As a Portland resident commuter for the past 27 years in a row, mostly to and from the same general parts of town, I can say with absolute confidence that Metro's claims on the subject are crap and are clearly cooked statistics to justify a means. The only people who might believe them are uninformed/misinformed recent arrivals, who are probably the intended audience anyways.

$5 gasoline will help.

Metro:By creating transportation options and planning for compact growth, Portland has reduced the length of its average commute, saving drivers time and money.
JK: Sorry, Metro, but your 19th century "transportation options" (mass transit, bikes, walking) are all slower than driving a car (sometimes known as an automobile). Nationally, commuting by your choice, transit, takes twice as long as driving a car. See: http://www.portlandfacts.com/commutetime.html

Transit also costs 2-5 times what driving a car costs. See portlandfacts.com/transit/cost-cars-transit(2005)b.htm

But planners don’t care about cost either - that is how the destroyed Portland’s fiscal condition and made our housing unaffordable. See portlandfacts.com/housing.html.

Why are planners always trying to waste our time and money? Is it because wasting time and money is inbred in planners? Or are they just “abbynormal”

Thanks
JK

Allan L: $5 gasoline will help.
JK: Yep, by forcing low income people to waste even more of their time on mass transit.

Again, Portland planners, who generally wish for much more expensive costs for driving, show their lack of caring about people, especially low income people as they drive them out of Portland with rising costs due to their grand schemes of enriching the rich developers.

Thanks
JK

Bingo JK!
The poor and increasingly disenfranchised are supposed to 'walk' to look for work.

I frequently use public transit in Portland and I have lived in other cities big cities and I believe based on my experience that public transit fails in Portland Metro.

It takes me longer to travel a short distance in Portland then it takes me to travel a much further distance in the bay area.

It takes like 30-40% longer to travel distance via bus or max in Portland then it would travelling the same distance in the bay area via their mass transit options (Muni/Bart/ACTransit/GG)

The sad part is the price for a fare is about the same in the bay area and Portland and yet the service is better in the bay area and if you have a monthly pass you can use it on other transit systems.

What should genuinely creep people out is this statement:

By creating transportation options and planning for compact growth, Portland has reduced the length of its average commute, saving drivers time and money.

I invite Metro to prove that causal link.

Or, the other creepy item--a hired PR person (ahem--"reporter") writing a "neutral" story about the organization that writes his paycheck. This last item sickens me, as it should anybody with even the most flexible ethical standards. Shame on you, Nick Christensen. I know you know better. And shame on Metro, for successfully out-creepy-ing Mayor Facebook.

"By creating transportation options and planning for compact growth, Portland has reduced the length of its average commute, saving drivers time and money."

That's probably the most common deceit by the inhabitants of the theoretical world of Metro and Trimet.

Yep, having the taxpayers pay for Airport MAX, all the Cascade Station infrastructure and hand over the 120 acres of public land for a song all helped. Especially when in the real world it became the BIG BOX strip mall it was supposed to prohibit.

And now millions are about to be spent upgrading the Airport Way/I-205 ramps to deal wit the traffic.

In the real world Metro CFO Michael Jordan says the Green Line was built in the wrong place.

Nearly everyone now says WES should not have been built.

In the real world Rex Burkholder says (with regard to the WES fiasco), "Probably that project didn't get the scrutiny it deserved 10 years ago." He also said, "TriMet has no incentive to ever admit they made a mistake."

There is never the scrutiny these demand. And it has gotten much worse.

Now with the Milwaukie Light Rail and Lake Oswego Streetcar there is no sign of any scrutiny at all. Quite the contrary the pushing forward effort is ushered along with more propaganda than ever and a total ignoring of the critics.

In every single previous debacle the critics were 100% right. From Eastside MAX to the Tram to WES to the Green Line and now MLR and the streetcar.

But the theoretical world & the "steering committee" have no learning curve.

Isn't Karen cute?

Gosh, she used to work at the zoo, but now is one of the many PR drones at Metro that we pay $4.4 million per year to fund.

Are you not getting your money's worth?

Me neither.

Literally every possible event or data point will be interpreted to support The Vision. It is much closer to a religion than a science.

More like a cult.

Jack, I wish you had a "like" button for comments!

I second that suggestion!

(However, I imagine it would require rework of the html forms and may not be trivial. The expression "looking a gift horse in the mouth" comes to mind)

If you ride a bike or train, your commute has improved. If you take the bus or a car, your commute is worse.

