Coming out of a campaign season in which the major issues were homelessness, homelessness and homelessness, it might come as a surprise to many people that a big part of a City Councilor’s job is about, well, pipes.
More properly, infrastructure — water, stormwater, sewage and right-of-way. Infrastructure takes up 50% of the city budget, but until things stop working, most Portlanders rarely think about it. As long as the toilet flushes and water comes out of the tap tasting fine, we’re good.
But I’ve yet to see a better introduction to the workings of the city than the presentation given by the Public Works Bureaus —Transportation, Water and Environmental Services — to the City Council last Thursday as part of Council’s Public Works work session. To anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Portland, including budget issues, tuning into the first 90 minutes of this session is well worth your time.
For a BikePortland reader, the most important information presented was that Portland’s roads face a severe maintenance backlog. But you knew that already, right?
What made me sit up straight during Thursday’s session was that the alarm finally seemed to impress the council as a whole. In the past, we’ve had individual commissioners-in-charge sounding-off about maintenance backlogs, but those concerns were easier to disregard in a fragmented council in which each commissioner had their own competing budget worries. In contrast, this session showed representatives from each of the four districts fully engaged and weighing in on the issues which concerned both their constituents and the city as a whole. Infrastructure was everybody’s business.
“Director Williams, I would say, don’t apologize for saying we don’t have enough money, scream at the top of your lungs, ‘We don’t have enough money’ with a lot of expletives attached, because that is the case.”
– Steve Novick, city councilor
The hearing also offered an early glimpse of Portland’s reorganized bureaucracy. In this instance, Interim Deputy City Administrator Priya Dhanapal, charged with the Public Works Service Area, led the Bureau Directors under her watch through a coordinated joint presentation. Similarly, on the City Council side, the meeting was ably facilitated by President Elana Pirtle-Guiney. This might not mean much to folks who have never attended council meetings in the past, but to anyone who has, last week’s session was remarkable for its clarity and professionalism.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Portland really does have an alarming infrastructure backlog. Let’s dive in.
The bureau presentations
There is a lot to know about the guts of city operations, and the bureaus did a fine job of making what could be an overwhelming amount of information more accessible.
The three slides above bring the financial crisis into focus. The middle graphic shows that the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) has faced growing budget cuts over recent years, and has eliminated all of its financial reserves. The pie chart shows the budget.
The Council questions
I’ll let a selection of excellent questions and comments from Council speak for themselves, starting with Steve Novick, the Councilor most knowledgeable about Portland’s street network.
Novick was the Commissioner-in-charge of PBOT during his first term on council, from 2013 to 2016, and he is responsible for introducing the Fixing Our Streets ten-cent gas tax. His powerful comments came at the very end of the meeting:
The condition of the streets that you see now is the result of 30 years of neglect by the administrations of Bud Clark, Vera Katz, Tom Potter and Sam Adams, who completely neglected street maintenance, because it takes a while for street maintenance neglect to show up. They knew what was going on and they decided to do nothing—as opposed to the electeds in surrounding jurisdictions who recognized that the money they were getting from the state and the feds wasn’t enough to maintain the streets and they adopted local funding sources.
We did not do that until I and Charlie Hales took a measure to the ballot passing a 10-cent gas tax in 2016. But at that point the maintenance deficit was so big that it was like applying a bandaid to a machete wound. I said at the time, ‘this will slow the bleeding a bit, but it is not going to stop it’ …
Roads are like teeth, if you don’t do regular brushing and cleaning, then you are into root canals and extractions, which are a lot more painful and much more expensive …
Director Williams, I would say, don’t apologize for saying we don’t have enough money, scream at the top of your lungs, ‘We don’t have enough money’ with a lot of expletives attached, because that is the case. As to some of the streets in the West and the East being gravel, my assumption is that if we don’t get a huge amount of money, most of the streets in Portland are going to be gravel in another 40 years.
Novick’s remarks were the culmination of a line of questions initiated by the Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair, Olivia Clark, who commented about sidewalks and stormwater. Eric Zimmerman continued in this vein with remarks about the
gravel delivered to my property, to put out where normally a sidewalk would go … What is it going to take to expire the mindset, particularly in east Portland, but also in west Portland, that if you want a road, you and your neighbors have to pay for it? … that old mindset that we applied to the places we annexed 40 years ago? … I think what a tremendous difference we could make 40 years from now, if we just dedicated ourselves to [building] one mile of road per year.
