From Here to Portland's Transportation Tomorrow

From Here to Portland's Transportation Tomorrow
City Club of Portland Remarks
Commissioner Sam Adams
July 20, 2007

Listen to the speech here.

Thank you, Don Williams, for that gracious introduction. It is an honor to return to the Portland City Club.

I have never seen a passion for any other issue be more intense, a problem more intractable, or options so hotly debated. It was on the front page of every newspaper and the top of all the newscasts for weeks. In fact, history likely will regard it as the most important transportation-related question of our generation. If you haven't already guessed, the issue I am talking about is, "Should, or should we not, allow duct tape on our streets and sidewalks?"

I guess it is all about perspective, isn't it?

Context is important: and to my way of thinking, a great transportation system never guarantees a great city, but a lousy transportation system almost always guarantees a lousy one. Why? Because transportation should not be an end unto itself but must serve to promote other important civic goals, such as: an educated citizenry engaged in life-long learning; locally-owned businesses ready to win sales at home and in the world's marketplace while providing family-wage jobs; a sustainable and green and beautiful city in balance with nature; a robust creative and science community; affordable housing and equality of opportunity; a safe city that embraces the world and flourishes as a hub for trade; and, an effective regional partnership between citizens, labor, business, advocacy groups and government.

We all know that Portland gets high praise for its transportation innovations. Just yesterday, CNN reported, that "Probably the best asset [Portland] has to offer travelers...is its extensive and reliable transit system." This feedback is great for our collective ego. But we need to stay humble in the knowledge that our transportation system does not adequately serve tens of thousands of Portlanders. And we must be honest with ourselves that the 30-year-old transportation vision we have been operating under has outlived it usefulness, that we face major new challenges, and that a key decision-points that will shape what kind of transportation city and region we will for the next half-century are fast approaching.

Today I'm going to summarize the key transportation challenges we face and our efforts to address them over the past 24 months. Then I'll transition to potential solutions and wrap up with the community benefits I see if we embrace a transportation transformation.

The challenges:

Our first and most tragic: Portland's streets are killing and injuring people despite the fact that we know how to make them safer. Streets like 82nd Avenue, 122nd Avenue and West Burnside - these are dangerous streets because we have lacked adequate funds to implement safety solutions, to enforce traffic laws and educate road users. And when I say, "safety solutions," I mean the most basic of things like sidewalks -- over 60 miles of Portland busiest streets - the streets that people to walk on to catch the bus - over 60 miles of these kind of streets lack sidewalks. Sixty miles: that is the distance between Portland and Hood River.

With such a safety gap in our transportation system, I don't blame parents for not wanting their kids to walk or bike to school, which contributes to the rising rate of childhood obesity. And I understand why the concerns about safety keep more adults from using their bikes. Congressman Earl Blumenauer rightly calls the bicycle the single most efficient form of urban transportation ever conceived. And yet only 3.5% of city travel trips take advantage of such efficiency because so many perceive our streets to be unsafe.

Our second transportation challenge: our basic road and bridge system is crumbling. Early estimates put the repair bill at $422 million today and $9 million more for each year we wait. Add another $325 million for the County's Willamette River bridges. The City or County does not have this kind of money or a revenue source to get it.

These antiquated streets also contribute substantially to another, sometimes not-so-obvious problem: the $1.4 billion price tag we have to pay to stop untreated pollution from entering the Willamette River. I'm talking about the Big Pipe Project, the largest public works project in the city's history. More than 60% of our stormwater pollution comes from our road system.

Our third major transportation issue is the erosion of our land use laws. Measure 37 claims filed in our area threaten to blow out the region's Urban Growth Boundary, the most important tool we have for keeping a region scaled for people; if the UGB goes, likely so too will the remaining capacity of our road and freeway systems. This is a disaster in the making.

Our fourth challenge is gridlock: Each morning and evening, 7 million motor vehicle trips try to squeeze into Portland's arterial streets and freeways. With so many people stuck waiting in traffic congestion, unabated, it will cost the local economy $1 billion every year by 2025.

