Where is the bad traffic? (Portland, Beaverton: home, construction, school)

[karlsch]

Originally Posted by Nell Plotts

It may be that the fracture of the Cascadia fault will take care of the I-5 bridge reconstruction issue. I doubt that the existing bridge(s) can safely survive that earthquake. The earlier bridge design wasn't high enough to pass muster with the Coast Guard. What on earth were they thinking?

That's what I always wondered. To me it was mind-boggling. They spent huge amounts of money, millions and millions, on planning and research and missed one of the most basic things. Making sure it was high enough should have been at the top of their list of things to check.

[Mossa]

Yes, texasdiver, I’ve seen what you are describing. Farm fields bought out individually, built out and walled off. No small accessible neighborhood parks, good playgrounds, tennis, volleyball courts, clubhouses, walking and biking trails, public bathrooms for the community. Yes, that’s definitely a disadvantage. Where I live, we have all that. Every household in town pays about 200 per month for the maintenance and we do pay special assessments in property taxes, which effectively double those taxes, but I think it is well worth it, and it’s better to have it than not, quality of life is higher, property values are higher, and generally people end up liking their community more. Lots of cul-de-sac streets though, and they are just fine. People don’t mind them at all. But our entire county is sort of one big somewhat urban but mostly suburban area. You can call it a sprawl, but it is a very comfortable sprawl that slowly urbanizes in places.

And about rational and irrational urban planning. Of course it’s better to do things the right way to begin with. But it rarely happens in real life and poor planning is nothing new and not just a property of this day and age. The areas still develop, urbanize and change, sometimes to the better, sometimes to worse. For example, I was greatly surprised that in quite a few older Portland areas there were no sidewalks. Just none. But now in some of those places they appear as a change.

By the way, I do have somewhat harder time agreeing with people who lament loss of farm fields and open spaces and say that it is a loss of natural environment. As far as I see it, those fields already were loss of natural environment, all those areas were already altered by humans through logging, clear cutting, changing of landscape, etc. And now humans are just altering that land again, repurposing it.

[Mossa]

Originally Posted by karlsch

That's what I always wondered. To me it was mind-boggling. They spent huge amounts of money, millions and millions, on planning and research and missed one of the most basic things. Making sure it was high enough should have been at the top of their list of things to check.

By the way, where is all that institutional culture of city government, which back in the day pushed Portland well ahead of its time in infrastructure planning and made it king of the effective public transport system? I mean it can’t just go from 60 to 0, right?

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Mossa

And about rational and irrational urban planning. Of course it’s better to do things the right way to begin with. But it rarely happens in real life and poor planning is nothing new and not just a property of this day and age. The areas still develop, urbanize and change, sometimes to the better, sometimes to worse. For example, I was greatly surprised that in quite a few older Portland areas there were no sidewalks. Just none. But now in some of those places they appear as a change.

Most of the areas of east Portland that lack sidewalks were subdivisions that were built on rural unincorporated land with little planning or requirements like sidewalks and then subsequently incorporated by the city years later. It is a huge problem dealing with that lack of planning after the fact. The city of Portland mostly imposes the requirement on property owners and developers who want to build out there now. But we are talking about billions of dollars of missing infrastructure that should have been built out from the very beginning but wasn't because developers in the 50s and 60s weren't required to.

The other place in Portland where you see few sidewalks is in the West Hills where many of the roads are too steep and narrow to really accommodate sidewalks. They could maybe squeeze them in on one side, but not both sides.

But yes, failure to do things right from the beginning imposes massive costs on future generations.

[Mossa]

I agree with you, texasdiver. And by the way, thank you again for consistently providing local knowledge in a balanced well considered way. For someone who is not local but is very interested in the area, it’s whats and whys, it is invaluable.

[Lapaki]

Originally Posted by psichick

I have a few co-worker that commutes from the eastside to Hillsboro (Orenco area). One lives in NE Portland and she works 8-4:30. Morning commute is 35-45 minutes. Evening commute is 60-90 minutes. The evening is always worse anywhere you go (starting around 3:30-4ish).

I’ve never understood this phenomenon. I live in Beaverton and work in downtown Portland, something I’ve been doing since 2002. I used to work from 8 to 5, but the traffic got worse each year. My job has flexible hours, so I began shifting my shift earlier and earlier to beat the morning rush. The “sweet spot” keeps moving earlier and earlier. I currently work from 6:30 to 3:30, which means I leave at 6 AM. The morning commute is smooth sailing, even with school buses, and takes me about 30 minutes. The afternoon commute takes me between 45 and 55 minutes. That tells me that a lot of people must go in late and leave early. It can’t be due to afternoon school traffic, because it doesn’t get any better during the summer.

