Look closer; Portland no utopia

Published on: 06/07/05
Metro Atlanta's fascination with Portland, Ore., remains a great mystery.

Traffic congestion's worse. Between 1986 and 2001, rush-hour traffic in Portland increased 33.3 percent, tops among the nation's 75 largest urban areas, according to independent transportation consultant Wendell Cox.

Housing is far less affordable. The average cost of a house in metro Atlanta is $135,300; in Portland, it's $165,400. And transit use in the decade ending in 2001 was flat, despite heavy spending. Actual train ridership may or may not be climbing on a percentage basis, but its market share is minuscule.

Portland has become the national magnet for urban planners and for delegations like Atlanta's, drawn in periodic pilgrimages to the West to find solutions to managing growth. "Portland validates, theoretically, but not in practice all the strongly held biases of the urban planning community," says Cox, who also serves as a visiting professor of transport and demographics at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Meitiers, a national university in Paris.

John Charles, president of Portland's Cascade Policy Institute, a free-market think tank, was among those who spoke to the Atlanta delegation. "What's going on in Portland is a Potemkin village where they put up these false fronts," he said Monday. "You create a false image, and this week people from Atlanta come in, and next week it's a delegation from somewhere else . . . Intellectually, there's no there there. There is no rationale for what we're doing."

Charles says Portland attempts to drive high-density development to rail lines with heavy subsidies, such as 10-year property tax abatements. But, he says, "it creates this Hollywood movie set so out-of-towners come out to see, which is nice, if you don't ask how much money was spent to put these people there."

Charles and a group of volunteers have a project around train stations. "I've spent countless mornings between 6 and 9 a.m., sitting outside five-story apartment complexes and all I do is watch. With other volunteers, we count how many people are leaving by foot, by bike, or by car. You know what? Very few are using the train."

Density and rail don't cause people to abandon their cars. Instead, he says, they park in surrounding neighborhoods. "I'm not against high density, and I don't care how people get around," Charles says, but Portland's approach, with streetcars and slow trains, is "low-capacity, high-cost transit."

Portland was a planner's dream for years, too, because of an urban growth boundary, an arbitrary line that allowed property owners on the inside to develop while those on the outside were told to provide the scenery, thus driving up housing costs. Last year, however, fair-minded voters overwhelmingly approved a measure requiring compensation when one guy's property is taken for another guy's view, as the urban growth boundary does.

Portland's approach has been to avoid adding road capacity, thereby making traffic worse while using all authority of government to favor high density. That is not a model for metro Atlanta.

Government's aim, always, should be to determine how citizens wish to live — and facilitate it, regardless of whether that results in "sprawl." Says Cox: "Atlanta is the fastest-growing high-income urban area in the world. Yet no place sprawls more than Atlanta. One could very well make a strong case that sprawl and auto ownership are strongly associated with economic growth — it would be almost impossible to refute that."

Charles' solution is to start getting rid of the gas tax, while adding new road capacity in the public and private sector and converting highways to toll roads with time-of-day pricing.

The first step, though, is to measure traffic congestion, set goals for relief and apply cost-benefit analysis to every project proposed — with each competing against all proposed solutions.

Let people live where and how they choose. Government's job is to act on those choices and eliminate obstacles that diminish the quality of our lives. Traffic congestion heads the list.