And that brings me to my final two transportation issues, numbers five and six on my list, respectively: global warming and peak oil. Kudos to Commissioners Erik Sten for his forward thinking plan to reduce CO2 gas emissions, Dan Saltzman for his leadership on our peak oil response plan and Randy Leonard on his biodiesel local production and sales strategy.

There work is important because the age of cheap energy is over. Consider this: the Environmental Protection Agency reports that America is now spending more on transportation than food. And it is worse for the working poor, who now spend more on transportation than housing and food combined.

Ok, upfront, I have hit you hard with the gloom-and-doom to drive home the fact that the transportation challenges we face are numerous, very tough and more lethal than ever. But our collective transportation challenges are also very solvable with a smart new regional vision that integrates regional transportation and land use planning, wise investments that diversify transportation choice, and some good ‘ol Portland-style gumption.

Our new approach started 24 months ago when I was appointed the city's transportation commissioner. As commissioner-in-charge I am determined to lead Portland's transportation agency in a new direction of increased sustainability, accountability and results. With the appointment of Sue Keil as Portland's new transportation director, most all the senior managers in PDOT are new to their posts. We have completed two outside management reviews and we are implementing changes from a recent audit. The agency's budget is put together with advice for a citizens and labor budget committee. And we don't just wait for transportation problems to come to us downtown; we're out looking for them. We have held 15 transportation public town halls and eight neighborhood and business district walkabouts.

And we are doing everything we can to get the basics right, like paving and repairing potholes. We have increasing our pothole repairs by 30%. If we don't see it first, call our pothole hotline at 503-823-BUMP and get it filled.

We have strengthened our partnerships. For the first time ever, all the transportation providers in Portland meet regularly to focus on operational improvements. With the Oregon Department of Transportation, we passed bills in the state legislature that give us the authority to clear more quickly disabled vehicles on the freeway - 50% of local congestion is due to non-repeating delays such as non-injury crashes. And with TriMet and Metro and Milwaukie and Clackamas County we successfully lobbied the state legislature for $250 million to expand light rail from Milwaukie into downtown, and $20 million for streetcars. And along with investments in South Waterfront and on the eastside, we are in the midst of the largest extension of streetcar trackage since the early 1900s.

And we are making a new industry of streetcar manufacturing. Congressman Peter DeFazio - my former boss -- got us started by securing $4 million in federal funds to help build the first Oregon-made streetcar. The state legislature saw a good job-creation opportunity and invested another $20 million. More than 80 delegations from around the country have visited to see our streetcar. I hope it's only a matter of a few short years before Oregon-made streetcars are running throughout the nation.

After inheriting costly mistakes early in the process, we finished the OHSU Tram on the revised timeline and budget with the private sector picking up 85% of its cost.

The city council approved the initial I-5/I-405 "loop group" study recommendations and we are now looking for resources to do the next phase of needed studies.

We moved forward another important project: the Burnside Couch Couplet Plan. We put it through the wringer with a year of additional outside scrutiny, improved it by adding an express streetcar line, and ultimately got it approved by the City Council with unanimous support.

We held Portland's first transportation safety summit and then successfully lobbied for $11 million in city funding to improve Portland's most dangerous intersections. The crosswalks on NW 23rd, NE Alberta, Belmont and other neighborhood main streets are the result of this initiative. So are 100 new school crossing beacons throughout the city. Soon you will see pedestrian medians on east 82nd, 122nd, Foster and more; my thanks to Mayor Tom Potter who was the first of my city council colleagues to grasp the importance of this safety investment.

We completed the city's first freight master plan, which identifies key corridors for safe, effective freight movement-so vital to our economy-that minimize the impact of trucks in our neighborhoods. And from that plan, we have almost finished a complete rebuild of the Columbia Boulevard/North Killingsworth intersection to eliminate a dangerous turns for trucks.

