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Incremental Cost of Building Freeways and Exporting Portland’s Road Fees
I would like to explore to issues related to cost of building freeway lanes, the benefits to the transportation system, and who pays. 1) The incremental costs of building out of congestion is inefficient and serves only a small number of people, making the cost per user extremely high. 2) Personally, I rarely sit in…
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TriMet Grapples with Energy Costs
TriMet’s board has adopted a corrective action plan to deal with increased diesel fuel costs (about $5M over budget for the year). In addition to conservation measures, the plan includes a 15 cent fare increase… On a more hopeful note, in conjunction with the Bonneville Power Administration, TriMet has installed a fuel cell at its…
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Social Justice and Transportation
Last week I received an announcement for the Cascade Policy Institute’s Wheels to Wealth conference, subtitled “the role of auto ownership in reducing poverty”. My immediate reaction was that owning a car might be more of a financial burden than a benefit for a low income person, but I also thought about my own situation.…
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Population Growth and Regional Traffic
Yesterday’s Oregonian had a good front page story on traffic, capturing the essence of the issues facing this region and others: roads filling up as population and rates of car ownership increase along with the decline of major national investment in new transportation infrastructure. Whether you think these trends are “good” or “bad” the key…
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Do Trucks Pay Their Fair Share?
Editor’s note: The City of Portland has just released the discussion draft (PDF, 5.5MB) of their Freight Master Plan. Last month in a commentary titled “Road funding scheme ignores constitution, physics,” Orval Etter charged that the Oregon Department of Transportation hasn’t been charging trucks their fair share for the costs of roads. The Oregon Constitution…