Cascade Policy Institute
Policy Perspective No. 1022
April 2002

Defining the options

Metro intends to study only three options for the South Corridor: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), light rail, and a busway.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is an improved bus system where buses operate primarily on existing roads and highways but use signal technology and bypass lanes to help them operate more effectively. BRT generally implies express service, which allows commuters to get to their final destination with relatively few stops. Depending on how it is defined, BRT can be a very low-cost, easy-to-implement system that offers vastly improved transit service.

The Federal Transit Administration has recently begun advocating BRT has a viable alternative to fixed rail. Last September, the General Accounting Office released a report showing that BRT had considerable cost advantages to light rail. According to the GAO report, BRT has average capital costs of around $200,000 per mile for an arterial street-based system, compared with light rail costs that range from $12 million to $119 million per mile.

Light Rail Transit (LRT) is a fixed-route train that generally travels on both city streets and train-only corridors. Many people confuse LRT with other types of rail transit, such as subways, commuter rail, or heavy rail. Compared with those other options, LRT has many limitations. Other rail systems can achieve high speeds because they have exclusive rights-of-way and few stops, while LRT has to travel on crowded city streets and has many stops. Also, the short length of Portland city blocks limits LRT to two cars per train, while other train system can generally carry five to ten cars. For that reason, LRT is a relatively low-capacity system. It is also a relatively low-speed system, averaging about 15 MPH and only about 5 MPH in downtown Portland.

Busway transit utilizes an exclusive right-of-way and limited stops to achieve both high-speed and high-capacity service. Because busways are frequently constructed to relieve peak-period traffic, they are sometimes built as reversible lanes, which means that only one lane is built, serving in-bound traffic in the morning peak, and then reversed to serve out-bound traffic in the afternoon peak. Busways are generally restricted to use by transit vehicles, such as buses, airport shuttles, commuter vans, and possibly taxis.

Because busways only need to be one lane, and because buses can follow one another at very tight spacing, busways can be built more quickly, at lower cost, and achieve higher passenger throughput than light rail.

For example, the reversible express busway running through the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey to New York City regularly carries more than 25,000 passengers per hour at the peak period. By comparison, Portland's light rail system averages about 1,500 one-way passengers per peak hour (the number is slightly higher on the eastside line due to the extra four cars per hour that run between downtown and the airport). Moreover, the Portland MAX system has very little potential for improvement because trains cannot run more frequently than every two minutes, whereas a busway could easily carry over 60,000 passengers per hour if demand for such service existed.

Another advantage of a busway is that excess road capacity can be used by private auto users, either through a tolling arrangement or for free (possibly limited to high-occupancy vehicles). Any excess capacity on a train system is wasted because only trains can use it.

Water transit: Worth another look?

One of the options Metro allegedly studied in the South Corridor analysis was water transit. However, according to one local advocate who is actually in the boating business, Metro never took it very seriously.

Dan Yates is co-owner of the Portland Spirit, a cruise line that serves downtown Portland and hosts over 100,000 customers a year on more than 1,200 dinner cruises. Dan, who has a keen eye for market opportunities, recalls, "I was first approached by Vic Rhodes, head of PDOT, in about 1996 to look into creating a water taxi system for the central city area. I started to attend conferences on ferry systems and collect information.

"I looked at a study conducted by Tri-Met in the early 1990's where they listed the reasons a ferry/taxi service will not work and should not be funded. It was obvious that Tri-Met viewed ferries and water taxi as competition for riders and subsidy dollars as they completely trashed ferries and taxies as being impractical for several reasons. The standard mantra from them is that wake from the vessels will do environmental damage, infrastructure costs are high, and they have high operating expenses.

"I have learned after several years of research several things. One, water taxis are really called waterbuses. Taxi implies service on demand, while bus means it is on a set schedule. Two, waterbuses are to ferries as buses are to light rail. Waterbuses are used as feeders to fast ferries in an integrated system. Three, waterborne technology has been making rapid advances in the last 10 years and with those advances the number of water transit systems have nearly doubled to over 400 in the United States.

"I have developed a concept of moving up to 5,000 people north from the Lake Oswego area to downtown and a similar number of passengers south from Vancouver at the same time. This will involve a series of fast ferry stops and a collection of waterbus landings in the inner city. A direct fast ferry from Lake Oswego will take 20 minutes, while the same commute during peak travel time is nearing 40 minutes by car. The run to Vancouver is less than 25 minutes.

"New technology has created vessels that can travel over 60 knots, carry over 150 people and have nearly no wake. As long as the fast ferry is traveling in 15 feet of water the energy being transferred from the vessel is safely transferred into the river and not along the sides of the vessel.

"I was asked to participate in a discussion with the South Corridor Transportation Study team about a year ago on the viability of ferries running from Oregon City, Lake Oswego and Milwaukie to downtown Portland. I was given a one-day notice. I developed a series of spreadsheets showing the costs of operating a fast ferry system on that route. I showed that with a public/private partnership a ferry passenger could be moved for less than a light rail passenger.

"The other great thing about the system is that it can start small (just a couple of boats) and as demand rises add more boats. The initial outlay is much smaller. There are no right-of-way issues as the river is already there.

"I explained all the benefits of the fast ferry/waterbus system and passed out spread sheets. The committee was very polite, surprised by my level of knowledge and the detail of my plan. I was told they would get back to me. Needless to say they did not. They used that meeting to say they had fully explored ferries as an option and decided it was not practical. The meeting was check-box…they check off the box that they had explored ferries."

When asked for his assessment of why Metro planners behaved this way, Yates shrugs and says, "They are slavishly attached to light rail."

Railroaded: Light rail gravy train rolls toward Clackamas

In 1996 Oregon voters were asked to provide $475 million in financing for what was then known as the South/North Light Rail project, running from Clackamas Town Center to Vancouver, Washington. They rejected that request.

In 1998 a similar proposal was put before the voters again, but this time only in the Portland tri-county region. Again, they voted it down.

In 1999 the regional government, Metro, initiated the South Corridor Study to look at transportation options in the Portland-Milwaukie-Oregon City-Clackamas region. The study looked at high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, bus rapid transit, busways, commuter rail, and river transit. Light rail transit (LRT) was specifically excluded, because of the two previous elections. It seemed like Clackamas County light rail was finally dead.

Yet by early 2001 a Milwaukie-to-Portland light rail proposal had been added back into the mix, and later that year Metro began studying a light rail proposal that would run alongside I-205 from Clackamas Town Center to Gateway in Northeast Portland, and then to downtown Portland. By 2002, river transit, HOV lanes, and HOT lanes had been deleted from further study, while light rail was one of three options deemed worthy of analysis in the upcoming Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS).

How is it that light rail could have been defeated by the voters twice, taken off the planning agenda, and then wound up as one of the preferred options only three years later? This is the story of a light rail project that refuses to die.

JPACT in Denial

JPACT has been supporting the South/North light rail transit (LRT) line since the mid-1980s, and losing the 1998 election was a crushing disappointment. It was especially bitter to officials from Clackamas County, who had supported funding for light rail lines to Gresham and Hillsboro, and now felt it was "their turn" to feed at the public trough.

After the election JPACT called a special meeting to analyze the election results, which was held on November 12. The discussion at that meeting made it clear that many JPACT members felt that voters really did not understand the issues, and that regional officials should continue to find a way to build more light rail.

Patricia McCaig, the political consultant who had been retained to run the Yes on Measure 26-74 campaign, set the tone with her assertion that "low voter turnout killed us." In addition, she complained that there were too many funding measures on the ballot, leading many voters to simply vote no on all of them.

She gave no credit to the opposition campaign, dismissing the critics in scathing terms by saying they were only "marginally effective." Moreover, she told JPACT, "We should not devote much time to dealing with them."

Perhaps no one was more embarrassed than Ed Lindquist, who was then in his final term as a Clackamas County commissioner, after having served for over a decade in various elected offices in the county. Commissioner Lindquist admitted to being "deeply hurt" by the defeat. Said Lindquist, "Portland is the model for the nation, and we have this grand experiment that we need to continue."

Another Clackamas County politician, state representative Kurt Schrader, was even more critical of the electorate. He said, "The voters do not see the coming problem [of traffic congestion] as clearly as we do…."

It was obvious from this meeting that the pro-rail forces were enraged by the defeat and would continue to seek ways of building additional rail lines, regardless of voter intent. This was quickly borne out when only three months later, a group of rail boosters suggested that a northern-only portion of the project be built up Interstate Avenue, terminating at the Multnomah County Expo Center. Metro and Tri-Met quickly jumped on board and cranked out an SDEIS one month later in April 1999, possibly a world record for the production of a complex planning document. Not surprisingly, the SDEIS concluded that LRT was the preferred mode of travel and a North Interstate route the preferred alignment.

The advantage of this proposal, from the perspective of rail boosters, was not related to how many transit riders it could serve at a given cost; the real beauty was that it did not need a public vote. It could be financed primarily by Congressional grants, low-cost right-of-way (subsidized illegally with gas tax dollars), and by designating the Interstate corridor an Urban Renewal District, which would allow a portion of local property taxes to be used.

Local opponents had numerous arguments against the project: it would increase traffic congestion by destroying two of the four roadway lanes on North Interstate Avenue; it would require nearby neighborhoods to be re-zoned for high-density development, which would make them more crowded; and it would cost more than $31 for every new transit trip.

But lacking the funds and the socioeconomic status to stand up to Tri-Met, the opponents were quickly steam-rolled. Oregon's congressional delegation brought home the bacon in federal transit grants of $257.5 million, and construction was begun. The line is expected to open in September of 2004.

Not content to move on just one front, rail supporters scored a coup when they put together a package of financing to build another light rail line, running from Gateway Transit Center in NE Portland to the Portland Airport. Once again, the most prominent feature of the $183 million proposal was that it did not require a vote of the people, because no general obligation bonds were to be sold. Instead, it relied on funds from Tri-Met, the City of Portland, Metro, the Port of Portland, and the consortium of Bechtel/Trammell Crow, which paid $41 million for an 85-year lease on 120 acres of commercial property next to the airport.

Again, a perfunctory "public involvement" process was held, criticisms brushed aside, and the 5.5-mile line quickly built, opening in early September 2001.

As these projects were moving forward, rail boosters continued to search for ways to get the South Corridor project back on track. However, Clackamas County had voted solidly against light rail in 1998, so lip service needed to be paid to non-rail alternatives, at least until public concern died down. Oregon City Mayor John Williams, who is a member of the South Corridor Policy Committee, explained, "We all agreed that LRT in Clackamas County was a loser and that people would misinterpret our behavior as 'railroading' them (pardon the pun) if we continued studying LRT after the vote in 1998."

However, Multnomah County was a pro-rail county in the election, so it did not take long for a rail group to emerge in the Sellwood Neighborhood of SE Portland. That group asked the project management team to add a Portland-Milwaukie LRT line as an option, which it did in December 2000.

This was not good news in some parts of Milwaukie, where a mayor and two city councilors had been recalled several years earlier for their pro-rail positions. According to Michelle Gregory, Neighborhood Services Manager for the city, "This created quite a stir. Although the community is divided on the issue, some people perceived it as 'same old, same old. This is obviously a Portland agenda and is going to happen whether we like it or not.'"

However, Milwaukie critics of LRT were caught in a bind, because one of the prime alternatives to LRT-a busway-had its own drawbacks. A busway means lots of buses, which are noisy. The right-of-way necessary for the facility would also add another travel barrier in an area already divided by Hwy. 224. And designating the Milwaukie-Portland corridor as a high-speed bus corridor would likely have the effect of attracting a large portion of the anticipated commuter traffic from future urban growth boundary expansions in the Damascus region, especially if the busway were built with free park-n-rides to lure commuters.

For these and probably other reasons, many Milwaukie residents opposed the busway concept. As Bill Kennemer, a Clackamas County Commissioner and a member of the South Corridor Policy Committee, noted, "Milwaukie residents just absolutely rebelled at the idea of bus transit in their area."

Reviving rail in the I-205 corridor

Instead, rail supporters have pushed the concept of running an LRT line up I-205 from Town Center to Gateway, where it could use the existing east-side LRT track and continue on to downtown Portland without passengers having to transfer at Gateway. This alignment was not new. Many planners have long envisioned LRT running up the entire length of I-205 and over the Glenn Jackson Bridge into Washington, and right-of-way for such a facility was purchased when I-205 was originally built. In fact, the easy availability of that right-of-way was the reason the Airport LRT line was built; running it down to Clackamas Town Center would simply be the next logical step in the minds of transit planners.

This proposal was added to the South Corridor study in mid-year of 2001, at the request of the Clackamas County board of commissioners.

Clackamas County: Auto-oriented and proud of it

For one thing, the county's 342,861 residents are spread out over a large geographic area at low densities. Most communities are not even incorporated. Since rail lines need very high densities to attract ridership, this is an obvious problem.

Another problem is that the automobile is the preferred method of travel for Clackamas County residents. On a typical day 78.6 percent of commuters drive alone to work, while another 11.6 percent drive in a car pool. Only 2.2 percent use any form of public transit.

More than 95 percent of households own a motor vehicle, and 69 percent own 2 or more vehicles. There are only 103,530 households but 208,738 registered vehicles in the county.

The strong preference for automobile use is not surprising because Clackamas County residents have relatively high incomes. The estimated average household income in 2001 was $74,748. Survey data from both Oregon and around the country show a strong correlation between income and driving; the higher the income, the more people tend to drive.

Although many rail proponents assert that sprawling development patterns lead to longer commutes-and that LRT can shorten those trips-the average daily commute for residents in Clackamas County is only 22.4 minutes. This is the same as the national average, which has hovered around 22 minutes for over three decades. It's difficult to see how a light rail line would decrease that by any measurable amount for most workers.

Approximately 52 percent of county residents commute to jobs outside the county. This reflects a conscious choice by many to enjoy a rural or semi-rural lifestyle close to the recreational amenities of the Mount Hood National Forest, while driving to work locations that are in the more urbanized portions of the metro region. Public transit is simply not relevant to this demographic group, especially a light rail system that travels to a limited number of locations at 15 MPH.

It seems odd, then, that local transit officials have been trying to build a light rail line to Clackamas County for decades. Unless light rail is not really about transit.

The Clackamas Town Center "makeover"

In the mid-1990s, light rail proponents envisioned the South Corridor LRT being the catalyst for a complete makeover of the shopping mall, with high-density housing, office and retail structures replacing most of the parking lots, along with pedestrian walkways and bike paths. The planning documents of that era, filled with glossy architectural drawings, project a utopian vision where the mall would be supported by thousands of new residents living, working and shopping all within the Center. Light rail would also deliver a new breed of suburban shopper, content to bring armloads of consumer goods onto the train, and presumably walking to their home after deboarding elsewhere.

The planners were so sure of this future that they grandiosely renamed the area the "Clackamas Regional Center" as part of Metro's Region 2040 land-use plan in 1995.

Driving around the mall today, there is no sign of an imminent urban village. Although the county adopted zoning codes to allow it, there is little market demand for high-density development in a region already built at suburban scale.

Even if the I-205 LRT line gets built, it is unlikely to spur mixed-use redevelopment at the mall. According to one official in the mall management industry, the I-205 LRT proposal "has commuter parking written all over it." The rail line would end just north of the mall, and rely on park-and-ride facilities both at the mall and at most stops elsewhere, servicing commuters, not shoppers.

In the event that commuters actually rode the train, it would not reduce vehicle travel as much as it would re-route it. Lured by the bait of free parking, commuters would simply shift their travel patterns by driving to the parking lots, getting about $5 a day in free parking in exchange for a slow rail commute to downtown Portland.

An I-205 line would also cannibalize service on the Airport MAX line that just opened up last year. Most people don't realize that the Steel Bridge is a bottleneck for trains crossing the Willamette River from the Eastside. Once the Interstate MAX line opens in September, 2004, Tri-Met will need to run trains across that bridge at the rate of one every two minutes in order to satisfy the scheduling demands of the Gresham LRT line, the I-MAX line, and the Airport MAX. That by itself will be a challenge, because Tri-Met has never successfully run more than 14 trains per hour over that bridge, or one every 4.28 minutes.

Adding in another 6-10 trains per hour from Clackamas Town Center would put the system over the edge. Metro officials say that if the Clackamas line is built, the Steel Bridge problem will be resolved by discontinuing airport service from downtown, and running the airport MAX as simply a shuttle from PDX to Gateway. This would force airport users boarding downtown to transfer at Gateway, a major disincentive to using the system.

Why not bus?

At a Metro hearing in February, when a woman from the audience asked why express buses couldn't run up I-205 from the Town Center, the Metro representative said that the buses would have to terminate at Gateway, requiring people to transfer to Eastside LRT, which would be impractical.

What he didn't explain is why Metro thinks such a transfer at Gateway would be necessary. The reason is that Tri-Met has refused to run buses of any type down I-84 since the day eastside MAX opened 16 years ago, because doing so would reveal how slow and inefficient light rail is in comparison.