For bicyclists, we've put Portland on the path to Platinum bike status, a national achievement no major city has yet earned. We're planning the next wave of major bicycle investment: an aggressive expansion of the bicycle boulevard network. These are low-traffic, low-impact streets designed to accommodate the auto needs of residents, but where the bicycle rules the road.

And we just yesterday we dedicated the Hollywood sewer and streetscape improvement project with a neighborhood business leader saying that the city's was great to work with, doing everything it could to minimize the negative impacts of construction and boost all the possible positives.

I may have the fancy title of "Commissioner-in-charge" but these results come from a team effort. Thanks to my colleagues on the City Council, all my staff in city hall, at Portland Office of Transportation, our partners at Oregon Department of Transportation, TriMet, Metro, Portland Streetcar, Inc., Portland Development Commission, Oregon Health Sciences University, Bicycle Advisory Committee, Bicycle Transportation Alliance, Pedestrian Advisory Committee, Willamette Pedestrian Coalition, Portland State University, our Freight Advisory Committee, and everybody else who volunteers countless hours of time to make Portland a safe, better place to get around. If you belong to any of the groups I just mentioned, please stand so we can recognize you.

That was a highlight of good work underway to address our transportation dilemmas; now let's discuss other solutions on the drawing board.

Portland enjoys a reputation for being ahead of the curve thanks to the people of this city who embrace innovation. Some of the additional solutions I will discuss today are in the works, others are decades from fruition but all are intended to call upon the best of what it means to be a Portlander.

I'm going to discuss the solutions to our safety and maintenance deficits as one package.

I recently hosted five transportation town halls to discuss this unglamorous but important issue that has been 25 years in the making. After two years of improving the operations of the city's transportation department and unsuccessfully begging the Oregon state legislature for more money, but just as dozens of Oregon cities already have enacted local transportation funding sources, I feel we have no choice but to look at new local transportation funding options.

It might not be widely understood but there is little mystery in how we got here: As project costs have skyrocketed as the price we pay for raw materials and health insurance goes up and up and up. Meanwhile the amount of money we receive from the state via the gas tax, in real terms, goes down, down, down. This has resulted in seven years of budget cuts from current service levels at Portland transportation department.

On this issue, I always get asked some similar questions, good questions that I will try and answer succinctly:

Did the tram eat money that could have been used for maintenance? No, the $8.5 million we spent was for tax increment resources that legally cannot be used for street maintenance.

Should we have spent some of money used to build streetcar and lightrail for maintenance? The bulk of the funds used to pay for these projects - federal transit funds, lottery bonds, tax increment - legally cannot be used for street maintenance.

Aren't Oregon's transportation taxes already high? Oregon's transportation-related fees and taxes, per gallon of gas - the best apples-to-apples comparison - are the lowest in the U.S. west.

If transportation is so important, why not cut other less important city programs and use the savings to pay for transportation? Given the $422 price tag, it is question of trade offs. Do you cut police, fire or parks - all with their own unmet funding needs to pay for transportation?

Why not cut the waste out of PDOT and use the savings for maintenance? We are always looking to improve operations at PDOT but again it has been cutting at its budget for seven years.

With gas prices so high, you in government must be making a mint off your gas tax? Actually, the gas tax is on a gallon of gas not the price of gas so when gas prices rise consumption slows bringing in less revenue. And it is a state gas tax, the Portland region only gets 46 cents of each gas tax dollar we send to Salem.

In terms of what new local funding options we might select for consideration, it too early to tell. We have created a diverse 60-person to audit how PDOT currently spends it money, the list of identified needs and recommend funding options.

Of course, the best tax is one that somebody else pays. But I am intrigued with Seattle's approach of a three-legged funding source. Maybe a modest monthly basic street safety and maintenance fee, a smallish local gas tax, and some other revenue option. By looking at three modest funding sources instead of loading it all on to just one tax, we spread the pain as evenly as possible among all those who use the system.

