Columbia River Crossing may get no-vote from Portland Metro [Archive]

Chief

05-24-2008, 04:21 PM

From the article...just page 1 but it will give everyone a taste of this...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4184/is_20070817/ai_n19474527

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty isn't the council's designated transportation expert. But the attorney, who represents District Six in most of Southeast Portland, has a fair amount to say on the subject. Since joining the regional government's council in 2005, Liberty has often challenged Metro's standard analysis of big projects.

Planners, he says, have yet to fully analyze the costs and benefits of regional transportation priorities. And he cites the $6 billion Columbia River Crossing as an example of a particularly egregious project.

DJC: What's wrong with transportation planning in the Portland metro region?

Robert Liberty: No business would even buy envelopes using the decision-making process we use for transportation. There's about eight basic things that are wrong with it, that are serious.

DJC: When you say "we," do you mean Metro in particular, or do you mean the region?

Liberty: It is endemic: national, state, local, Metro. I was at this national summit on transportation policy in July, and my counterparts in other places said Metro is one of the leaders on these issues. I think we can do far better as a nation, as a state.

I think there's a lack of awareness about how fundamentally defective our decision-making is.

Transit has to meet substantially more difficult tests than road modeling, so it's somewhat better. But I still think there are problems there: making clear we have an objective that's not building a light-rail line or a streetcar line, but what we're trying to do as a community, whether it's development patterns or access or so on. And that we're looking at pieces instead of the whole.

Commissioner Adams is looking at a streetcar system for the city of Portland, which is certainly a step in looking at a whole system. But that is going to draw in some money from the region, and that raises questions of tradeoffs. And how can you compare one project to another unless you have a standard way of looking at costs and benefits?

And I want to be clear, it's a wide spectrum of costs, economic, social, environmental and fiscal. And, as I say, this is a national problem. We're spending about $2,000 for every girl, boy, woman and man in the United States in Iraq. The idea that Uncle Sugar, the federal government, is going to bail us out is naive. We've got to be smarter, cheaper, greener. The good news is there's lots of room for improvement.

DJC: The catch-22 of that is delaying the process also increases the costs of the projects over the long term.

Liberty: Hurrying up and doing something expensive and bad is a mistake. And this argument is used all the time to cut off any thoughtful discussion of alternatives that might be better.

The second point is, if you're talking about general inflation, that's irrelevant because you're going to pay with inflated dollars. The only time that's relevant, and a lot of times that's the case, is when construction costs are rising faster. A lot of the solutions I'm talking about don't involve construction, they involve operations. So that argument doesn't apply.

Part of the rush to do that is part of the assumption that the best thing to do is always build more stuff. I'd like to apply a little more brains and a little less concrete and still do some of these projects. Because I think we have cheaper solutions that are better for the community and are not so taxing on the citizens.

DJC: What's the solution for Columbia River Crossing?

Liberty: If I had $80 million, I'd give you a huge spectrum. I wouldn't be just studying one thing and then adding another alternative. I think the effort to consider other than the new bridge is pro forma and not genuine. So let me start talking about the process, then about the solution.

I'd have taken $10 million and had five teams, different contractors, and say, "we want you to give us a preliminary solution that's focused on different approaches." So one would have been a highway bridge, second transit, a third would have been demand management and system management, fourth would have been land use, a fifth would have been arterial connections. And each of those teams get $2 million to give us your best shot.

From that I would have evolved a new spectrum of solutions. One other thing, I would have included I-205 in the study and the railroad bridge. And I would have gone a lot farther north and south. So my study area would have gone at least to downtown Portland, if not Wilsonville, to the Clark County line.

So when people say, What's your solution? Well, you know, I don't have the benefit of $80 million worth of studies, so it's not very fair. But I can tell you what my instincts tell me. Instead of one big project, it would have been a bunch of incremental things that are smaller.

Yes, there should be an additional bridge, but it would be an arterial bridge. Most of the traffic across the Columbia River is arterial traffic - the lines aren't much longer than 217 or even 39th Avenue. And that bridge would have provided direct city-to- city connection.