(Photos © J. Maus)
[The following editorial was written by Ron Buel. Buel is a long time Portland transportation activist through his work with Riverfront for People. Back in November 2006, BikePortland covered his initiative to bury the I-5 freeway through Portland’s eastside.
In this editorial, Mr. Buel shares his concerns that, despite intentions, the City of Portland’s Climate Action Plan lacks the teeth it needs to really take a bite out of climate change.]
The City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) and the Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) have put out a Climate Action Plan that, when it comes to transportation, is as phony as a three dollar bill. It’s the latest version of political greenwashing, led by Mayor Sam Adams, who, like our Governor, talks the talk of climate change, but doesn’t walk the talk.
“In the transportation arena, which produces 39% of local carbon, serious action by the City is not in the cards, so good writing, public relations, lovely pictures and meaningless action plans have to suffice.”
The City is taking this plan very seriously, as it should, and it has mailed out a four-color brochure to Portland residents telling them about Town Halls and asking for feedback. There will be five of them, in each geographic part of the city, from June 20 to July 7.
Unfortunately, I expect that the bureaucrats who have written this lovely plan and are now asking for citizen input, don’t really want to do anything or listen to anybody. They just want to produce a lovely plan and pretend they are listening.
It’s about public relations. It isn’t really about taking action on the serious climate change problem that we all face, a problem that the plan rightfully says threatens our entire planet. In the transportation arena, which produces 39% of local carbon, serious action by the City is not in the cards, so good writing, public relations, lovely pictures and meaningless action plans have to suffice.
The reason? When it comes to transportation in Portland, special interests are in control.
I’m talking about the oil-auto-highway-trucker-labor lobby. The City has this publicly-funded Freight Committee that the truckers use to get what they want out of PBOT policy. Adams and PBOT (which he oversees) have turned around 30 years of transportation planning, plans that have been in place since 1973 – plans that place density, transit, bicycling and pedestrians ahead of fossil fuel-vehicle travel.
But now, with the pavers in charge of City Hall, we are planning huge freeway capacity expansion projects such as the $4.2 billion, 12-lane Columbia River Crossing and the $1.5 billion above-ground expansion of the I-84/I-5 interchange near the Rose Quarter.
The Special Interest Pavers don’t just include the Oregon Freight Association. They include the aggregate companies like Ross Island Sand and Gravel, the Ironworkers and Steelworkers unions, the housing developers who want to continue building their homes out in the distant suburbs (where land is cheaper and people must drive to get anywhere), and the Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council and the AFL-CIO (they just want the construction jobs – they don’t care if the projects supplying the jobs promote global warming).
The City’s effort to ignore global warming and to greenwash the City’s new draft transportation Climate Action Plan is part of a statewide effort by the same special interest lobby that pushed the Oregon Legislature to pass HB 2001. That bill includes $900 million in earmarked highway capacity expansion projects like the $192 million Newberg-Dundee bypass and the Sunrise Corridor in East Multnomah County and Clackamas County.
The City of Portland bought off on the deal, of course, because Mayor Adams got a little money for PBOT and some starter money for the Sellwood Bridge project. Governor Kulongoski and ODOT’s plan is all global warming, all of the time. Even a lot of our Democratic legislators got sucked in.
The Climate Action Plan also virtually ignores transit and rail (Obama has big plans for high speed rail in our region, but where is the planning effort from PBOT to support it?), and it makes no real effort to ensure that TriMet does not have to cut its bus service at a time when we need it most.
By contrast, Portland has done a lot for bicycles, and this is a real success for the City and its transportation policies. Riding a bicycle in place of getting in a fossil fuel vehicle, is an important way to combat climate change.
But, while we see dramatically increased bicycle use within the city, including particularly the shorter commutes, we do not see a lot of suburbanites getting on their bikes and making their commutes to or through the central city of Portland on bicycles.
Since commuting from the suburbs, or from one suburb to another, continues to be a large amount of the vehicle miles traveled in the region, there seems to be a potential ceiling on bicycle trips in the Portland region and also on the bicycle’s ability to combat global warming pollution, region-wide.
“For five years now, Sam Adams has talked on one hand about how important it is to deal with climate change, and with the other less visible hand, led the City and its Transportation and Planning departments and policies, in the other direction.”