That comparison was made for many years by C-TRAN of Vancouver when they ran buses over the Glenn Jackson Bridge to Gateway Transit Center, then nonstop to downtown Portland via I-84. The running time was 15 minutes from Gateway to city center during the peak, and about 10 minutes when traffic was thin. The same time on MAX is at least 22 minutes, regardless of the time of day.

But C-TRAN cancelled that service in 1998, leaving transit commuters in the Gateway neighborhood with no Express alternative to the local MAX train.

Because Tri-Met is determined to maintain LRT ridership by shielding the trains from bus competition, the only transit option being considered in the I-205 corridor is more light rail.

A twenty-first century approach

But urban economists are nearly unanimous in concluding that light rail cannot reduce traffic congestion, because lack of transit is not even a primary cause of congestion. The underlying problem is improper road pricing, coupled with the failure of Portland to build adequate road capacity.

Commuters are drawn to highways and arterials because they perceive the cost to be "free." Of course, no roads are truly free; the maintenance is paid for primarily through a gas tax. But since the average motorist has no idea that the tax in Oregon is 18.4 cents per gallon of federal tax plus 24 cents at the state level, they don't think of travel costs in terms of per-trip costs, if they even think about it at all.

The perception of free roads results in vast overuse at certain peak times, which creates congestion. The modern solution to this problem is peak-hour road pricing, which is analogous to long-distance telephone charges or matinee movie pricing. People respond to price signals by changing behavior. When drivers perceive that the price of road use is more expensive at certain times of the day, some of them will change the times they travel, switch to transit, form a car pool to split the tolls, or cancel the trip. This will improve traffic speeds for everyone else.

It is not necessary for all drivers to make changes in their behavior. Under heavily congested conditions, it only takes a small reduction in traffic to increase speeds dramatically.

Road user charges, collected electronically through automatic vehicle identification (AVI) systems, allow road managers to set the access price at whatever level the market will bear in order to maintain free-flowing conditions. The revenue collected is then used to maintain the roads, and to pay for expansions when necessary. Motorists maintain private accounts and pay them monthly, much as they do with other utility bills. This concept has been successfully implemented in many locations outside of Oregon, including California, Texas and New York.

Metro actually studied road pricing in a three-year analysis known as the Traffic Relief Options Study. The study, published two years ago, found that peak-period tolls on the region's major highways would lead to a 54 percent increase in traffic speeds without the need for any new highway construction. Moreover, because of the estimated savings in travel time, fuel, auto maintenance, and reduced pollution, the net social benefits would be in excess of $120 million annually for the region.

Perhaps because peak-hour pricing would actually solve the traffic problem, neither Metro nor Tri-Met has sought to implement such a strategy. It has never been seriously considered as part of the South Corridor study process. Agency managers seem determined to increase congestion in Portland as a means of making transit look better in comparison.

What price light rail?

Twice the voters have killed light rail, yet Metro officials continue to study it. In Portland, the obsession is so high that city officials continue to ban any parking facilities within 100 feet of a proposed light rail station-a policy that squelched a plan for Columbia Sportswear to re-locate its corporate headquarters from North Portland to the central eastside. As a result, Columbia built a new facility in Washington County.

If rail boosters are willing to hold private property hostage to a dream of more light rail, even at the expense of losing a flagship Portland company with more than 400 jobs, one has to wonder where it will all end.

Ultimately people cannot be forced to ride light rail, or work near it. If pressed hard enough, they will simply vote with their car tires to move out of Portland.

That's an election result that Metro won't be able to overturn.

813 S.W. Alder Street
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Portland, OR 97205

(503) 242-0900
fax (503) 242-3822

John A. Charles is environmental policy director at Cascade Policy Institute, a Portland, Oregon think tank. A version of this Policy Perspective appeared in the April 2002 issue of BrainstormNW magazine.

Founded in 1991, Cascade Policy Institute is Oregon's premier policy research center. Cascade's mission is to explore and promote public policy alternatives that foster individual liberty, personal responsibility and economic opportunity. To that end the Institute publishes policy studies, provides public speakers, organizes community forums and sponsors educational programs. Focusing on state and local issues, Cascade offers practical, innovative solutions for policy makers, the media and concerned citizens.

Cascade Policy Institute is a tax-exempt educational organization as defined under IRS code 501(c)(3). Cascade neither solicits nor accepts government funding, and is supported by individual, foundation, and corporate contributions. Nothing appearing in this document is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of Cascade, or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before any legislative body.

Copyright 2002, Cascade Policy Institute