Multiple protests have been held in Portland in opposition to the CRC Bridge project, which Federal Transit Administration officials yesterday praised as "forward-leaning." Photo: Stop the CRC

But many state and regional transportation agencies continue to operate as if it were still the 1980s, when highway budgets were flush, gas was cheap and the destructive impacts of auto-centric planning were less well understood.

It’s especially discouraging to see those old-fashioned attitudes prevailing in greater Portland, which enjoys a reputation as the country’s most progressive transportation city. The fact that the $3-plus billion mega-bridge project known as the Columbia River Crossing remains a regional transportation priority is a testament to the pervasive grip of highway-building interests.

Just yesterday, this “highway boondoggle in disguise” passed another milestone when it was given environmental clearance from U.S. DOT, opening the way for land acquisition and construction. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that the project has been granted a “record of decision,” a disappointing endorsement from an administration that has made “livability” a key issue.

Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff even praised the project as a break from carbon-intensive traditions, saying, “This is the type of forward-leaning project that will greatly benefit the entire region well into the future.”

It’s true that the project does include a transit component. About $800 million will be spent on light rail through this corridor between Portland and suburban Vancouver, Washington. But project opponents like David Osborn, head of the community group Stop the CRC, point out that a much greater share of the money will be spent widening the highway to 10 lanes and adding a number of interchanges. This is fundamentally at odds with Portland’s professed emphasis on environmental stewardship and sustainability, Osborn told Streetsblog in April.

“If we build transportation infrastructure that supports single-occupancy-vehicles, it will increase low-density sprawl,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to this project in the community.”

Joe Cortright, a consultant with Impresa and one of the project’s most vocal opponents, says he is disappointed but not surprised by the U.S. DOT announcement. “This has been clearly in the pipeline for some time,” he said. “It reflects kind of the internal consensus of the state DOTs.”

But he added that the federal government has yet to award the CRC any funding — and the project plan assumes a $1.2 billion contribution from the federal government. Nor has either state DOT committed any money, he said. He added that legal challenges to the environmental impact statement were likely forthcoming.

So the fight certainly isn’t over yet in Portland.

Costing at least a cold $3 billion, the CRC project and its ten freeway lanes could bankrupt the Portland region's road budget while undermining its progress on sustainable transportation. Image: Spencer Boomhower

The Columbia River Crossing is a mega-project by any standard. A bridge replacement, a highway widening, and light rail project wrapped into one, the CRC is a proposal to span the distance between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. With a $3.2 billion price tag — by conservative estimates — it would be the largest public works project the region has ever undertaken.

Any project of the CRC’s transformative scope raises a great many questions. For starters, is it worth the investment? Can the region afford it? Will it promote a healthy environment? Will it induce sprawl?

In the five years since project engineers began honing their plan, more and more local observers have become adamant that it fails on all counts. “It’s a disaster of a project, really,” said Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” But while governors are killing worthy transit and rail projects left and right, this fantastically expensive sprawl generator still has a pulse.

The full length of the project is five miles. Image: Columbia River Crossing

Planning efforts alone for the Columbia River Crossing have thus far consumed $110 million. After all that expense and all those meetings, local observers say there’s still little agreement about what form it should take — or whether it should move forward at all.

The project is intended to reduce congestion on Interstate 5 between Portland and suburban Vancouver, which, officials say, backs up for six hours daily. Their plan is to expand the interstate from six to 10 lanes, demolish the existing drawbridge and build a replacement.

But $3+ billion is a lot of money to spend on a five-mile stretch of roadway, particularly when the Portland region is facing a $6 billion road budget shortfall by 2030. And at least one analysis has said the actual fiscal damage could be a lot worse.

Financial questions aside, the project runs contrary to the values of sustainability and walkability on which Portland has built its reputation, says David Osborn of the grassroots opposition group Stop the CRC. According to Osborn, the CRC typifies the kind of single-occupancy-vehicle infrastructure that the region has expressly rejected.

“We’re known for and really value alternative transportation,” Osborn said. “That’s the kind of transportation solutions that our region is looking for — transportation infrastructure that favors small, walkable communities. Building freeways doesn’t create that kind of community.”

Earlier this year, Stop the CRC held a poster contest and invited the public to take part. A month prior to that, local activist Spencer Boomhower produced a powerful video arguing that the project is wasteful and ill-conceived.

Opponents point out that the majority of the cost is dedicated to increasing car capacity on I-5. Of the total cost, only about $800 million would be used for the bridge replacement, with another $600 million going to light rail. Much of the remaining $1.8 billion would be spent expanding interchanges.

“This is a freeway expansion project,” said Osborn. “It is often kind of guised as a bridge.”

And many recognize the CRC for what it is. The original plan was for expanding I-5 to 12 lanes, but planners pared it back following public outcry. Local bike advocates aren’t sold on it, even though the project is slated to include bike and pedestrian facilities under the new bridge. The regional Bicycle Transportation Alliance withdrew its support two years ago, accusing sponsors of “vastly overstating” the benefit to bicyclists and pedestrians.

Seen at a CRC opposition rally in 2009. Photo: Portland Transport

Commissioners from Clark County refused to vote in favor of the design, despite the urging of supporters. The local paper summarized one commissioner’s position as such: You leave us out of this.