This City Climate Action Plan wisely calls for increased density in the city and no expansion of the urban growth boundary in the region, which limits the length of trips. The problem is that the City government and politicians have very little power to enforce holding Metro and local suburban governments firm on urban growth boundaries.
For five years now, Sam Adams has talked on one hand about how important it is to deal with climate change, and with the other less visible hand, led the City and its Transportation and Planning departments and policies, in the other direction.
Those of us who dearly want to deal with climate change, and to make Portland a leader in that fight, have to become sophisticated enough to hold our politicians accountable. Now and at election time, let’s remind them that when it comes to fighting climate change, we want real action, not just another planning process.
— Learn more about the City of Portland and Multnomah County’s Climate Action Plan by attending one of the upcoming Town Hall events. More details here.
Thanks for reading.
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Thank you, Mr. Buel! This is a very important message that Portlanders need to hear. Thank you for publishing this, Jonathan!
Scam Adams doesn’t just lie about his personal life…
spot on! Thanks for speaking out against the madness.
Ron, I appreciate how you outlined some of the problems, but I don’t read anything in your editorial that proposes any specific solutions to them. What is it that the City of Portland can do to get more suburbanites to ride their bikes into the city? How can we offset the influence the paving and construction industries have in the political process? Many of our politicians campaigned on green platforms, and then voted for HB 2001. How can we prevent this from happening again?
While I agree that it’s important to hold our politicians accountable to what they say they want to do, I think it’s also important to think about who the available candidates were in the last election and realize that we probably ended up with one of the better possible combinations of people in the Portland city government. That being said, I would especially love to see the CRC and especially any in-city highway expansion nipped off before it goes any further, and I hope that enough people can get that across to the city leaders that they might do something about it.
Great editorial! Should this not be on the Oregonian?
Does it really make sense to put so much of the blame on Sam? I don’t particularly support or not support the guy, but I think the situation’s a bit more nuanced than “…Sam blah blah Sam blah blah Sam…” Of course, the article touches on some of that, but there’s so much Sam-blaming that it’s hard to see what useful purpose is being served.
Although what happens at the political level is relevant (to varying degrees), every successful effort for social change is a grass roots effort. We all need to be involved, and we all share the blame, and we all need to make some changes. Laying all responsibility at the feet of the pols is disempowering.
No. It doesn’t.
You could argue that Sam was somewhat forced into his CRC position in part because people like Rex Burkholder — the founder of the BTA – and Metro were also in support of the largest bridge option. Thus, the groundwork laid made it tough for Sam to aggressively oppose it. There was also no real opposition to the CRC by local advocacy groups until after Sam made the big compromise with Pollard.
But then again, this is how politics works sometimes. The biggest dog in the fight takes the biggest blame. And in this case, Sam — as Mayor of the City that many expected to oppose the big bridge — was the biggest dog in the fight.
A thousand thank yous for speaking the truth. Our politicians have their heads buried in the sand. I went to the City of Portland’s Climate Change presentation, last Saturday, hosted by Sam Adams. I asked him how he planned to fund the Bike Master Plan, I got political speak and no answer. He can find $10 million a year, for years, to subsidize a Convention Center Hotel, but can only find $500,000 for bike infrastruture, in this years city budget. The Bike Lanes will be used by the citizens of Portland (young & old)365 days a year. The emphasis they put on the sports arena amounts to 15 soccer games a year and does nothing to address the pressing issue of climate change. We need a Gas Tax/Carbon Tax NOW. If you like the European model of great mass transit, people driving small cars & bike infrastructure, it didn’t happen by chance. It happened with a $4 a gallon gas tax.
Citizens are a major source of CO2, we need to dial down our consumptive lifesytle, politicians don’t want to say that or make laws that point us in that direction. They are spineless, and make decisions to get re-elected instead of enacting legistlation for the good of the planet and the people who inhabit it.
Thanks for publishing this! The editorial lays out many points that need to be read, heard and considered. All the blame does not fall on Sam but his decision RE CRC expansion clearly sits on his shoulders. Rex is to blame in his own right and for his push of this over the years also, but Sam could have opposed, gotten the coucil to kill it, open and shut.
This editorial needs to reach beyond the bike community – I know many folks who don’t ride bikes read bikeportland, but I hope it gets picked up all over.
Jonathan:
Right on about Sam sharing responsibility relative to his profile and to his ability to do something about it. And the BTA? Well, they could have taken a leadership position early on, and now their opposition is lost in the noise. Hate to say it, but with friends like these…
Jonathan, thanks for publishing this.
