river.... that's just more cars on the road. County over there says, "You want them trains? You better give them the aux lanes." We concede. "Also, that train isn't allowed in the county, you can have one stop across the river and then it has to turn around."

Whoops, we conceded but didn't gain much.

Now what's this got to do with racial equity, shiny? We don't really know you to be hot for anything that doesn't tackle racialized issues. Well, glad you ask.

About 500, or 25%, of the Portland school district's elementary and middle school classrooms didn't meet minimum targets of three air changes an hour. Another 750 didn't meet the number of changes recommended by air quality experts, who say a better number to shoot for is six.

Which neighborhoods do you think will have the worst air quality in their schools? Who do you think attends Rosa Parks Elementary, Harriet Tubman Middle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, Cesar Chavez Elementary, and Chief Joseph Elementary schools?

How do you think this air quality issue impacted covid transmission rates for this already overrepresented group?

How many of these schools do you think have open windows (inadequate cooling systems) under the damn freeway interchanges? How many of those kids do you think live in houses with inadequate mold and mildew prevention (here in the rainy rainy PNW), leading to an epidemic of poorly controlled asthma?

Adding freeway lanes adds cars which adds to the daily exposure of those children.
Adding auxiliary lanes adds cars which does the same.

And yet, there will be no bridge update without these concessions. Every day the project is delayed costs about $1million.

So hey, at least we can be relieved that after a literal aaage of newspaper headlines telling us simply that our civic leaders failed to broker a deal (once again) we finally have reached an agreement, right?

Did I mention the overwhelming amount of bridge repair funding is from federal funds?
$1M/day/delay.