Maus is convinced the project will never see the light of day. “It’s so politically toxic,” he said. “There’s just no money for it and it’s too controversial.”

But Osborn is not as sanguine. After all, in his budget announcement last month, President Obama listed the project for potential New Starts funding. And just last week, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber stumped for the CRC in a speech to local civic leaders.

“There’s still a big push to try and make this happen,” Osborn said, despite the fact that “the project just continues to run into problem after problem.”

Mandy Putney, a spokesperson for the bi-state partnership that oversees the project, denies it is embattled. “There’s a regional agreement to move forward with a replacement bridge,” she said. “This region needs to move goods and people across the region. The region will grow by about one million people by 2030. Freight just is running out of the ability to move.”

Supporters say the CRC will create 20,000 jobs and reduce crashes by 70 percent. In addition, the bridge — which was built in 1917 and substantially renovated in 1958 — is in need of replacement, Putney said. Its pilings don’t go all the way to solid soil. Pedestrian and bike access is also “challenging,” she said.

A prominent critic of the CRC is economist Joseph Cortright of Portland-based urban consulting firm Impresa, Inc. Commissioned by a local business leader to do a study on the project, Cortright has compiled data that disprove arguments in its favor. He found that traffic projections being used to justify the CRC, for instance, are out of date and inaccurate. Those projections showed traffic steadily increasing over a a 25-year period, but as Cortright pointed out and as Streetsblog has reported, traffic has actually been declining regionally, a trend that preceded the recession.

That’s a big issue because project financing relies heavily on tolling, according to Cortright. CRC backers hope to generate about one-third of the project’s cost from tolls, and plan to borrow against those projections. If tolling revenues come up short, the project could leave Oregon and Washington residents on the hook for total costs closer to $10 billion, Cortright predicts.

The study highlights other financial shortcomings, according to Cortright. Project sponsors did not include the costs of debt financing in their projections, Cortright said. Also important, the two states were hoping the CRC would benefit from federal investment, but Congress has cooled to earmarks. It speaks volumes, Cortright said, that thus far nobody — not Washington, not Oregon, not the federal government — has committed any money to the project.

Cortright, like Maus, Osborn and others, said congestion on Interstate 5 could, and should, be mitigated through smaller-scale interventions. Boomhower says delays caused by the drawbridge could be remedied by making adjustments to a railroad bridge upriver. Maus recommends rehabbing the existing bridge and adding a transit bridge. Cortright said adding another local bridge at a different location could draw away traffic and ease the bottleneck.

But CRC sponsors have consistently said that the project is too far advanced to return, more or less, to the drawing board.

“These things are all about momentum,” Maus said. “Once you get a big project like this rolling down the hill, you either move ahead or get smashed.”

Putney said construction will begin as early as 2013 and should be completed in five to seven years.

Local labor unions and the regional port authority are lobbying hard for the project’s advancement, said Osborn, as are the local construction and engineering industries. One of the major justifications for the project is to create jobs that will help bring down the region’s unemployment rate, which hovers at about 10 percent.

Meanwhile, Washington and Oregon aren’t exactly flush with cash for infrastructure. Without an increase in revenues, said Cortright, the funds for the CRC just aren’t there. “It should really be daunting,” he said. “I don’t see any momentum on the part of either state on raising the gas tax.”

But as we’ve seen in other areas of the country, local transportation officials seem undeterred by very real financial questions and widespread and organized public opposition. Cortright chalks it up to a lack of creativity.

“Basically you’ve got highway departments thinking the way they always have, only more so,” Cortright said, “when the money is running out.”

David Bragdon. Photo: Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian.

City sustainability chief David Bragdon offered some more hints about what to expect from April’s update of PlaNYC this morning. Speaking at a livability conference hosted by NYU’s Rudin Center, Bragdon said that the update would eschew large capital projects and feature a larger role for neighborhoods and individuals. In terms of transportation, Bragdon seemed to suggest that a call for a new Hudson River crossing of some kind would be a part of PlaNYC 2.0.

Much of what Bragdon had to say about the PlaNYC update has already been revealed: That the plan will take on solid waste management, for example, or that the administration wants to allow street hails for livery vehicles.

But he did suggest one idea sure to inspire fierce controversy. “We will be proposing to charge people ten dollars,” said Bragdon, pausing for effect, “if they want to have a hard copy of PlaNYC.”

When Bragdon turned more seriously to transportation policy, he offered an intriguing discussion about New York’s connections to the west. Bragdon pointed out that the number of rail crossings underneath the Hudson River, two, hasn’t changed in a century, though in that time the population of New Jersey has tripled while that of New York City has doubled. “We’re still making do with what we have here,” he said, but “doing nothing has a high cost.”

With that kind of talk, it seems that some sort of post-ARC proposal to add rail capacity underneath the Hudson will be in PlaNYC 2.0. Perhaps the return of the Secaucus 7?

In large part, Bragdon focused on the update’s new approach rather than new policies. With the city grappling with the recession’s fiscal fallout, he said, there won’t be any major new capital commitments in the update. Outlays like the $134 million for public plazas, he said, will be maintained but not likely to be repeated. How that commitment could be squared with the goal of new capacity across the Hudson isn’t clear.