Excellent work, Mr. Buel; we need more of this. We need to be getting our heads around the way that, even though we elect politicians who talk a good game when it comes to carbon emissions, and even when those politicians have solid progressive credentials, they still too often end up beholden to powerful interests that want to build big, expensive projects – climate stability be damned.
I’m wondering if you could comment here on the Hayden Island plan. You’re pretty much the only person I’ve heard talk about it. My understanding is that the plan would replace the current Jantzen Beach center with an elaborate new housing development. And while a nice little community could seem like an improvement on big-box stores, the push to build it must be fueling the push for a gigantic CRC. To me it seems like it could be a good object lesson in how development interests influence political decisions which then go on to impact climate and livability.
“When it comes to transportation in Portland, special interests are in control.”
Uhm Mr. Buel, well uhm, special interests are always in control. That is the nature of representative democracies. What you are really complaining about is that your special interest group is not as powerful their special interest group.
You slam Sam, (not that I’m a fan), and praise Obama. Like he gives a rat’s patootie about HSR. Sorry but 13 billion is not “big plans” for HSR, it is a mere token. (You’d think Obama would be sensitive to that sort of thinking.)
Your right, the plan is a greenwash, so is the idea that we can build ourselves out of climate change. We have to downsize our economy and realize a new and more ethical model and of sharing our resources.
The suburban situation is the best reason for HPV-specific infrastructure–nothing else will work. This infrastructure is most needed in the bottlenecks in transportation corridors where non-motorists get short-changed.
Creating extra capacity for bikes on MAX and other mass transit is a good thing, but it’s also stressing an already overstressed mass transit system. And it’s always going to be less efficient than a dedicated roadway.
My ex-boss lived in Tualatin and worked in NW. After citing safety concerns as his main reason for not commuting by bike, I asked him if having a dedicated, continuous roadway would change his mind. He said it would. No hesitation.
This is not an option but an inevitability…it just took awhile for us to see the forest for the trees. Proper subsidization must ensue.
Bikeways today!
[“bikeways” would be open to all non- or low-powered roadway users…I’m searcing for a name…bikeways seems to function ok…suggestions?]
Huh. I thought, “greenwashing”, was the act of brainwashing people into thinking the sky is falling. Who knew?
Make that, “…serious climate change problem that you face…”, Mr. Buel. I’ll make my own decisions, thanks all the same.
Right, these guys have about as much clout as a chain-smoking, Republican, child-molester right now. Way to work the F.U.D., though. Awe inspiring.
While I remain a huge fan of Urban Growth boundaries, there is another side. One where developers just go outside of the boundary to build. Corbet, Sandy, Fairview… These boundaries are creating sprawl as fast as they counter it.
I especially like the comment about overstressed Tri-Met. I actually fell off my chair laughing at that one. Overstressed twice a day. The rest of the time it’s running virtually empty, and the net benefit is simply not there. Some fringy wing-nuts are even saying with rider-ship patterns of this nature, mass transit is hurting way more than helping us.
I didn’t come to pick a fight with a person in whose shadow I can’t even stand, but have any of you thought maybe the City of Portland is doing what they are paid to do? Like patting Church of Green zealots on their head, and then getting down to the business of getting 1.5 million folks to and fro? Could be that. You run with that F.U.D. thing though. “Special interest asphalt lobby…”, oh I just blew milk through my nose.
You sound like Randall O’Toole’s alter-ego.
The only thing I took away from this article is that Mr Buel has a pretty strong axe to grind against Sam and a couple of city agencies. Criticizing Sam’s support of the CRC makes sense, but beyond that this smells of a rant.
And to #8, both OR houses adopted a low carbon fuel standard. While not exactly a gas tax, it does provide an incentive to shift towards less carbon intensive transportation fuels (based on a life cycle analysis).
Great article,
I’ll post it up to my blog, so that’s a little more circulation for your ideas!
Hello BikePortland.orgers,
I welcome this blog discussion on climate change and the CRC.
I am interested in engaging Portlanders in a conversation of what we need to do individually and as a city to meet some aggressive but common-sense green house gas emission reduction goals. That is why we are hosting six of these first-ever climate action town halls.
