Not to be outdone by the Trib’s article on commuting, Sunday’s O has a piece on marathon commutes.
My two cents is that if people want to do this, fine, but no rational social policy would focus on making it easy.
Not to be outdone by the Trib’s article on commuting, Sunday’s O has a piece on marathon commutes.
My two cents is that if people want to do this, fine, but no rational social policy would focus on making it easy.
14 responses to “Monster Commutes”
Chris,
totally agree with you. We have the privilege of living in a free country where we can make choices such as where we live. We just have to assume that when people choose to live so far from work that they have done so mindful of the implications of THEIR choice. There is no obligation, social nor moral, for the rest of us to pay for their decision.
Unfortunately, the reliance of transportation planning on performance measures such as Level of Service (LOS) results in putting scarce resources into widening roads at the edge of cities rather than maintaining existing facilities and providing travel options within cities. It creates a nasty positive feedback loop–more people choose to live outside the city and commute, locat transportation agency or, more likely, ODOT sees more traffic, ODOT widens road temporarily speeding traffic, more people make choice to live farther away, etc, etc,.
In this one area we have forgotten that freedom comes with responsibility.
My apologies to Rex. His comments along these lines ended up being cut from my story for space.
It is time that many of the employers like the BPA start moving there headquarters and opperations out of Portland to accommodate the Rex Burkholder and his fellow believers of the current transportation plans and priorities.
BPA has moved some of its people to Vancouver Washington and they should consider moving more of its people and maybe the whole headquarters out of Portland.
This type of activity would help reduce some of the congestion problems that we face. I am sure that many of the approximate 55,000 to 65,000 people who commute from Washington to job’s in Oregon agree.
Maybe these Washington residents should be going to their employers in Oregon and suggesting that business and employee friendly Washington is a much better place for their businesses and/or headquarters.
Rex and others have a plan to accept grid-lock and congestion and blame others. Its their choice.
It is time to solve the problem and that is to move any and every business out of the grid-locked area’s so that the problem will be solved.
Lets get the businesses, the employers closer to their employees.
That’s nothing – my father has done a 4 hour round trip commute in Oregon for about 10 years now. He puts around 30-40 thousand miles on his car per year. And he doesn’t drive on weekends or go on trips, either.
I call it complete and utter insanity, and is part of the reason I refuse to drive to commute.
Maybe these Washington residents should be going to their employers in Oregon and suggesting that business and employee friendly Washington is a much better place for their businesses and/or headquarters.
I believe that the folks in Vancouver and Clark County have been making this case, unsuccessfully, for a long time. But their population continues to grow faster than employment and that is projected to continue into the forseeable future.
Adding more freeway capacity across the Columbia makes the disparity even larger. I believe people, jobs and housing values all shift to Clark County’s advantage with new capacity over the river. But the number of jobs shifted doesn’t equal the housing shifted.
“We just have to assume that when people choose to live so far from work that they have done so mindful of the implications of THEIR choice.”
This is a very simplistic answer to a much more complex issue. There are a lot more considerations to choosing housing than just the proximity to where a person is employed. They include but are not limited to the following:
The costs of housing and living there. For example both the price of housing and the taxes are higher in Portland. This forces families out. Not all people want to pay for art, the theater and other services Portland demands taxpayers pay for.
The type of housing. Again Portland is attempting to force higher densities in neighborhoods. Much of the new housing construction in Portland can be described as high density people warehouses. Luxury or not, they are packing people in like sardines in a cans stacked on top of each other. I believe the majority of families want single family housing with attached yards and some privacy. A person only needs to look at the declining Portland School District enrollment and the mushrooming suburb school enrollment to prove this point.
For people with children, schools are yet another factor when choosing a place to live. Portland schools for example are administrative top heavy.
People no longer hold life long jobs. Just because a person changes employment, it should not mean they must also move. Furthermore, one person in a household may work close to home while another person may have along commute. People can not always choose where they work.
Quality of home life is another factor. Most people do not have control over their quality of their life on the job, but they can and do at home. The suburbs often offer more of this quality of life than does the overpriced, too congested and overly dense city.
Living closer to where a person works does however bring to mind two things that can take place. One is to decentralize jobs away from the central city and therefore closer to family choice housing. The second is to retain the bi-annual legislative sessions in Salem thereby not requiring legislators to make that long commute to Salem for the long sessions every year.
I believe the majority of families want single family housing with attached yards and some privacy.
And yet the suburban homes that provide that are cheaper than homes in the central city without them. So whatever you believe, it is not being reflected in the marketplace.
People can not always choose where they work.
As far as I know, slavery is dead in the United States. People do choose where they work. As you note, there are a lot of things that go into that choice. Proximity and length of commute is only one of them.
I don’t agree with Rex’s libertarian argument about who pays. I think we do have a social and moral responsibility to increase the options that all of us have as to where to live, shop, recreate and work. But we also have a responsibility to weigh the costs and benefits of providing those options.