I want to be sure we all see any fine print on the funding package options. For instance, at $40 million of new revenue per year, we can eliminate the safety and maintenance backlog in ten years. At $20 million annually, it will take 20 years. And any proposal I bring forward will show exactly when, where and how the money will be spent.

We knew before I rolled out this issue that this would be an unpopular but the early feedback from the town halls has been very encouraging. That said, I am cautiously optimistic we will have something to present to City Council in January. Since my funding efforts are focused on our maintenance and safety deficits, the regional and state funding efforts to expand transportation capacity must continue as well.

And whatever transportation package we may ultimately end up with, I guarantee it will include aggressive plans for more greenstreets. This year I sponsored the nation's first comprehensive greenstreets policy for a major city. As we build or rebuild streets, we'll employ greenstreet technology, which saves the taxpayer money because it addresses road-produced pollution close to the source instead of piping it to the treatment plant.

The solutions to our land use start with passage of a state ballot measure and extend to more robust development around transit stops.

It's imperative that we keep our land use laws in place - fix the parts that need fixing but keep them in place. Indeed, much of what Portland has done better than the rest of the country harkens back to previous generations of leadership who recognized the inextricable relationship between transportation and land use. Light rail, streetcar, safe streets for bicycling and walking - none of it is possible without land use laws that encourage a more compact and humane development pattern. When you receive your ballot this fall, get out that #2 pencil and take a good 10 seconds to darken that bubble in support of Measure 49.

We also need more vigorous transit station area development. The slow pace of redevelopment along the Yellow Line in North Portland concerns me. At my direction PDOT has initiated a review of the Banfield and I-205 transit stops to understand the barriers to redevelopment. We need a review of our zoning, building codes, planning practices, and market analyses as they relate to transit stations. Every transit station in the city should be a vibrant micro-community with its own unique sense of place and identity. We need to maximize the return on our multi-billion transit investments with station area development that makes walking, bicycling, and transit the easiest and best set of travel choices.

Our solutions to congestion need to be assertive and regional in scope. As the 3rd most trade dependent region in the nation, congestion is much more than just an inconvenience; it's the annual $1 billion hole in our pocket by 2025 if we do nothing.

We need modernize our freeways. But more importantly we need to reduce congestion by creating real alternatives to personal auto dependency. We must use our existing road right-of-way, fully 1/3rd of the city's land mass, more efficiently.

As I have already discussed, it's starts by fixing the basic infrastructure we already have and dramatically diversify our good travel choices. It's like any good investment portfolio: diversify, diversify, diversify.

So our solution to congestion must also move forward achievement of our global warming and peak oil goals. What would Portland look like if we implemented solutions to global warming and peak oil? Well, ironically enough, it would look a lot like Portland circa 1920 - a time when the main means of motion were your feet, streetcars and bikes - and maybe horses, but we should leave them in the pasture. In that era we had more than 100 miles of tracks. Streetcars were literally setting the footprint for how the city would grow. In fact, one of Portland's finest charms, our distinctive neighborhoods, is a direct result of our original streetcar grid.

To me it's obvious that we should grow what we know works and return the streetcar to its original stature in the city, along with lightrail. We are close to completing a nearly 30-year-old regional rail transit plan. So, we have initiated a citywide - followed by a region wide -- rail transit plan that will determine the best corridors for rail transit expansion.

For our new regional transit plan I foresee new light rail and express streetcar lines, more frequent bus service going more places, more car-sharing, bikes, bike boulevards and sidewalks and walking paths, appropriate auto use, and new deployment of transportation management associations -to ensure you could get where you need to go when you need to be there without you wanting to use your car.

And to ensure we are disciplined about linking transportation and land use planning I believe we should plan to accommodate our share of projected regional growth-Metro anticipates 300,000 more Portlanders by 2035-within ¼ mile of all existing and to-be-planned streetcar and lightrail transit stops. That will be a huge task but a worthwhile task. Why? Because it will simultaneously encourage responsible, transit-supportive development while protecting our existing single-family neighborhoods from undo growth.