Perhaps because of those fiscal constraints, Bragdon said that the update wouldn’t exclusively be made up of city programs, but would seek to enlist both local community groups and individuals. “A greater and greener New York is made up of greater and greener neighborhoods,” he said. That shift is already underway in the Department of Environmental Protection’s announcement yesterday of a competitive grant program that would fund local businesses and non-profits trying to build their own green infrastructure projects.

Finally, Bragdon said that the new PlaNYC would expand the sustainability focus from being about “pure utility for human beings” to include “nature for the sake of nature.” In addition to asking how to fit one million new people in New York City, he said, it would also ask “how many alewife herrings do we want coming back to the Bronx River?”

During his remarks, Bragdon also warned New Yorkers not to over-learn from Portland. The city is far newer, smaller, and more homogeneous than New York. In fact, at 580,000 people, Portland is only as populated as Manhattan was in 1850.

Bragdon did think it important, however, that Portland and New York City were two of the first cities to trade in federal highway dollars for transit. In Portland, they used the money slated for the Mt. Hood freeway, which would have destroyed one percent of the city, to build the first pieces of the city’s light rail system.

New York City, argued Bragdon, saved its transit system by cashing in Westway. Every time you travel on a clean and reliable subway, said Bragdon, “You need to be able to connect the dots on that experience we have every day to the $1.5B dollars, in 1985 dollars, to Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo coming around and cancelling Westway.”

Transportation planners in Portland, Oregon are taking their famous bicycle boulevards to the next level. By adding more routes and stepping up the traffic calming treatments, the city is not only making these streets more attractive and usable for cyclists, but also for pedestrians, runners, children, and anyone else who gets around under their own power.

These next-generation facilities have been christened “Neighborhood Greenways,” and by 2015, over 80 percent of all Portlanders will live within half a mile of one. The city is counting on these re-engineered streets to reach its goal of increasing bicycle mode share from eight percent to 25 percent by 2030.

Just about anybody who’s biked one of these routes can testify to the safety and peace you experience. You’ll see scores of families and children riding to school with regularity. At any time of day, there’s a constant buzz of activity, and during rush hours you’ll see many more bikes than cars. As Portland Mayor Sam Adams points out, “They’re on a quiet street, where that bike boulevard is prioritized for the bike, not the car.”

On a final fun note, one day Portland may also be able to lay claim to being the birthplace of the “sharrow flower.” What’s that? You’ll just have to take watch this Streetfilm and find out.

Exhibit A: The Mount Hood Freeway

“There was a period of ignorance, a period of enlightenment and catharsis, and a period of change.”

A drawing of the proposed Mount Hood Freeway. Former planning chief Richard Ross marked a red dot where his friend's house still stands, despite plans to pave over it.

Longtime local planning official Dick Feeney says Portlanders shouldn’t be too smug about their much-touted bicycle network and strides on transit. After all, he says, “Portland founded the Good Roads movement,” which had its basis in the gas tax. “And the gas tax became this monumental engine to give a private subsidy to the private automobile. It started right here, folks… part of our own destruction started right here.”

The Mount Hood Freeway was almost part of that destruction. Proposed by the Oregon State Highway Department in 1955, the road would have been eight lanes wide and removed one percent of all the private housing stock in the city. An estimated 3,700 children would have had to cross it to get to school.

In the 1960s, the city of Portland set about buying up houses they’d need to demolish to build the freeway – including the home next door to State Rep. Grace Peck, who wanted her neighbor’s house torn down early “to keep hippies from living there,” according to Richard Ross, former head of planning for the Portland suburb of Gresham.

Before long, the freeways became the polarizing issue in Portland, on which every aspiring politician had to take a position, firmly in one camp or another. Unions wanted highway construction to provide jobs. Environmentalists and farmers sided against it. Finally, popular opposition to the project reached the point where the city and county withdrew support, and the project died.

Exhibit B: Harbor Drive

Okay, Portland, you can get a little smug about Harbor Drive.

Harbor Drive today (otherwise known as Waterfront Park).

Portland was the first major city to rip out an existing highway, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer stretch of land. Harbor Drive ran along the western shore of the Willamette River in downtown. In 1968, as I-405 was being built, Governor Tom McCall appointed a task force to study the possibility of tearing out Harbor Drive and making it a park.

Urban planner Ernie Munch advocated for the teardown:

The committee went on and on and on and on until 1973 or 1974, when Tom McCall and Glenn Jackson, who was the head of the highway division, were going over that ramp onto the Markham Bridge, and they looked down on this area and they said, “Let’s just do it. Let’s just take it out.” So in 1974, Harbor Drive was removed. It was, at the time, the city’s busiest arterial. One-third of the traffic went to the freeways on either side of the downtown. One-third went in to the downtown. And one-third has never been heard of since.

What happened to those cars? Where did they go? It’s hard to say precisely, but the example of Harbor Drive stands as a good reminder that the amount people drive rises and falls with car capacity — and infinitely expanding roads won’t keep them clear of traffic jams.

It’s important to note that it wasn’t just one good man in power that made Harbor Drive the waterfront park that it is today. A whole citizens’ movement mobilized in support of the teardown plan. In the summer of 1969, Portlanders even organized “consciousness-raising picnics” along Harbor Drive.