Ultimately, it was District 3’s Sameer Kanal who asked the most concise question, “Why do we not take responsibility as a city for sidewalks, as a lot of major cities do, and how can we fix that?”
PBOT Director Millicent Williams responded to Zimmerman and Kanal:
When I moved to the City of Portland, I was unclear about homeowners and property owners having the responsibility of paving streets … expiring that is something that I would be delighted to see us do. But that would take the interest and investment of the political capital that you have to change the policies, codes, rules, laws … Growth, when it happens, requires a lot more planning and intentionality than people assume.
That is an historical challenge that we have… I hate to use that we can’t afford it as the excuse for everything, but it is a very expensive venture. Sidewalks are very expensive, I’d love to do a mile a year, but a mile, depending on how complex it is, is a million dollars, and that’s just pavement. That doesn’t include the stormwater, it doesn’t include the drainage … The hope is that we could look at some strategies to create this more complete network of streets and sidewalks.
This was the most straightforward discussion about Portland’s roads that I have heard from Council. Frankly, it was cathartic. We seem to be entering a period of honest reckoning about what it truly costs to properly maintain our roadways — and bring them, across the city, to a safe standard.
And what about bicycles?
Councilor Zimmerman began his comments by revealing that he was shopping around for an e-bike. And he brought up his concern about the recent bill introduced in the state legislature to regulate e-bikes in bike lanes, “as somebody who has some hills between me and my workplace, for me it’s a non-starter, it also makes me question moving into that market.”
Then he used the opportunity to ask Director Williams, “I always thought that the idea was to make it easier to get into that mode of transportation, rather than protecting it for the die-hards. I’m curious about your thoughts.” The exchange was lengthy, I have excerpted some of it:
Williams: For the City of Portland, we intend to continue to allow e-bikes to access the bike lanes. What does that mean for the design of the bike lanes for the future? Would we be looking at wider to create more space for the different types of users, potentially. There are lots of opportunities for us to evaluate how to support members of communities who are seeking to make that shift. And doing so without an excuse around ‘it’s too hard, or it’s too fast, or it’s too different’ … Today, are we prohibiting e-bikes from being in bike lanes? No. In the future, that will depend.
Zimmerman: I hope the answer is ‘no.’ I think that bike lanes and e-bikes go together. I don’t know what the answer is in regard to the Senator’s, “what is a moped?”
Williams: I will share that one of the initiatives that was funded through the PCEF investment through PBOT was the intentional cleaning of bike lanes. Part of that was driven by that there was going to be an investment in e-bikes…one of the deterrents to people using e-bikes is their concern about the cleanliness of the bike lane.
Today’s session was for the entire Council. Expect a meeting of the Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee sometime in February.
Thanks for reading.
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Good time to charge people to rent parking spaces around the city!
Kiel, I’ve added an exchange between Williams and Zimmerman about bicycles at the bottom of the post. Zimmerman is in the market for an e-bike, and asks about the City’s commitment to allowing e-bikes in bike lanes.
If we’re looking for something to eliminate, I’d nominate applying gravel to streets during snowstorms. I know that represents a tiny fraction of the amount needed, but consider it one item on the list.
Given a choice, I’d rather have gritty gravel in my chains and tires than the rock salt they put on streets out here in North Carolina every winter. Salt more rapidly rusts my chain, drivetrain, anything with steel in it, plus it’s horrible for the environment.
That ship has sailed here in Portland, David. When you lived here, there was a ban on using salt on roads. But after a couple of hellacious snowstorms here in recent years, the salt is back on the roads – and especially on private sidewalks and parking lots. It’s basically everywhere, so bikes and the environment be damned. Oregon is North Carolina now.
Sure, but here we can just let the snow melt.
They do that here in NC too. in the fallwinterspring season from late November through February, we get a few weeks of “cold” – sometimes down to the 20s at night plus maybe some snow or ice – followed by 60s a 2-3 weeks later, in regular cycles. Not as much rain as in Oregon though during the winter, much drier here, our rain is usually during the hot humid summer and early fall hurricanes.
