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Tonight and Tomorrow: Columbia Crossing Open Houses
After all the discussion here about the Columbia River Crossing project, I hope everyone will take the time to come to one of the open houses coming up in April. I’ll probably be at the Thursday session. It’s important that all the comments get put on the record [we haven’t been able to convince them…
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Can Wal-Mart Pave its Way to Acceptance?
Friday’s Oregonian reports that Beaverton has outlined a list of road improvements Wal-Mart would need to fund to meet standards for its proposed Cedar Hills location. The list includes some 16 off-site improvements. Wal-Mart seems happy with the list even though no one has added up the price tag yet. Some of the items include:…
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What Should that Ticket Cost?
Friday’s Transportation Seminar at PSU will focus on “Optimal Mass Transit Subsidies.” (12-1:30pm, 4/14, 204 Urban Center) Here’s the abstract: This paper, co-authored with Ian W.H. Parry, derives formulas for the welfare effects of reforming subsidies for peak and off-peak urban rail and bus fares, and applies them to the metropolitan areas of Washington, D.C.,…
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Citizens, Pay Attention!
A few weeks ago I tried to answer the question of when was the decision to put Light Rail on the Transit Mall was really made. I opined that these were continuous processes rather than discrete events (the adoption of a Locally Preferred Alternative is the discrete decision, but the consensus building along the way…
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The Perils of Outsourcing
While serving on the PDOT budget advisory committee, I heard strong suggestions that PDOT could be more efficient by outsourcing some of its functions to the private sector. Well, ODOT went that way at the beginning of the decade, and Jim Mayer reports on an audit of the results in yesterday’s Oregonian. The conclusion: ODOT…