Monday started with 15 different workshops that took place around the city, including one highlighting Portland’s “Lost Freeways” – the roads that were never built, and one that was actually torn out. These battles happened decades ago, but in many cities, highway fights continue to this day, and in some, teardowns are looking more and more possible. (Take note, readers in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, and New Haven.)

Traveling around on bikes and on foot, two groups visited some notable sites in Portland’s battles against freeways. First, we saw some battlegrounds where the anti-freeway movement lost.

South Park Blocks and I-405

Here's the block of the Goose Hollow neighborhood right next to I-405...

... and here's the highway that paved over two more blocks just like it. Photos by Shoshanah Oppenheim

In 1943, Portland invited New York’s master freeway planner, Robert Moses, to come to town. After a month of study, he came out with an 86-page document mapping out the “future of Portland”: 14 freeways and a tangle of limited-access parkways to re-make the city. Portland would have become what longtime local transit official Dick Feeney calls “a wonderful place to drive a car through,” where “the neighborhoods would have all vanished.”

Today, one of those highways, I-405, runs right through downtown. Tour guide Sarah Mirk, author of Oregon history comic books (including one about dead highways), took us to a little grassy patchy just across the I-405 overpass from the South Park Blocks, built in the mid-1960s.

This little marooned park over here is an orphan of when they built the I-405 freeway right here. The South Park Blocks are something people love in Portland; it’s a historic part of our city. And when they built I-405 through, they not only tore out two solid blocks of dense housing here in this neighborhood – which was really diverse, low-income housing – they also tore out two blocks of the South Park Blocks. People were really upset about that. And as a concession to people who were really upset about tearing out the park blocks, they said, we’ll do a ‘park-like treatment’ on the overpass coming over here. So you can see the overgrown bramble, and the cement, and the weeds. This is the ‘park-like treatment’ given to the South Park Blocks.

The freeway cut the neighborhood off from their school and library on the other side, becoming a “wall” between the residents and the services they used. Developers put in a bike-ped trail along the freeway as a concession.

That trail – unsigned, virtually unknown and unused – is known informally as the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Not to honor the Vietnamese leader,” says Mirk, “but because it was so dangerous and there were lots of muggings along here at night. There’s zero lighting, the neighbors have put up barbed wire, and it’s out of sight, out of sound. No one can hear you scream over the sound of the freeway.”

In my next post, I’ll get to the good stuff: the freeway plans that never saw the light of day, and one that came tumbling down.

David Bragdon, the new head of New York City's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, announcing a set of regional trails in the Portland area. Photo: BikePortland/Flickr

In appointing David Bragdon, the president of the Portland-area Metro Council, to run the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Mayor Bloomberg turned to an established elected figure with a track record of progressive planning. What will he bring to New York City?

Streetsblog spoke to livable streets advocates on both coasts to find out.

"We're going to be sorry to have him gone," said Rob Sadowsky, the executive director of Portland's Bicycle Transportation Alliance. "He's got a real strong, rooted sense in policy, particularly around transportation, sustainability, and environmental stewardship."

Jill Fuglister, co-director of the Coalition for a Livable Future, agreed. "David's vision and values have been very focused on sustainable transportation," she said.

Fuglister said that Bragdon made transportation one of his two top issues, along with the creation of an interconnected regional park system called the Intertwine, after his 2002 election to the top post in the Metro Council, Portland's regional government and planning organization.

Sadowsky highlighted cycling-friendly achievements under Bragdon's watch, like the creation of a Metro Active Transportation Council, which brings together stakeholders from across the region to support walking and biking. Bragdon also facilitated the expansion of transit in Portland, said Sadowsky, helping the region streamline its efforts to access federal transit funding. As Streetsblog has reported, Metro has also played an integral role in promoting transit-oriented development in the region.

Under the radar, Bragdon has also begun to reshape the way the Portland region writes transportation plans, said Fuglister. His administration at Metro is "at the forefront nationally of trying to reform the way that regions and metropolitan planning organizations function," by trying to move toward an "outcome-based, performance-based plan," she said. If the Portland region sets a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, proposed projects should be evaluated in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. "We're far from it still," she said, but called Bragdon "a part of the changemaking." 

Both Fuglister and Sadowsky warned that Bragdon's political instincts may lean too far toward avoiding conflict, though. "Under his leadership," Fuglister said, "Metro has moved away from looking at how you might use regulatory strategies towards a more consensus-based, voluntary approach." While Metro could require local jurisdictions to comply with the regional plan, she explained, Bragdon hasn't used those powers as much as previous administrations. 

Similarly, Sadowsky saw a desire to reach consensus as being at the root of Bragdon's position on the controversial replacement of a bridge across the Columbia River, which would widen the road from six lanes to ten. "There are some parts of the proposal that we'd rather not see," said Sadowsky, which gained traction "because he's bringing freight to the table and business leaders to the table." Of course, he added, that approach could serve Bragdon well in a job that requires coordinating a slew of independent city commissioners. 

Sadowsky expects that advocates will need to hold Bragdon's feet to the fire. "Individuals are only as good as the community that can inspire them and keep them accountable."

