No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Columbia Crossing Follow Up: 12 Years to Plan a Bridge

Mar 2

2007

In my post about the Sellwood Bridge I noted that Portland planners seem to take inordinate amounts of time to make decisions about new roads. In a post on the Columbia Crossing I noted that Portland transportation planners seem to be going out of their way to drive up the costs of new roads.

When I was writing about the Columbia Crossing, I didn’t notice that the region has already spent ten years “planning” this bridge, and expects to take at least two more. At the rate they are going, it will probably take a lot more than two years to reach a decision, much less to actually start any construction.

The whole point of both the delays and the gold-plating is that Portland does not want to add any capacity to any of its roads, for that might relieve congestion and “induce” more people to drive. Henry Hewitt, who co-chairs the Columbia Crossing committee, used to chair the Oregon State Transportation Commission, and while there he made sure that minimal capacity increases were added to Oregon’s highway system. “I don’t believe we can build our way out of congestion,” he said, so he saw no point in trying.

Only a government monopoly would act so defeatist. Can you imagine a cell phone company saying, “We can’t build enough new capacity to meet the demand, so we are just going to let our customers get worse and worse service every year.” That company would soon be out of business as all its customers changed to companies that would serve their needs. But government has a monopoly on highway transport, so users are stuck with it.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner