The following column appeared in The Oregonian newspaper on November 12, 1998.

November 12, 1998

Light-rail never was the right answer

Pricing, car pooling, and better bus net would improve traffic, air quality

By Gerard C.S. Mildner

Last week, the south-north light-rail project suffered a dramatic election defeat. Voters realized that light rail's claimed benefits of traffic relief, pollution reduction and time savings do not exist. And because express bus routes would be canceled, as Washington County experienced with westside MAX in September, light rail reduces commuter choice.

The Portland metropolitan area needs a very different strategy for the public to receive the benefits it wants.

This alternative should involve six elements: better bus service, high-occupancy vehicle lanes, congestion pricing, removal of bottlenecks, more competition in transit and better enforcement of pollution standards. This strategy will build upon existing strengths and current initiatives, including Tri-Met's efficient inner-city bus operations, the Oregon Department of Transportation's new HOV lane on Interstate 5 north, Metro's congestion pricing task force and the city of Portland's recent opening of the taxicab markets.

First, Tri-Met must keep its focus on developing a good bus system. The key to customer satisfaction is offering 5- to 10-minute frequency, on-time performance and no-transfer, direct service. On too many routes, such as 14-Hawthorne and 9-Powell, passengers west of 20th Avenue get passed up in the morning because the bus is already full. Eighty-five percent of Tri-Met's riders are bus riders, and meeting their needs should be Tri-Met's priority.

Tri-Met is doing some good things. For example, the agency pioneered using automatic passenger counters to learn precisely where riders board and where to redesign routes, and it is beginning to use global positioning equipment to allow dispatchers to spot and respond to schedule delays.

The bus operations' success could be greatly assisted if the Tri-Met board would rescind its unwise airport MAX vote and used the $47 million to purchase buses (which would be routinely matched by the federal government). For example, $47 million is enough money to increase the fleet by 25 percent. Money set aside to operate south-north could be used to operate these buses. By comparison, the airport MAX project would receive no federal match, cost $182 million in local tax dollars, and at most, boost system ridership by 1.8 percent.

The second dramatic opportunity to provide congestion relief will come in March when Multnomah County reopens the Hawthorne Bridge. Heavily used by Tri-Met buses and carpools, the bridge could be converted to a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) bridge during morning and evening rush hours and connected to HOV lanes on Oregon 99W. The carpool emphasis is critical, since more than twice as many Portland residents get to work by carpool than transit.

HOV lanes provide incentives to use carpools and transit, prevent buses from getting bogged down in traffic, and increase the effective capacity of our road system. Seattle has used buses on its HOV lanes for years and has no light rail, yet has a greater percentage of transit users than the Portland area. In Los Angeles, the El Monte HOV-busway handles more than five times the passengers and at faster speeds than an equivalent freeway.

A third opportunity for congestion relief will come next year when the Metro/ODOT Traffic Relief Options Task Force completes its study and makes a recommendation regarding congestion pricing. Congestion pricing (or value pricing) is the concept of replacing gasoline taxes with highway tolls that vary over the time of day, and has been used in places as diverse as California, France and Norway.

Congestion pricing can be used to finance new bridges and new lanes, or used to reduce traffic on existing highway lanes. Because congestion is primarily a problem during a few weekday hours, congestion pricing creates strong, lasting incentives for drivers and employers to choose alternative transportation modes and flexible working schedules, and can save us from costly highway expansions.

A fourth area for congestion relief is removing bottlenecks. For example, for a fraction of the cost of building a light-rail line to Clackamas Town Center, ODOT could build an HOV-busway facility to Milwaukie that would allow vehicles to bypass congestion on McLoughlin Boulevard. Another way to reduce bottlenecks is more widespread use of signal pre-emption equipment that the city of Portland has already purchased for buses and emergency vehicles.

More extensive construction projects such as the proposed new bridge on the Willamette River, a high bridge for I-5 to cross the Columbia River, a third lane for I-5 south in North Portland and an express lane to the airport may need to be financed by congestion pricing to reduce demand at rush hour, prevent new traffic jams and reduce the impact on neighborhoods. Reliance upon gasoline tax revenues for these projects only takes money away from road maintenance and makes all drivers pay for the costs of rush-hour travelers.

A fifth area for transportation reform is to increase competition within the transit industry. The city could put out a request for proposals on shared-ride jitney routes and jitney cab stands. The Port of Portland could replace its taxi-cab cartel system with a competitive system that would force airport cab rates down. The state Legislature could require Tri-Met to contract out bus routes to lower-cost private transit providers.

Finally, we need additional effort to reduce the impact of high-polluting automobiles on our roads. Despite the small air pollution benefits of light rail, many supporters were motivated by this legitimate environmental concern.

Most of our air pollution gains over the last 30 years have come through reducing automobile exhaust and the replacement of older cars. Yet data from national studies indicate that 90 percent of the regional air pollution is caused by 10 percent to 20 percent of the vehicle fleet, largely because of evasion of the law, old vehicle age or poor maintenance. Other elements in the strategy also will reduce air pollution.

These examples provide a variety of strategies to solve our congestion and auto pollution problems that is much more comprehensive than south-north. They will create incentives for transit use, carpooling, telecommuting and flexible work hours, without specifying an answer for each citizen or each firm or spending all our transportation dollars on a single corridor. And unlike the south-north proposal, which would have taken five years to complete, most of these strategies could be implemented in a matter of months.