New York City transportation advocates praised the appointment, reading it as a sign of renewed support for the goals of PlaNYC within the Bloomberg administration. The city's sustainability agenda is due for a mandated update next Earth Day. "Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of David Bragdon to lead the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability bodes very well for the continued growth of a greener, healthier New York City," said Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White. His experience as an elected official, continued White, will serve him well as he takes on the tasks of making New York more walkable and bikeable, improving transit service, and reforming New York's parking policy.

"David Bragdon has impressive credentials," said Tri-State Transportation Campaign Associate Director Veronica Vanterpool, "and his appointment to head the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability is an encouraging sign. By conducting a nationwide search for the best candidate, Mayor Bloomberg sent a strong signal that PlaNYC will remain a priority in his third term." Vanterpool highlighted transit funding and traffic congestion as among the biggest challenges Bragdon will need to tackle during his tenure. With the state legislature's failure to enact congestion pricing, those issues stand largely unaddressed.

Joan Byron, who runs the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development, saw promise in two pieces of Bragdon's resume. "He has a background in freight," said Byron, referring to his five years working at the Port of Portland, "which is an area that a lot of us are hoping that the next PlaNYC will pay attention to." The Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel, which would connect Jersey City and Brooklyn, "would be the biggest thing we could do to make a dent in truck traffic," she said.

What's more, running Metro meant Bragdon was in charge of the Portland region's urban growth boundary, which strictly regulates where growth can occur. "There's a lot that is really laudable in PlaNYC," explained Byron, "but it's not really a plan. It's really a checklist. It doesn't make hard choices." Portland's plan, in contrast, actually forbids development in some places. Bringing in that perspective -- knowing how to craft a plan with teeth -- could help push an updated PlaNYC toward a more comprehensive and enforceable form, she argued.

The Crossings at Gresham brought transit-oriented development to Portland's suburbs, opening the door for financing to flow to similar projects. Image: Myhre Group Architects.

Metro -- Portland's regional government -- decided that wasn't good enough. They bought the site outright. Then Metro proceeded to double down on the original plans for the project, which it called The Crossings. Four stories became five, making the development the tallest building in Gresham. Condos became a mixed-use development with ground-floor retail, sidewalk cafés and engaging street-level facades.

There was still one big problem: financing. Charlotte Boxer, director of commercial real estate at Pacific Continental Bank, was skeptical of Metro's project. "What would draw people to live there, or what would make a retailer decide to lease there?" she asked. "There was substantial risk on Metro's part and on ours as the lender, because we had no comparables to go to that would say this would work." For the project to succeed financially, they'd have to charge rents 25 percent higher than the going rate in Gresham, for a type of development no one had ever tried there.

In many parts of America, efforts to build transit-oriented, walkable communities are foiled because financing can't be secured for projects that differ from the templates lenders have become used to since World War II. In Salt Lake City, for example, the local government's push for transit-oriented development has been stymied because local banks won't lend to projects without huge parking lots.

Why do lenders balk at development that reduces car dependence? In a word, inertia. "The lending industry appears to be very conservative, if your definition of conservative is doing the same thing this year as you did five years ago," said David Goldstein, the co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program and an expert on environmental real estate financing. Because banks have no institutional memory of lending to transit-oriented development, they are reluctant to do so going forward.

In Portland, officials and activists have begun to escape this cycle. The policies they've pursued to foster walkable development are instructive for many American cities looking to grow without making traffic congestion worse.

Even in transit-rich New York, economic development officials have subsidized developers who import car-oriented standards. They are happy to secure favorable lending terms, underwritten by the U.S. government, for multi-story parking decks. It's safe to say that goals like enhancing the pedestrian environment or attaining sustainability targets are not motivating these decisions. Portland development officials do things differently. When planners there decided that urbanism and sustainability were good outcomes, they went out and started convincing lenders to change the way they do business.

Megan Gibb runs Metro's transit-oriented development program, which works with developers and offers financial incentives for TOD. The Crossings, for example, received discounted land, tax breaks, and other financial incentives from Metro. "Our whole program is to build more market-comparables," said Gibb. "The more TOD projects there are, the more it builds on itself." Each project that gets built makes the next one easier to finance.

Gibb also highlighted the centrality of public-private partnerships to Portland's success. According to Gibb, banks normally look at standard, car-oriented development models and say, "We know this worked in the past. Why would we want it to be any different?" When the public sector commits to smart growth, however, bankers instead see that the government "thinks this is really important and is willing to put their money where its mouth is." For financial institutions that are often quite risk-averse, government action provides the security necessary to move forward.

John Warner, who manages most of the TOD projects at the Portland Development Commission, argues that at first, government may have to push the envelope to convince banks that walkable development pays off. "Until you've got examples that lenders can look back in time at," he said, "you have to be doubly conservative and oversubsidize something to prove the concept." Warner added that in Portland, where lenders have bought into a consensus about the need for sustainable development, they've been able to walk back many subsidies.

At The Crossings, Metro's vision -- and incentives -- turned the project into reality. Financially, it's a complete success, with 100 percent occupancy and a sizable waiting list. It's won awards for transit-oriented design and earned the praise of Gresham's residents and politicians. Perhaps most importantly, however, it set an example.

Boxer, the initially skeptical executive at Pacific Continental Bank who provided The Crossings' financing, now says she is "very proud to say I have financed the project." She also calls it "truly pioneering," providing a model for how to bring walkable development to suburban locations. The Crossings, itself possible because of the successful projects that preceded it, helped pave the way for more and better transit-oriented developments that followed.