And the city doesn't even pretend to maintain the streets anymore: it's just whack-a-pothole now.

In cities with road maintenance plans, the roads are resurfaced long before they turn to alligator skin.

DC metro area has transit share usage that's second only to New York City, yet has the worst traffic congestion in the country. Unchecked intensive development along rail corridors causes bottlenecks and gridlocks streets at transit nodes, degrading driving times. Recession has had minimal impact since boon in Federal spending has tamped metro area unemployment down at 6.1 percent.

We're losing money on every commute, but we'll make it up in volume!

Building an effective Transportation system in Portland is a challenge. It doesn't have the density to support a large-scale system- so comparing it to a larger city is not valid. It also has the classic suburban expansion of not only homes, but businesses. So people are having to get either to work or get home in all directions.

With the recent popularity in driving large family tanks around, the amount of space available has also shrunk.

I am not defending Metro- and think PR is BS, but let's not assume that there is some magic formula for the mess we have all created.

Becoming more apparent that the UGB plan has created and continues more of the same mess. The plan is just allowing sprawl anyway as we incrementally open up to more of the "same" kind of strip development, etc. Plus much farm land is now filled with McMansions while the rest of us are to be filled in uncomfortably. As time moves on, we will have more congestion leading to gridlock.

Am not for sprawl, but seeing the end result here, I would rather live in sprawl with open space between, than in "eventual sprawl anyway with unreasonable congestion." Besides with our debt here and unemployment picture, not so sure the "millions" are coming. In my opinion, our Portland area in many ways has turned into a sacrifice zone for the UGB concept. I began with a neutral outlook, but believe that too much money was involved that took over. We need to take care of our quality of life issues now rather than base decisions on speculations on what might happen.

clinamen, right on! I look at the area around where I used to live in Aloha--kind near the MAX, and there is sprawl--sprawl of skinny houses, faux-townhomes, the occasional condo bunker and that sort of nonsense.

If we *have* to have growth (and arguably, in the residential sector, we don't need it--look at our unemployment rate), I'd much rather take up a little bit of land here and there on the periphery rather than crowding everyone together with "smart growth" tomfoolery.

According to Mr. Cortright, the study fails to take into account the distances people in different cities actually have to travel, and gets incorrect commute times.

For example, consider Nashville and Portland. According to the UMR, Portland has a worse traffic problem than Nashville, with a Travel Time Index of 1.23. and 36 hours of delay per year per traveler, compared to Nashville, which has a Travel Time Index of 1.15 and 35 hours of delay. But these data also mean that the average peak traveler in Nashville has to spend a total of 268 hours per year commuting compared to the commuter in Portland who travels only 193 hours per year. So the commuter in Portland travels 75 fewer hours annually because of shorter travel distance, due in large part to less sprawling development patterns

. . . . . So the commuter in Portland travels 75 fewer hours annually because of shorter travel distance, due in large part to less sprawling development patterns

Or we could even be better. If planning was really positive then we would create communities where a portion of the land accommodated some businesses at least, and then there would be even less travel.

High tech work and office space certainly does not have to be so far away from where people live and more and more people can work at least part of their jobs at home now with computer connections. If Metro was so great at planning, why all that housing in Happy Valley and all the jobs in Hillsboro? Why not a high tech complex in Happy Valley or a smaller community? Why not create new ways of building and living in a community?

clinamen: If Metro was so great at planning, why all that housing in Happy Valley and all the jobs in Hillsboro? Why not a high tech complex in Happy Valley or a smaller community? Why not create new ways of building and living in a community?
JK Better yet. Let people decide where they want to live and busineses decide where they want to locate. They can’t do worse than the central planners at Metro.

What I don’t understand is that after the total abject failure of central planning in Russia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Burma and all the other “worker’s paradises” why anyone still thinks central planning is a good idea.

I mean, come on, Metero even lists crackpot books like The Experience of Place, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Social Structure, Building a Sustainable Society., "What is Ecological Economics?", For the Common good : redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future, The Population Explosion, "Impact of Population Growth, Envisioning a Sustainable Society and, of course those ultimate crackpots, Schneider & Gore: Schneider’s Global Warming and Gore’s Earth in the Balance. ((see Metro’s Future Vision Report and Carrying Capacity and Its Application to the Portland Metropolitan Area)

Thanks
JK

JK,
When I stated why not create new ways of building and living in a community, I was not envisioning Metro or COP planners deciding for all of us. They apparently have been trained a certain way and I do not see their plans and agenda as beneficial to our quality of life.