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Lapaki

I’ve never understood this phenomenon. I live in Beaverton and work in downtown Portland, something I’ve been doing since 2002. I used to work from 8 to 5, but the traffic got worse each year. My job has flexible hours, so I began shifting my shift earlier and earlier to beat the morning rush. The “sweet spot” keeps moving earlier and earlier. I currently work from 6:30 to 3:30, which means I leave at 6 AM. The morning commute is smooth sailing, even with school buses, and takes me about 30 minutes. The afternoon commute takes me between 45 and 55 minutes. That tells me that a lot of people must go in late and leave early. It can’t be due to afternoon school traffic, because it doesn’t get any better during the summer.

Which phenomenon? That people commute long distances, or that traffic continues to worsen? Both are explainable.

1. People commute long distances because (1) they are married with families and such and can't move for every job change, especially if a spouse is working elsewhere. Also the length of time that Americans stay with any one employer keeps shortening for a variety of reasons mostly outside their control. So buying a home near your work is less reasonable today than say in the 1960s. The growth of the consulting economy has only made this trend worse.

2. That traffic increasingly gets worse? The population and economy keeps growing with no new roads. What else should we expect?

[Lapaki]

Originally Posted by texasdiver

Which phenomenon? That people commute long distances, or that traffic continues to worsen? Both are explainable.

1. People commute long distances because (1) they are married with families and such and can't move for every job change, especially if a spouse is working elsewhere. Also the length of time that Americans stay with any one employer keeps shortening for a variety of reasons mostly outside their control. So buying a home near your work is less reasonable today than say in the 1960s. The growth of the consulting economy has only made this trend worse.

2. That traffic increasingly gets worse? The population and economy keeps growing with no new roads. What else should we expect?

You misunderstood. In 2006-2007, I was getting an online master's degree and worked from 7:30 to 4:30 to avoid what were then the rush hours. Leaving my home by 7:00 was the sweet spot that kept my morning commute to 30 minutes. Leaving work at 4:30 also kept my afternoon commute to 30 minutes. Now leaving my home at 6:00 AM guarantees me a 30-minute commute in the morning, and it's usually about the same if I don't leave until 6:20. My apparently false assumption was that most full-time employees work from approximately 8 to 5, something that's been the case with every job I've worked since 1983. As Portland's population grows, more cars are on the road to get to their 8:00 AM jobs, which slows down the commute, so people have to leave earlier to guarantee they get to work on time. That's why the morning sweet spot has shifted from 7:00 AM to 6:00 AM over the years. Conversely, if those 8-to-5ers don't leave until 5:00, then the rush-hour traffic should extend later into the afternoon and evening -- not be pushed backward to 3:30. Having thought about it, I'm guessing the logical explanation is that more people have flexible hours (some of my coworkers come in late and leave early, but also work from home for a few hours), and people who work part-time might be more likely to start later than I do but leave at the same time I do. My cynical explanation was that many people were leaving work before they were supposed to. :-)

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Lapaki

You misunderstood. In 2006-2007, I was getting an online master's degree and worked from 7:30 to 4:30 to avoid what were then the rush hours. Leaving my home by 7:00 was the sweet spot that kept my morning commute to 30 minutes. Leaving work at 4:30 also kept my afternoon commute to 30 minutes. Now leaving my home at 6:00 AM guarantees me a 30-minute commute in the morning, and it's usually about the same if I don't leave until 6:20. My apparently false assumption was that most full-time employees work from approximately 8 to 5, something that's been the case with every job I've worked since 1983. As Portland's population grows, more cars are on the road to get to their 8:00 AM jobs, which slows down the commute, so people have to leave earlier to guarantee they get to work on time. That's why the morning sweet spot has shifted from 7:00 AM to 6:00 AM over the years. Conversely, if those 8-to-5ers don't leave until 5:00, then the rush-hour traffic should extend later into the afternoon and evening -- not be pushed backward to 3:30. Having thought about it, I'm guessing the logical explanation is that more people have flexible hours (some of my coworkers come in late and leave early, but also work from home for a few hours), and people who work part-time might be more likely to start later than I do but leave at the same time I do. My cynical explanation was that many people were leaving work before they were supposed to. :-)

I think there are an increasing number of workers with flexible work schedules which may also account for it. You can come early and leave early, or come late, leave late. So the rush hour is gradually expanding. I'm always shocked at how by 2 pm the whole city can rapidly start getting congested. And how by 6 am the freeway bridges start to slow.

[pdxMIKEpdx]

People are forgetting that all kinds of business traffic increases during the afternoon.

Think about all those poor Amazon delivery drivers stuck in traffic from noon to after 6pm.