I agree with Lisa; it is good that all the bureaus under this umbrella presented how they work together, how broke they are, to a new council structure… the new structure eliminates commissioners snarling over cutting ‘their’ part of a shrinking pie, and forces them to think how to get all these overlapping responsibilities working as a whole.
The bad part is that the new council has few ways to fix this. Bond measures and tax increases are either not going to fly, or will simply not be enough. The Feds won’t be giving us cash anytime soon (though they might fund the Rose Quarter expansion to spite Portland).
I assume basic maintenance will take precedence for some time over new projects. That’s bad for my neighborhood, but probably best for re-election hopes and the budget alike.
“they might fund the Rose Quarter expansion to spite Portland”
If Trump finds out about Albina Vision, he’ll pull the plug on the RQ project in a heartbeat.
And don’t forget your feelings about the project may not reflect those of the city as a whole.
I made no mention of ‘my feelings.’ Opposition to RQ lanes is fairly widespread in groups Orange Julius apparently dislikes, and he likes to punish those he dislikes. Not a value judgement on anything but him. It will be interesting whether making more room for cars is more important to his minions than punishing restitution efforts.
As a cyclist, agree the gravel sucks. As someone who traverses areas higher than 500′ regularly it sometimes allows me to get somewhere otherwise inaccesible, by car or foot.
restitution efforts for something that happened 50 years ago?
I think they do. The RQ project is mainly about shortening commutes to and from Clark County, and allowing freight interests to get THROUGH Portland quickly. I know it’s complicated but I’ll bet you a donut or a dollar that most people in Portland itself are against freeway-widening projects.
Also thanks for the tip about Albina Vision. The NMF folks are on the phone to the White House right now.
I’d take your donuts and raise you a bagel that most Portlanders aren’t even aware of what’s happening with this project, and don’t really care. It is possible they are against “highway widening” in the abstract, but this has always been pitched as a safety project, and I’d be willing to throw in a danish that they like the idea of safer highways. I’d also kick in a scone that the political details are completely above Trump’s paygrade and he thinks the way to punish a blue state is to defund a project they’ve been pushing for.
Tell Trump to kill the woke highway, and he probably will.
It’s quite expensive to maintain oil in a solid state (asphalt). Portland is essentially bankrupt and has given so much money away .
What is more important, having a safe comfortable place to walk and cross the street, or having concrete sidewalks with curbs and gutters?
Six thousand summers ago when my family moved halfway across the country to a house on mature, quiet cul-de-sac, the street was gravel. I vividly remember the gutter, curb, and pavement construction, as well as my parents explaining that they paid their share (through what I later understood to be assessments) by the time school resumed in autumn.
I don’t know what promises were made to the gravel street homeowners, but I have known that there are no free lunches for this since I was only six years old.
If you have had the experience of hearing chunks of city pavement rumble under your tires, you know that many streets are in bad shape. Just spitballing answers, I’d be looking into dedicated employee crews working contiguous sections, assembly line style, and trading the city’s pet “process” for ruthless efficiency—it’s going to be painful for someone anyway, so just get it over with.
Also, it’s kinda lame of Novick to throw Adams under the bus. I was a new Portlander at the time but I can remember the mayor pitching cost-effective ideas for paving streets at a lower cost. People didn’t want them.
Sounds like Eric Zimmerman didn’t understand the explanation in the BP story (good that he reads BP) about Class 2 e-bikes (max speed 20 mph) and Class 3 e-bikes (max speed 28 mph). No one’s talking about banning Class 2 e-bikes from bike lanes, so he can be confident about buying a Class 2 e-bike.
The Prozanski bill is all about banning Class 3 (really fast) e-bikes from bike lanes and MUPs. Or do I have that wrong? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Zimmerman’s comments seem to indicate that he thinks the Prozanski bill would ban ALL e-bikes, and therefore he shouldn’t buy one. I think he should buy one!