The Beranger condos, a new transit-oriented development in Gresham, wouldn't have been possible without The Crossings' success. Image: Gresham Downtown Development Association.

Moving forward, then, Portland will have to craft policies that expand the comfort zone of lenders. Gibb and Anderson saw shared parking and car-share as tools to mitigate banks' fears about financing projects with fewer parking spaces than normal.

There are also structural reasons that banks avoid transit-oriented development, which can't be overcome by building a few market comparables. Because profits from transit-oriented development tend to materialize more slowly than from typical suburban development, new financing methods are needed to make TOD more attractive to lenders. And of course, banks respond to the regulatory environment. Portland makes many developers adhere to principles of walkable development near transit lines.

It's true that Portland area bankers have yet to embrace the full range of development needed to reduce car-dependence. But as the region attempts to grow sustainably, it benefits immensely from development officials like John Warner, who talks passionately about "the community organizing needed to get all the stakeholders on board with the absolute necessity of transit-oriented development." While here in New York, where growth is ostensibly shaped by a citywide sustainability plan, the chair of the local Economic Development Corporation still thinks that not providing enough parking is "the worst thing we could do."

Goldy Gopher is psyched about Minneapolis's first-place finish in Bicycling's city rankings.

New York was named one of the most improved bicycling cities in the magazine's 2008 listings and got the number 8 spot this year, behind San Francisco and Seattle, ahead of Chicago, and barely edging out Tucson.

The semi-regular rankings, out in the current issue, are based on several factors, with some intangibles mixed in. Portland still has the objective edge in bike commute modeshare (5.9 percent to Minneapolis's 4.3 percent, according to the most recent American Community Survey), but the Bicycling editors say Minneapolis has the momentum. Bike commuting in Minneapolis is on the rise at an impressive rate, and the city is on the verge of launching what will arguably be the nation's most ambitious bike-share program later this spring.

If you'd like to see this nascent intercity rivalry turn into an extended Jay-Z vs. Nas-style beef, that makes two of us. But BikePortland's Jonathan Maus seems to be taking the news in stride, writing that "this is more likely a sign that bike-friendliness is on the rise in cities across the country and Portland simply isn't as far out in front as it once was."

Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, speaking, with Daniel Squadron and Scott Stringer at last year's rally for Hayley and Diego's Law. To Squadron's right are Wendy Cheung, Hayley Ng's aunt, and Jon Adler, representative for the families of Ng and Diego Martinez.

With the state legislative session underway, Albany will soon turn its attention to business that lawmakers never got the chance to address last year. One bill to keep an eye on would give police and prosecutors a new tool to protect pedestrians and cyclists.

After two preschoolers were killed in Chinatown last January by a van driver who left his vehicle idling and unattended, lawmakers and advocates drafted "Hayley and Diego's Law." The bill is what's known as a "vulnerable user law." It would create a new offense called careless driving, which would carry penalties of up to $750 in fines and 15 days in jail for drivers who hit and injure vulnerable street users -- including all pedestrians and cyclists.  

We've seen lots of new, innovative bikeway designs appear on New York City streets over the past few years. But there’s one very promising concept we haven't seen -- bicycle boulevards. Bicycle boulevard design uses a variety of techniques to create low-traffic, low-speed streets where cyclists mix comfortably with cars. They’re very popular in Portland and Berkeley, two cities with high bicycle mode-share. Here in New York, though, they don’t seem to be part of the playbook yet. In this Streetfilm we ask: Why not?

We spoke to Mia Birk, who helped introduce bicycle boulevards to Portland. She's also the co-author of a new guidebook to bike boulevard design. Here we explore some of the concepts in the guidebook and show how they might be applied to New York. Outside Manhattan, especially, important cycling routes could benefit from the bicycle boulevard treatment.

• PBS's Blueprint America series will be airing "Road to the Future" tonight at 8pm in New York City. Check your local PBS station for times. Part of a PBS series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, the documentary examines the choices we can make as the country invests in its infrastructure, and how they can affect the way we live. Focusing in on three cities, New York, Denver and Portland, it features interviews with a whole host of interesting subjects including NYC DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, BikePortland blog maestro Jonathan Maus and Columbia University's Owen Gutfreund, author of "20th Century Sprawl." It should be a good one. Check their web site for a preview.
  
• I've also been told that the 11 pm10 pm local news on Fox channel 5 is going to run a report tonight on a Brooklyn resident named Miguel Padro who was arrested the other day for bicycling on the sidewalk on his way to work at the Prospect Park Tennis Center. I haven't spoken with Padro yet to get the story for myself, but word has it the NYPD held him in jail for 24 hours without a phone call despite the fact that he had no oustanding summonses or any problems with his record. Padro's wife and employer were really shaken up by the arrest and worried that he'd been kidnapped or killed. It sounds like a completely insane story but given the NYPD's increasingly random, senseless crackdowns on bicyclists it is entirely believable. I'm looking forward to seeing the Fox News piece and talking to Padro for myself before getting too worked up about this.
  

The first time you visit Portland, Oregon, the gaggles of cyclists streaming over the Hawthorne Bridge during rush hour is a sight you will never forget. It's something other cities need to see and be inspired by.