I agree completely with Rex’s comments. We need more creative answers to congestions rather than just building more or increasing highway capacity.
Just as individuals evaluate a number of different factors when choosing a place to live, so do businesses when choosing a place to locate.
For me, proximity to my work was paramount and when the company that I worked for moved from Swan Island to Ridgefield and increased my commute from less than 5 minutes to 30, I took a pay cut, changed jobs and can now ride my bike the 2 miles to my workplace. I don’t believe we should build more freeways or widen others, it’s a losing proposition.
I don’t believe we should build more freeways or widen others, it’s a losing proposition.
I agree. Unfortunately the logic of the “libertarian” argument made by Rex is that you should build more freeways and widen others as long as the people using them pay for them. This is why the region is now considering a variety of toll roads. That logic also argues “we have no obligation, social or moral” to provide transit alternatives for people who choose to live in communities without them. Or sidewalks and bike facilities if people choose to live in communities without them.
Transportation choices are public, collective, decisions. Not private individual ones. So long as you define the decision around “who pays” and not “what is best considering everyone’s interests”, you will end up with poor transportation decisions. They will only benefit people who can pay at the expense of everyone else.
The problem of freeways is not that they are congested for the users, but that they transform the communities they are attached to in ways that make them less atrractive for the people who live there. It doesn’t matter whether their users pay for them or not. Bike lanes and sidewalks create better communities to live in, whether the users pay for them or not. These are public decisions.
You have a choice: 1) live in the city if you
don’t drive and want to own a house (like me);
2) live in the suburbs if you have a car and
like living in a house. Pure and simple.
“I don’t believe we should build more freeways or widen others, it’s a losing proposition.”
And spending millions of taxpayer dollars on transit and then subsidizing the operation for the small percentage who use it to the tune of 80% is even a bigger looser. Also, don’t forget bicycle infrastructure that is 100% subsidized by taxpayers for even a smaller percentage of usage than transit. Freeways are paid for by motor vehicle users.
“I believe the majority of families want single family housing with attached yards and some privacy.”
What you believe is actually irrelevant, as market forces, backed by federal government housing & mortgage policies & the banks, is what actually determines what kind of housing people can buy. Then there is the rental market, which is largely supply & demand – not enough housing, prices go up. See San Fran for details.
Most people seem pretty ecstatic these days if they can find a place under $300,000 – and would likely move into just about anything for that cheap of a price, as long as it is semi-decent. Consider that, too, less than 1/3 of all households in Oregon & the US actually have kids in them. Single households outnumber families in the US, yet we get very limited options for housing.
Since most of all housing in the US right now already IS single-family, we could likely never build another house, only apartments, and have that demand quite sated due to demographics. I blame Fannie Mae and friends for limiting mortgages to single family houses for what? 60+ years?
Terry says: “The costs of housing and living there. For example both the price of housing and the taxes are higher in Portland. This forces families out. Not all people want to pay for art, the theater and other services Portland demands taxpayers pay for.
The type of housing. Again Portland is attempting to force higher densities in neighborhoods. Much of the new housing construction in Portland can be described as high density people warehouses. Luxury or not, they are packing people in like sardines in a cans stacked on top of each other. I believe the majority of families want single family housing with attached yards and some privacy. A person only needs to look at the declining Portland School District enrollment and the mushrooming suburb school enrollment to prove this point.”
These two points cancel out each other. First, you say that people cannot afford to live in Portland because the housing costs (and therefore property taxes) are high. That is a result of supply and demand. People WANT to live in Portland because of what it has to offer – walkable neighborhoods, easy access to goods and services and yes, arts and culture – and are willing to pay for those things. Those that cannot pay or don’t place a high value on city living move to the suburbs. Portland is loaded with single family dwellings with yards and privacy, just like the suburbs, but in a setting that, as market forces seem to dictate, is much more appealing to buyers. People are moving to the ‘burbs because they are more affordable, not because they’re more desirable. If this were not the case, you’d see suburban home values higher than inner city home values and that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
If people didn’t want higher density housing, they wouldn’t buy it, would they?
Ross posted the following tidbit under the Attitude in Washington County (Survey): “Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) respondents say they own their own home and just 20% rent. While this is higher than the 2000 U.S. Census estimate of a 61% homeownership rate in Washington County, this is consistent with other research we have done in the County.”
Along with declining Portland School District enrollment, again this posting from Ross supports my statements that families are choosing to leave and live outside the City of Portland. Furthermore, the last figure I heard was there were only 23 children of school age that live in the Pearl District. The conclusion can be drawn that even with the overly generous tax abatement policies the Portland City Council gives away like candy to high density developers, this new housing is only attracting yuppies, singles, childless couples and people who’s children have left the nest, NOT families.