David asks a great question:
When travelling through Beaverton, Tigard and other points west, I often see an asphalt walkway adjacent to the road. Usually these simply drain into adjoining soil or drainage ditch, Portland, it seems refuses to do this. Is it because they are no longer allowed by Feds? While cheaper to build, are continuing maintenance costs the issue? Or does Portland prefer to build concrete sidewalks and then stick the adjacent property with all maintenance. 🙂
The biggest issue is likely runoff. While a curbless path seems less likely to need all the infrastructure a sidewalk does, I don’t think Portland will build anything w/out a curb, which concentrates runoff to a collection point and requires treatment of various kinds. They worry just letting runoff soak in will cause landslides. I think the Alpenrose MUP was luckily covered by all the work needed to deal with new sanitary and stormwater.
Don’t get me started on how PBOT and BES will happily find a way to get ALL the retention/treatment they need for a parking lot and a vast roof, but routinely refuse to toss in a few hundred feet more capacity to allow a pedestrian path!
So, as far as I know, that safe and comfortable place to walk and cross the street IS a concrete sidewalk with curbs. At least in Portland.
Also agree with Champs; Novick blamed all the progressive mayors for ruining the streets, but Mr. Genius and ChooChoo Charlie tried to save the day! Too bad Charlie pretty much abandoned the city on everything else.
When I’m in Europe, both in towns and in rural areas, I and most other people there often walk in the street rather than the all-too-narrow sidewalks when they exist. I rarely came across European cities with wide sidewalks (Paris being an unusual exception). Even in Rome people walk in the street. But of course the walkable streets there are very different – lots of traffic calming features that severely limit how fast even a drunk driver can go – roads are much narrower, car parking even further limits road width, and drivers are more used to seeing pedestrians and cyclists on the road.
Here in North Carolina in the suburbs, sidewalks are rare, but lots of people still walk, for exercise, take the dog out, kids playing in the street. It’s not ideal, particularly if you are bicycling, but it’s not bad either, and a few communities are trying to make the walking environment safer by also adding traffic-calming rather than build (expensive) sidewalks.
If Portland built 1 mile of new sidewalks every year, which includes (in many cases) curbs, gutters, storm sewers, utility lines, (and in SW drainage ponds), roughly $5-$10 million per mile, it will take the city approximately 50 years just to complete the current network, and since most sidewalks use quick-drying cement that is designed to last 80-100 years when they start to crumble, the older sidewalks will meanwhile need to be replaced as well. Can you really wait that long?
The alternative (aside from doing nothing, the current modus operandi) is to aggressively traffic-calm city streets so that anyone can walk, bike, and (very slowly) drive on them, generally a far cheaper strategy, but politically a heavier lift.
PBOT is saying they have no funds for traffic-calming, except under Fixing Our Streets/Safe Routes To School – and those are on the chopping block to varying extent. They don’t have money for enough speed boards to go around. There are some legacy SRTS traffic calming projects funded and awaiting installation, but I’d wager those monies go elsewhere “for now” on some of them.
You’d also need to have enforcement to prevent the asshole neighbors who blow down my street at 30+ in a 20 zone.
So – no sidewalks, no speed bumps, no enforcement. Anything else we can suggest councilmembers ask PBOT about?
Ironically, broke as PBOT is, they will not accept cash payments from residents who want to install speed bumps to make their streets safer for everyone who uses them.
Equity. I understand; why should the well-off be the only safe people? I do think they should have a ‘buy-one-get-one’ policy, where if your neighborhood wants to pay for speedbumps it at least has to put in money towards another neighborhood.
Everyone using the street benefits, and no one anywhere is even a tiny bit disadvantaged.
Equity that brings everyone down is harmful.
(I have no problem with an additional payment into a fund for speed bumps in other neighborhoods, though I think the notion that this is only for “rich” neighborhoods is mistaken. Adding an additional cost burden will merely push the program out of reach for some otherwise interested communities, resulting in less safety for everyone.)
I dont disagree – but sometimes you need to get past people who prefer saying good things as opposed to getting good things done. Consider it activating their Robin Hood complex.
How about changing the street design standards so that 18-foot wide tree-lined streets without center-yellow striping or suicide lanes are the preferred norm rather than the exception?
Create a city-wide shovel-ready plan to add diverters to slow traffic within neighborhoods and to push through-traffic to arterial and collector stroads?