At the beginning of each ‘Climate Action Plan’ town hall meeting I explain how this discussion draft represents our collective best thinking. But how we are working on a comprehensive set of metrics that will be used to further refine the Plan before it is finalized in the Fall. And how we will have another round of ‘Climate Action Plan’ town hall meetings before the strategy is finalized.
I also encourage continued public discussion of the controversial Columbia River Crossing project.
The approach I pushed for and that was approved by all jurisdictions last Winter requires that the project complete a new and better batch of scientific analysis of potential impacts. This new analysis will be completed by the end of the 2009 calendar year. Portland city planners are part of the staff research oversight group.
All parties have agreed that the updated research will serve as the basis for finalizing decisions about the CRC. I realize this fact often gets lost in the overall controversy about the project. But it is still a fact.
In the meantime, I encourage folks to stay engaged on the CRC issue and to reach out to and activate like-minded citizen advocates who reside North of the Columbia River.
Yours,
Sam
Here’s my favorite part:
“Since commuting from the suburbs, or from one suburb to another, continues to be a large amount of the vehicle miles traveled in the region, there seems to be a potential ceiling on bicycle trips in the Portland region and also on the bicycle’s ability to combat global warming pollution, region-wide. ”
Yeah! That’s what I’ve been saying. Climate change doesn’t stop at city limits.
(I would love to see the City of Portland work with the surrounding Cities to create a more effective way to move people, especially by bike.)
Leadership. We haz none.
You lost all your political capital thinking with the little head and now we suffer for it. Let Randy take over already. Or lets find someone else who can actually deliver on all those “greenest city in the world” campaign promises.
Practicality of travel by bike between downtown and the suburbs could be vastly improved with wider, cleaner, bike-dedicated lanes of travel on streets. The practice that’s been going on for so long, of squeezing a minimal width bike lane into existing roadway widths does not do enough to support commuting by bike.
The metro area could might consider at least as an experiment, designing and building at least one fully supportive suburb to downtown bike commuter road. Then we could see first hand if this is the kind of thing that will open the door to greater use of the bike for commuting.
Between Beaverton and Portland, there’s still the Sylvan hill though.
Encouraging bicycling from the suburbs to the Central City, and back again, is an interesting challenge. It takes a real daily time commitment for the commuter. You have to be physically fit and a serious cyclist. You have to be willing to slog through Portland’s rainy weather, and, perhaps, depending on your job, take the time to shower and change on arrival at work.
I think we should encourage it, but I personally think transit is likely to be more competitive for the suburbanite commuter in getting them out of their autos, especially if we had a multi-destinational transit grid and if our transit were grade-separated from autos.
Sam is pushing his trolley, and at the town hall I attended, he said the trolley is being integrated with the bus lines, that it will not be redundant, but I don’t believe that is true — I don’t believe the planning has been done in an integrated fashion with Tri-Met. I don’t believe Tri-Met is planning new routes that utilize the trolley as part of the Tri-Met system.
The City’s Climate Action Plan is also misleading folks about its progress between 1990 and 2009 on greenhouse gas emissions. It does this by using the questionable metric of gasoline sold in Multnomah County, and says we’re about level in that category with 1990. Yes, that data may be an accurate measure, but maybe not. My perception, as a City resident for all of these 19 years, is, indeed, that there is a lot more walking and bicycling, and that this has shifted the mode split away from fossil-fuel vehicle use. But, there are other factors. We have A Lot more people living in Washington, Clackamas and Clark Counties than 19 years ago, and they are mostly driving, not biking, especially to work and back. Most of these folks do not buy their gas in Multnomah County, but close to where they live. Many of these folks drive into the City or through it every work day. And many more of them are driving SUVs and pick-ups than were driving such vehicles 19 years ago. These vehicles have truck axles and guzzle a lot more gas to power them, with much lower gas mileage. The airshed we live in, therefore, has a lot more greenhouse gas emission than in 1990, and to only use gas purchased in Multnomah County is to mislead everyone.
Multnomah County’s population has grown by less than 15% since 1990, but the populations of Clark and Washington Counties have grown by nearly 50% since then.
Our over-all density as a region is higher than many other regions because of our urban growth boundary, and the City of Portland has certainly become more dense, but vehicle miles traveled are up in the region dramatically and forecast only to grow.
