This July, Cascade published a new report by adjunct scholar Randal O’Toole, “The Portland Transportation Disaster: The High Cost of Anti Auto Planning in Portland.” To accompany that report, Cascade is launching a month-long series about Portland’s 50-year “War on Cars,” culminating with a look at the 40th anniversary of MAX light rail and a personal reflection on the opening of the Gresham line by John Charles.
This series is rooted in a fight Portlanders have been waging for years—citizens and small business owners pushing back against the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) relentless campaign to prioritize bus and bike lanes while removing lanes for cars through road diets and BAT (Business Access Transit) lanes.
The 82nd Avenue project is just one example of PBOT’s overarching agenda, spelled out in the Portland 2035 “Transportation System Plan” (TSP) and illustrated in its 2-page directive to “prioritize walking, bicycling, transit,” and shift 70 percent of Portlanders into “shared vehicles.”
PBOT’s “strategy for people movement” simply does not include personal automobiles. Their own graphics illustrate the progression they want: 200 people in cars replaced by 200 people on a single light rail train.
In PBOT’s worldview, “transportation” means walking, bicycling, and transit—and every policy is designed to reduce vehicle miles traveled. Success is defined, not by improving mobility for people who travel, but by ensuring buses, bikes, and trains move freely while drivers sit in manufactured congestion created by lane reductions, road diets, BAT lanes and other similar schemes.
Portland’s transit planning has been guided by the same delusion for half a century: that the personal vehicle can be regulated, nudged, or inconvenienced out of existence. The result is an overbuilt, financially unsustainable transit system and a planning model that has failed by every measurable metric.
Buckle up! This series with Randal O’Toole and John Charles will take you through how Portland got here — and what it will take to restore mobility in a city that has spent decades trying to engineer it away.
Naomi Inman is external relations manager at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. As a staff journalist and writer, Naomi helps Cascade make the case for free-market policies through media affairs and publications.