Add gravel shoulders to any street that lacks curbs and sidewalks but where the existing right-of-way allows for sidewalks?
Officially ban any stroad that has two or more lanes in any one direction?
Create a city-wide parking permit program?
Ban parking on all arterial stroadways and replace them with bus express lanes on stroads with bus routes, and buffered bike lanes on those without bus service?
Are you trolling? LOL. No, I agree, but that means weaning the city engineers off the f*cking AASHTO manuals, and on to manuals that emphasize safety for ALL modes, not just the dumbass hurtling past the fogline who might get a booboo if he hits something NOT a pedestrian or cyclist.
Yeah, plus a lot of medium-sized European cities (e.g. Montpellier, France and Groningen, NL) have gone almost 100% car-free, and it makes a lot of the narrow sidewalks (for streets that haven’t been renovated yet) look ridiculous. It might take 50 years, but Portland will get there eventually (car-free center city and commercial centers, extreme traffic calming and diversion everywhere else). Sidewalks are outdated car infrastructure
There are some streets in Portland that have an curbless pedestrian area (Beaverton Hillsdale Highway comes to mind). I think they probably feel like it’s only a last-ditch thing to use in places where a future sidewalk is exceedingly unlikely for a variety of reasons. Evidently, lots of un-sidewalked streets in East/SW Portland could do this kind of thing (like this bit of SE Mill), but on narrower streets I imagine parking is a primary concern rather than safe pedestrian travel.
And get rid of all those mature trees? If I lived there, I’d be a hard no.
Maybe it wasn’t clear, I just meant delineating a pedestrian path on the side of the road by removing parking on one side. No tree removal needed for that
Exactly like SE Mill between 82nd & 86th, a prime example of a traffic-calmed street without speed humps – instead it has excellent tree canopy and no yellow line down the center. When I lived in East Portland and biked to downtown, I used it quite often. It’s 18 feet wide, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. I wonder, what’s the 85th percentile speed on it? I bet it’s well under 25 mph.
There is also the issue of aging (failing) water and sewer lines. These contribute to potholes and pavement issues as well. Parts of the central eastside have piping nearing or exceeding 100 years old, and it’s crumbling.
We have oodles of money in Portlandia. We just spend it in the wrong places.
LOL, here we go again. Cry me a river.
Those poor poor babies at the bureaus have spent years ignoring maintenance (by instruction from our past elected clowns) so that the elected officials can claim some splashy project (that they magically found money for) was theirs for their next re-election campaign.
Maybe our elected officials should place a moratorium on new projects across all bureaus and focus on catching up on maintenance. This would mean eliminating jobs that don’t do maintenance or help those that do. Bet a ton of money would become available.
Then when maintenance is caught up, and a yearly maintenance schedule is in place, then and only then do new projects get looked at.
Yeah, a pipe dreams as our politicians like ribbon cutting ceremonies more.
If you take a step back and look at our personal transportation system through an economic lens, it is clear that the overriding organizing principle of the entire system is wealth extraction. It is as expensive as the “market,” i.e., personal, state and federal pocket books can tolerate in the short term. From the tools that we use to move around to the overbuilt infrastructure that is required to accommodate the size and harms of the tools, the cost is unsustainable. Money floods out of the local economy to purchase fossil fuels, fossil fuel burners, overbuilt e-vehicles, materials to build and quickly rebuild disintegrating infrastructure, and insurance to manage the never-ending harm caused by the system. There has never been a serious long term plan to deal with this constant loss of resources, nor has there been a legitimate effort to create economic sustainability.
Bringing more capital into the system through taxes or federal grants is a short term bandaid, at best. We need to have a very serious conversation about creating a transportation system with a lower rate of self-destruction that requires, constant massive rebuilding. We need to recognize that there is no place for limitless personal vehicle over indulgence in a sustainable transportation system.
The first step is something that will be broadly embraced by our current council; a planning session/ committee/ presentation on what an economically sustainable system would even look like. A discussion that is free from the knee jerk motonormative reflex to believe that there is no way out of the status quo. This needs to happen now. Not after they spend another couple of years begging for money to double down on our current failed system.