So having these nifty townhalls, in which people are encouraged to change their personal habits, is duplicitous in a way, and Sam knows it. Transportation provides 39% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Sam is under attack as a politician, and he doesn’t want to take on the auto-oil-highway-trucker-developer lobby on items like the Columbia River Crossing and the I-84 and I-5 bridge. Net, net, he will make things worse before they get better here, which makes the townhalls and the Climate Action Plan a sham, when it comes to transportation.
Sam says the City is going to re-do its plan for the next round of meetings. We’ll see how genuine his concern for the planet really is.
People can say that I am wrong to personalize this responsibility for climate change onto Sam.
But he provided the key vote, and the key leadership, at the City, for the Columbia River Crossing. Sure, there are folks at Metro like Burkholder, who were there earlier and harder. But it couldn’t have happened without Sam. Just like David Bragdon was the key at Metro (all the while protesting).
I am not a proponent of recalling Sam Adams, despite his lies during the campaign. I voted for him and endorsed him publicly. I am not trying to nail Sam. But he is the Mayor, and I am sick of the Mayor of our City cowtowing to the special interests, and greenwashing everything as if he really cared about Saving the Planet. You can’t lead us on global warming if you are fighting for a travel-inducing, sprawl-inducing $4.2 billion, 12-lane bridge across the Columbia that will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions. And leading the fight for a $1.5 billion above-ground expansion of the I-84/I-5 interchange. He knows you can’t build your way out of congestion — the congestion just moves down the road, as Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta have proven. Sam also knows that climate change responds to vehicle miles traveled, not single bottleneck removal. But there he is supporting these big freeway capacity expansion projects because, he says, they’ll eliminate the congestion. And there he is, leading these townhalls on climate change anyway. He insults our intelligence, and he’ll probably get away with that too.
You can’t lead us on global warming if you are fighting for a travel-inducing, sprawl-inducing $4.2 billion, 12-lane bridge across the Columbia that will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions.
Thanks again, Ron. That really is the bottom line. I totally agree that anyone who isn’t insulted by Adams’ hypocrisy on this issue must not be paying attention.
I’d like to see effort put toward more planning that meant not so many people had to make a commute from the suburbs into downtown for work. That would seem to be a far better way to reduce road congestion than spending billions of dollars on a bridge across the Columbia and bus rapid transit(grade-separated from autos).
Portland’s mayor Sam Adams and his stance on the CRC… . The bridge seems likely to aggravate rather than alleviate congestion problems in the metro area but never the less, there he is, joining in support of it with the others.
But what if they’re all driving Priuses? And using cloth shopping bags? 12 lanes of Prius-filled glory! [/snark]
Scam Adams says:
“The approach I pushed for and that was approved by all jurisdictions last Winter requires that the project complete a new and better batch of scientific analysis of potential impacts. This new analysis will be completed by the end of the 2009 calendar year. Portland city planners are part of the staff research oversight group.”
New and better, oh, that’s just so warm and fuzzy! Personally, I’ve seen enough of your jaded “scientific studies” tailored to give you the data you need to support your pet projects (Lent’s anyone?). The initial study on the impacts of the CRC was such a joke that I’m sure your “new and better” one will prove to be just slightly less pathetic.
You’re such a sell out Sam!
“North of the Columbia River.”
I can dig it. Vancouver needs to be canvassed. I’m sure there’s plenty of Couvgers who are ready to get on a bike to go to work. Probably not a fixie though..
I think there may even be room to push for building a ped/bike-only bridge now to have it completed by ’12 when construction on the CRC begins. Though it may also take significant private funding- didn’t Hank Paulson say he wasn’t a fan of global warming?
Ron post 21, the last time I checked the city of Portland has no jurisdiction over Clack, Clark and Wash counties. The failings of those counties to do much of anything about their transportation GHG emissions should not be laid at the door step of City and\or Mult Co employees. I don’t see how the City is being misleading to anyone by only counting the sources within its jurisdiction.
You might also want to brush up on the science behind global warming. A ton of CO2 or any other GHG has no impact on our airshed. The effect occurs well above anyone’s airshed and is the same whether the source is Wash Co, or China.
Portland and Multnomah County don’t have any jurisdiction over the bridge either, but that didn’t stop Scam Adams and Rex “GHG” Burkholder from taking a “leadership” position there, so why should it stop them from taking a leadership position on their stated views (i.e., addressing global warming)?
Maybe we’re the leadership. “I’ll fix your wheels..”