On a recent vacation there, I couldn't resist cranking out a Streetfilms shortie, so I hooked up with Crank My Chain's Dan Kaufman to capture the essence of the p.m. rush and find out what it feels like to be a part of the mass of cyclist humanity in Southeast Portland's Hawthorne corridor.

As Greg Raisman from Portland's Bureau of Transportation pointed out: 20 percent of all traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge is bikes, while the number of cyclists in Portland has risen 600 percent in the last 15 years and shows no sign of letting up.

Denver's FasTracks transit expansion will add more than 100 miles of rail and BRT service.

The core of his argument that Americans don’t like cities rested on this survey by Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans, when asked where they would most like to move to, named Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio as their top ten, in that order of preference. Because these cities are mostly in the west and the south, Brooks concluded that Americans are interested in living in, well, the west and the south. But then he went further, citing it as general evidence of America’s anti-urban tastes.

What Brooks didn't address -- and which I have a hard time believing he didn’t know, given his usual informedness -- was that most of the 10 cities in the poll are pursuing pro-urban agendas with a vengeance. They are building lots of light rail lines. They are re-configuring streets to make them more walkable and bikeable. They are steering clear of policies and projects that would encourage more driving.

Nowhere is that more true than Denver, the number one city in the poll, which supplied the headline to Brooks' column, "I Dream of Denver." Well, a few years ago, this object of American aspirations voted to approve what is probably the largest new mass transit system in the United States. The city of Denver and a bunch of neighboring political jurisdictions managed to come together and agree to build a half dozen light rail and commuter rail lines at once. The metro area will end up with a complete rail-based transit system in one fell swoop, without having to proceed line-by-line over decades, like most cities.

Portland, of course, has been the most aggressively pro-urban city in the country for three decades, with its mix of pro-transit, pro-biking policies all set in a state that employs some of the most cohesive growth-management practices in the country. In Portland, as readers of Streetsblog know, you can now ride a bike and have priority over cars when you come to a red light, just like in Amsterdam, the place Brooks posits as the epitome of un-American living. If Americans don't want to be urban, why are they putting Portland in their top ten list?

Essentially all the other cities on this list are pursuing pro-urban policies, even if they aren’t all urban yet. Hell, even Tampa, in the belly of a state that defined suburban sprawl, opened a downtown streetcar line a few years ago.

Before posting this piece, I went back and re-read Brooks' column, just to see if I had gotten everything right or missed anything. Upon review, it's actually astonishing how misleading it is. It's such a textbook example of selectively using facts and figures to advance faulty logic that it's worth doing a blow-by-blow here.

First Brooks starts with an arguably true statement, that many urban planners would like Americans to live in denser, more urban places. Then he condenses that into the hyperbole that urban planners want Americans to live in Amsterdam. This is not quite the case, but it’s okay to over-simplify to make a point and to make a column easier to understand.

But then, having set up this over-simple argument, Brooks goes about arguing that the places where Americans want to live are not Amsterdam. As I think I’ve demonstrated, even going by that absurd criteria, Brooks can’t prove his point. Because Denver, Portland, and other cities on America’s top ten list are moving in the direction of "Amsterdam." Plenty of Americans do “want the Dutch option,” or an American version of it.

Every columnist must at times simply pull one out of the air, using whatever is lying around on the desk. I wonder if this was one of those times with Brooks.

Advocates cheered the news. "More bike lanes and safer designs like Ninth Avenue are really starting to pay off," says TA's Wiley Norvell. "These numbers really show the huge latent potential for biking in NYC. We can't wait for 2009."

DOT paired its announcement with a safety message for cyclists and, yes, drivers:

"This unprecedented increase shows we are well on the way toward our goal of doubling the number of bike commuters," said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. "As these numbers rise, cyclists should take all safety precautions, while drivers must be vigilant when sharing our streets with this growing population."

Meanwhile, fueling what could become a heated intercity rivalry, bike counts just came out of Portland touting a 28 percent increase in cycling this year, bringing bike commute mode share up to eight percent.

More background from DOT on its screenline count, after the jump.

DOT first conducted screenline counts of cyclists in 1980 and has been doing so annually since 1984.  Counts were historically taken once a year, during the middle of the week for a 12-hour period from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In 2007, DOT expanded the time window to 18 hours and added two additional counting dates. The 18-hour count showed that over a quarter of cyclists counted use City streets earlier in the morning and later in the day than previously believed. While commuter cycling has doubled over the past six years, DOT has found that some facilities have gotten much more popular.  The cyclist volume on the Williamsburg Bridge has quadrupled from 2000-2008 to 4,000 cyclists on a typical day.

DOT's NYC Commuter Cycling Indicator makes use of the most robust data available to estimate the trends in commuter cycling.  While not every commuter cyclist in New York is counted in the screenline, the count locations are high usage areas where trends are easily spotted. The screenline count looks at cyclists crossing the four East River bridges, those entering and exiting the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall terminal, as well as cyclists crossing 50th Street on each avenue and the Hudson River Greenway.

This growth in cycling follows two years of DOT efforts to rapidly expand and improve New York's bicycle network. DOT added 140 miles of new bicycle routes to the on-street bicycle network in 2007 and 2008.

