Courtesy of the excellent Streetfilms project, here’s a great video on the defeat of the Mt Hood Freeway in Portland, Oregon.
The Defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway (Portland, Oregon):
In Oregon, a battle raged for nearly twenty years over the construction of a highway project known as the Mt. Hood Freeway. If approved, the Freeway would have removed more than 1% of all housing stock in Portland. In the mid 1970s, after the proposal’s defeat, the city opted to build a mass transit infrastructure. The result is a more pedestrian-friendly and livable city.
TOPP videographer, Clarence Eckerson Jr., takes us to Portland to see the results and posits that his own neighborhood in Brooklyn might have benefited from similar forethought during the planning phase of the Robert Moses-designed Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
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Ah, so there we have it: Steven Joyce seeing himself as a tardy provincial imitator of Robert Moses, without realising it. It’s a pity that Joyce (obviously) hasn’t read Robert Caro’s The Power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974) because he then might see the error of his ways. Mind you, given his recent comments about the need for a robust business plan for the CBD tunnel it’s evident that he doesn’t read much. And it’s a pity too that we don’t have a sufficiently robust Environmental Protection Act that would ensure that schemes such as the SH20 extention (and all the other extentions it’s going to induce) are subject to rigorous environmental assessments. Interesting video although it’s a pity about the cheesy ‘children playing in parks’ and ‘hippies reading on park benches’ shots which tend to dilute its impact.
They have bits of motorway in Wellington where they were going to build another terrace tunnel like the ones shown in the video. I guess the pressure on that motorway to be stopped has been huge in achieving the levels of public transport in Wellington.
Its an awesome video on what happens when motorways are not build. Now Portland is held up as a best practice example. Why can’t decision makers follow that lead for Auckland transport!
Brent C: The levels of public transport in Wellington are completely unrelated to the non-completion of the Wellington Urban Motorway. The latter would not have facilitated people travelling to the downtown, but bypassing it. The urban motorway actually helped primarily because it eliminated Lambton Quay as a major through route, enabling it to be dominated by bus and delivery traffic. Indeed, had the Wellington Urban Motorway been completed as the cut and cover tunnel (with emissions filters) envisaged in the early 1990s, it would have helped the regeneration and enhancement of the whole of Te Aro, by removing the through traffic from the airport, eastern and southern suburbs heading for the Hutt and Porirua etc. Sadly, thanks in part to mindless lobbying by the anti-road transport evangelists (and in part due to starvation of road funding and a foolish rural based Minister of Transport) Wellington has NOT got a proper inner city bypass.
By contrast, Sydney, Melbourne, Oslo and many other cities do. Oslo being one of the best examples, combining good public transport, a huge urban underground highway scheme funded through tolls that effectively operate as a congestion charging scheme (which also contributed to some public transport improvements). It has transformed the downtown.
Portland as a case study polarises, and it would be good to sit back and weigh up all the evidence. For starters the connections between the Mayor of Portland in the 1970s and the beneficiaries from light rail construction and the related property developments are very dodgy, not as dodgy as revelations he had been having sex with an underage girl whilst being Mayor, but that’s a diversion.
This study http://www.upa.pdx.edu/CUS/publications/docs/DP97-7.pdf shows the mode share for transit in Portland dropped between 1980 and 1990, and at best was around static for one corridor along the light rail route. Light rail opened in 1986, but seemed to have done little. One conclusion was “This assessment of LRT impacts in Portland is both encouraging and sobering. It identifies
some emerging trends in residential location, but the overwhelming trend toward auto use and decentralization serves to caution against overly optimistic assessments of large impacts.”
Portland has a 90% car mode share for trips and 3% for public transport. (remainder walk and cycle). This is hardly a role model for Auckland, which achieves better today.
Randall O’Toole is well known as a debunker of rail based transit, but while you may not agree with some of what he says, his well cited history of Portland’s light rail programme contains some damning indictments and lessons that Auckland, hopefully, wont replicate.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-596.pdf
Similarly, I am not endorsing massive clearance of private property to push highways through areas. Trade offs have to be made between buying properties, tunnelling and determining whether new roads are worth building at all. Sadly, NZ has swung away from applying economic efficiency to transport projects in recent years, under this and the previous government.
Surely Joyce’s roads of National (big N) significance take this to a whole new level though? Wellington’s northern corridor has a BCR of 0.3-0.5 for the Transmission Gully option, yet it might well still be built. The Puhoi-Wellsford roads will probably have an even lower BCR.
Well, that is unless Joyce screws the numbers around to suit his purposes. There are some nasty rumours coming out of NZTA and the Ministry of Transport about how “hands-on” he’s getting with regards to matters like that.
Wow, you can really see the passion these people have against this freeway. If only the people of Waterview and Avondale watch this video, they can equip them selves against the fight for the waterview connection.
Hopefully it will make the rounds Marwan. I think the people of Avondale & Waterview are doing their best – it’s just difficult when their power is being stripped away through RMA amendments and the transport minister is effectively a mouthpiece for the roads lobby.
Joyce is getting an easy ride so far, wait till formal campaigns start to kill off the really dubious plans (particularly Puhoi), Waterview doesn’t fall into the really dubious category…
Liberty Scott: I understand what you are saying about Lambton Quay, but if more motorways were built, then there is more space for people to drive their cars on. If you don’t provide that road space, then there has to be another way of getting around. In Wellington that has been public transport, but in Auckland it has not been the same as more money went into building roads and not the public transport systems. Whatever transport system you invest in, it will be well used if invested in well.
Makes me wonder what would happen in Auckland is they ever tried to remove a motorway or main arterial.
Admin: I think spending $81m for the Auckland rail corridor then buying what is now Kiwirail at massive markup shows the last lot were great wealth destroyers as well. Tis the nature of governments spending other people’s money. Transmission Gully is not well favoured by anyone in central government including the Minister as far as I can gather. The case for it has never been good, but the expensive design work Labour paid for from general taxation is showing it to be far more expensive than the earlier Western Corridor study indicated.
Brent C: People don’t just drive because there is road space, bear in mind Wellington has severely constrained corridors to the north that limit this. People drive because they seek a destination, and the generalised costs of driving are the lowest way of getting there (time, fuel, parking, convenience, comfort). Public transport almost never rivals that, the times it does is when parking is expensive, hard to get, the destination can’t be changed and there is enough frequency and the travel time isn’t unacceptably longer. Wellington has frankly seen precious little spent on new public transport infrastructure for a very long time (1981 was electrification to Paraparaumu), it has a legacy rail system now being largely replaced (plus an extension to Waikanae). However, roads ARE needed, it is the only way to move almost all freight, buses obviously need it and non-CBD destination trips are virtually never worth doing by public transport if you have a car.
LibertyScott: I agree people don’t drive because of road space. But they are more likely to choose to drive (if they need to make a trip) if that space is made available. However in Wellington there simply isn’t that road space available and to widen the road will be just to expensive and controversial. If the motorways had been built in Wellington instead of rail, then I believe it would be a different city with far different land use patterns. But they left there run to late (money and protests) and the rail had already been built well established.
I agree also that public transport can simply not compete with the car in terms of time, but is cheaper and more efficient. Public transport in the suburbs also acts as a public service as parking is often free and people don’t even know how it works.
Roads are needed (eg/ 2nd Waikanae Bridge and Kopu Bridge), but not new state highways and urban motorways that divide communities and see people lose their homes.