With all the lightrail and streetcar projects underway or planned, it is fair to ask, do we really need more? My answer is an emphatic, "yes." As recently reported in the media, many of the cities that we compete with are doing much more than we are. Denver has 12 year program to build 119 miles of light rail and commuter rail. Houston has a $7.6 billion initiative to 73 miles of lightrail. Portland, we cannot afford to fall behind.

These efforts will relieve congestion by leaving the freeways and major streets for the most valuable travel trips - freight and those for whom transit, or carpooling or human motion is not a realistic choice.

Creating a true diversity of travel choices also means dealing with the disruptions of building it out and questions as to how to pay for it.

Right now there are over 30 current and planned public and private projects worth an estimated by some to be valued at $1 billion that impact the right-of-way in downtown. It is a Herculean task to keep things moving as normal as possible. But I meet with PDOT, TriMet, small business owners, resident and 35 other stakeholders meet every other week under the banner of "Keep Portland Moving" to provide assistance and coordinate the reduction of our collective impacts. We opened a hotline. If you see something that concerns you, call us at 503-865-MOVE. Live operators really are standing by to help. I do.

Given the $422 million maintenance repair bill already on the table, a natural follow-up question to any mention of a robust regional transit system is, "How do we pay for it?"

As I already mentioned, the funding options work underway on the state and regional level must go forward.

When it comes to streetcar, if you pick the right routes and they help pay for them selves; along our existing system we've seen more than $2.4 billion in private investment. The Burnside/Couch Couplet Streetcar is estimated to pay for itself in 14 years.

The federal government needs to refocus and return to its role as our nation-builder. Historically, the federal government has always picked up most of the tab for major infrastructural investment. In the 1950s Congress set the federal government's contribution to interstate freeway projects at 90%. Stop the war in Iraq and save $175 million each day. Impose a federal tax surcharge on excess oil company profits resulting from this price gouging.

And we should slap a surcharge for urban transit projects on national oil companies engaged in what appears to be price gouging while prices at the pump hover around $3 per gallon. U.S. Speaker of the House of Representative Nancy Pelosi is right when she calls the $97 billion dollar annual profits they made last year, "Obscene."

Duct-tape, bailing wire and band aids are apt metaphors for how we have funded our transit and transportation projects. But this approach will leave us falling behind of where we need to be for regional mobility.

So in the immediate term, we've got to invest in our basic roadway infrastructure. Access to safe, well-maintained streets is everybody's right, and consequently everybody's responsibility.

We must protect our land use laws to keep our wonderfully diverse mosaic of safe, livable neighborhoods that make Portland special. Congestion paired with anticipated growth isn't just a frustration; without alternatives it will be a billion dollar annual burden.

We must focus our response is to diversify our portfolio of travel choices, investing in real alternatives for around-town travel needs. And last by certainly not least, global warming and peak oil are basically the exclamation at the end of the travel choice sentence. The consequences of inaction are simply too dire to assume we can ignore them.

Taken together these actions will result in a "transportation transformation." Simply put, as the transportation commissioner of your city, I don't think we have a choice.

Remember that history is replete with examples of once-fine cities that grew complacent in their accomplishments and let innovation pass them by. In the 1980s when massive freeway expansion was still en vogue, some renegade city hiding in the car wash corner of America turned its back on the Mt. Hood Freeway, took the federal dollars, and tried the nation's first light rail system instead. Now it seems everybody's been to or coming to Portland, Oregon to experience first-hand what we've been up for the last twenty years.

Yes, we start ahead of other cities but we need invest in more. We already attract a disproportionate share of young, creative talent, in part because we've made smarter transportation investments than other cities. One nationally-renowned economist, Joe Cortright, says we're already reaping the benefits. Portlanders commute on average four fewer miles than the national average, saving us a collective $2.6 billion in fuel and time savings.

The transformation is how we get from here to Portland's transportation tomorrow. I hope you will join us.

Thank you.

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