Graphic: NYCDOT [PDF]

Bike infrastructure can help overcome safety concerns, says Portland-area researcher Jennifer Dill.

How effective are bike lanes at enticing people to ride? Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill has been looking into that question for more than a year, and her research is starting to get some attention. Using GPS trackers to map more than 1,700 bike trips, Dill found that about half of all bike travel occurs on dedicated infrastructure like bike lanes or bike boulevards, even though such routes comprise only eight percent of Portland's street network.

Dill also conducted surveys about who rides most often and why people choose to bike or drive. She concludes that bike riding won't expand far beyond a core demographic of young men unless perceptions of safety change, reports the Portland Tribune:

According to Dill, most regular bicyclists are young men. This means that if the city wants to substantially increase the number of people riding bikes on a regular basis, it needs to reach out to young women and older people. And, Dill said, that is what public spending on bike infrastructure can accomplish.

All this may come across as confirmation of common sense (Portland DOT has based its bike network strategy on similar surveys), but the notion that dedicated bike routes make cyclists safer is not universally accepted. Proponents of "vehicular cycling" reject bike infrastructure forcefully, claiming that biking amid traffic reduces collisions. They wield considerable influence over design standards at the federal level, and in Portland they have consistently opposed steps intended by the city to improve safety and boost bicycle mode share.

Dill's preliminary research [PDF] adds to the evidence that dedicated bike infrastructure matters. Without a bike network that makes everyone feel safer -- men and women, children and seniors, veteran and inexperienced riders -- it's hard to imagine that American cyclists will ever enjoy the safety in numbers that cities like Copenhagen have managed to produce.

Graphic: Jennifer Dill

Check out this video, via BikePortland.org, on bicycle safety, part of a Portland Water Bureau campaign to reduce truck-cyclist collisions there. Last month, the Water Bureau held a bike safety seminar, which involved cyclists climbing into the cab of a city truck to see (or not see) driver blind spots for themselves.

The accompanying vid definitely puts the onus on cyclists (since "drivers are trained for safety"). Still, there's valuable info here on how the road looks from a truck driver's perspective, and it's impressive to see a city not only acknowledging the dangers trucks pose to cyclists, but taking action to mitigate them. Writes BikePortland.org editor Jonathan Maus:

I’m usually skeptical of educational videos as they are often cheesy and pedantic. But this one worked. Much of the footage was taken from inside the truck’s cab on crowded bikeways I’m very familiar with, but they looked completely different from a trucker’s perspective. It was eye-opening and nerve-racking just to watch the truck’s rear and side mirrors as bikes darted in and out of view — I couldn’t imagine the stress of actually operating that vehicle.

Here's one more from this summer's Carfree Cities conference week in Portland. In this Streetfilm, Greg Raisman of the Portland Office of Transportation treats Elizabeth Press to a bike parking tour, featuring two designs that make the most of available space while keeping pedestrian impediments to a minimum. The "bike oasis" incorporates a sidewalk bulb-out for bike storage, while the "bike corral" secures scores of bikes in parking spots once occupied by two or three cars.

Not only are the set ups convenient for cyclists, they're good for business too. Says Richard Satnick, founder of Laughing Planet Café:

"They're very heavily used all the time. And the usual business argument that you're taking away parking just doesn't work here."

Two recent road rage incidents are all over the news in Portland. Earlier this month, a drunken man on a bike became aggravated when a driver, himself a self-described bike advocate, reprimanded the cyclist for blowing a stoplight. The cyclist threatened the driver, picking up his bike and hitting the car with it. Then this week, a driver struck a cyclist and continued to drive as the victim, who escaped without serious injury, clung to the windshield.

The aggression on display is hard to fathom, but does it merit front page coverage? The breathless headlines pitting cyclists against drivers have led BikePortland's Jonathan Maus to critique the local press for exacerbating the us-versus-them mentality.

There's no excusing dangerous behavior on the road, no matter how you choose to get around, but the level of violence people are capable of when they're driving is, by the nature of the vehicle, quite considerable. As one commenter on the Oregonian's web site put it, "A drunk cyclist is clearly a menace, but a drunk driver can be downright deadly."

And then there's this story (via Tom Vanderbilt) out of Seattle last Wednesday, when a man was killed for setting up orange cones while he gardened in a traffic circle near his house, showing that people don't always have to be behind a wheel for their entitlement to the road to turn fatal.

Here's a question for Vanderbilt, whose new book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), will be released later this month. What is it about automobiles or the road or human psychology that makes people behave like sociopaths at times?

According to the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), Portland, Oregon's Pioneer Courthouse Square is one of the Top 10 greatest public spaces in the U.S. & Canada. I couldn't agree more. Affectionately referred to as the city's "living room" the charming and versatile block was once slated to be a parking garage in the 1960s. Thankfully the residents didn't let that happen.

Recently while grabbing lunch in Portland, I wandered into the "Festival of Flowers" - a beautiful urban meadow installation that was so pleasant and comforting, I just had to shoot some video. Ethan Kent from PPS has often said to me that the key to the success of Pioneer Courthouse Square (and many public spaces) is its amazingly diverse programming. He's right, I've been to Portland a dozen times and there always seems to be something wonderful going on there.