Welcome to the week. Here are the most notable news items our community has come across in the past seven days…
Concern trolling tolling: When the Trump Administration says congestion pricing is “elitist” they’re not considering the fact that the revenue goes directly to helping low-income people who rely on public transit. (Vox)
A speed camera option: Gotta’ love it when the head of a driver lobbying group realizes his hatred of speed enforcement cameras leads him to support safer street designs. Sounds good to me! (Route Fifty)
Silver bullet for streets: The more data that comes out of Manhattan since congestion pricing began, the more it seems like a silver bullet for many urban ills, and the more the Trump Administration looks completely out of touch with reality. In this example, we learn that Manhattan’s economy has been humming with fewer drivers on the roads. (Streetsblog NYC)
City budget: On Friday, Portland’s city administrator launched the opening salvo in what will be a very strained conversation about the budget. (OPB)
Tariffs are good, actually?: Just kidding. But I’ll be very interested to see what happens to the vehicle choice decision-making process when/if cars get much more expensive then they already are. (Bloomberg)
ODOT cannot be trusted: The latest example of how ODOT governance is broken and the agency should not be trusted in its current form is a one billion accounting mistake. (Willamette Week)
Walking and talking: As a flaneur and lover of chance public encounters, it’s a bummer to me that folks don’t hang out and chat on city sidewalks as much as they used to. Sidewalks are third spaces and not immune to broad societal shifts that have made folks less likely to linger. (Bloomberg)
Thanks to everyone who sent in links this week. The Monday Roundup is a community effort, so please feel free to send us any great stories you come across.
Thanks for reading.
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In order to hang out and chat on city sidewalks, one must first have sidewalks upon which to hang out.
My streets has zero sidewalks, but luckily little traffic (it’s mostly cut-through traffic to avoid a stop light on the main street) so when I do chat with the neighbors it’s out in the street or even sometimes just yelling at each other across the street from each other! LOL
Back in 2019 HBO had a great short series called the Watchmen, based on a graphic novel from the 80s. You knew it was science fiction because, among other things, in the December 2019 story line everyone was meeting on the street and having face-to-face conversations; people were still reading huge thick competing newspapers even in Tulsa Oklahoma; and no one had any cell phones whatsoever. It was filmed in 2018 with police wearing masks to hide their identities – very ironic given the unknown pandemic was just around the corner.
Where did you find that image? I’d like to take a closer look because I think I see some missing sidewalk that’s not shown.
It’s not the exact same map but I found an interactive version here. It’s from this PedPDX page on the city’s website. I was confused about it initially because there are a lot of sidewalks and missing sections not marked. My assumption is that this is not a complete map of sidewalks but a map of sections along specific corridors, like transit routes, that have or need sidewalks.
Edit: Ya here’s a blog post about it where they talk about making priority tiers.
We’ve discussed this ad nauseam on BP before, but the PBOT statement “In Portland, property owners are responsible for constructing, maintaining, and repairing the sidewalks abutting their property.” was even proven wrong by a 2000 report by PBOT itself that found that many inner Portland “streetcar neighborhoods” had sidewalks (and paved streets) put in and paid for by the (socialist) Federal Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, as well as both earlier and later street projects such as on Barber. Many sidewalks and streets were put in by developers, but we still don’t know the ratio of public projects to private ones, and in many cases the sidewalks in front of your home may have been put in by a developer, but it could also have been put in by the city, the county, the feds, or even ODOT. Apparently no one keeps a database on this, or if PBOT does, it’s missing a lot of data – known unknowns. In East Portland many sidewalks on arterial stroads were put in by the county prior to annexation by the city, and after 2010 the city itself put in many miles of infill sidewalks using city and state money, plus some in Southwest.
The PBOT site also mentions that many built sidewalks are over 100 years old, which is true – if you look closely at many sidewalks, both public agencies and private builders often add markings as to who built it and when – and most concrete used in the USA is a quick-drying concrete that usually stays intact for 80-100 years. Now a lot of it is crumbling and already needs replacing. (There are other versions of concrete that take a much longer time to set and last much longer – the massive Pantheon dome in Rome was built with concrete that took about 30-40 years to complete, course by course, and still stands intact, started in the 80s and completed in the 120s AD, now about 1,900 years old.)
From social media. But the guy that posted it says it’s at ~34:50 here: https://youtu.be/uRm5VztWQX8
“Since average incomes rose among those who lived and worked near all four locations, individuals’ higher value of time could deter them from engaging in leisure activities like casual conversation or strolls that now carry a higher opportunity cost.”
There’s also an abundance of scientific research linking wealth to decreased empathy/compassion.
I have loads of chance encounters with people when I’m out and about, but 9/10 times, it is readily apparent that the person I’m speaking with has much less money than I do, and I am straddling the poverty line. The biggest users of public space are the same folks who are criminalized for existing in them and subject to harassment. That’s when they’re not being treated as invisible.
In product training at my old job, our instructor got called out on a missing feature of his company’s very expensive software. He told us that in sales, you “sell everything up to the ‘but,’”and sometimes it’s a really big “but.”
I’m not holding my breath on this lobbyist. When he says “safer road designs… naturally deter speeding” he is almost certainly leaving out “but fix the potholes first,” and there’s always a pothole.
City budget: I don’t remember the year, 2012 maybe?, that PBOT was faced with 100 layoffs while I was representing East Portland on the PBOT budget advisory committee, with a $16 million deficit. What I do remember is that ultimately, by the time the new budget was passed on June 30th, no PBOT employee was actually given a pink slip – everyone who wanted to remain employed was still employed.
What I learned:
_ It’s important for overall job moral that the city is transparent about the whole budget process. When PBOT does all its cuts in secret (or tries to – leaks are inevitable), everyone gets worried about their jobs and productivity has a massive drop – effectively the threat of 100 job losses equals the equivalent of 300 people suddenly not doing their jobs – and so those whose jobs are NOT under threat really ought to be notified as such.
_ The city spends a lot of money training people to do their job. Aside from worker angst, laying off city employees costs the city a lot of money on the long term and is widely seen as a policy of last resort. It also lowers the moral of those who remain.
_ All city agencies, but particularly infrastructure agencies, generally have a lot of “paper positions” – job positions that don’t actually have people currently occupying them, but will be needed when some future long-delayed capital project finally gets built. Often such agencies can “cut” 20-50 positions (and the budgets for those jobs) without anyone actually losing their job.
_ When a recession hits or some other budget crises, the bureau will switch from doing maintenance work – which involves a lot of asphalt – to doing capital projects with more concrete. So for example some workers will be “cut” from maintenance as asphalt rakers and “hired” for capital projects as concrete trowelers. Job descriptions for many other positions are similarly named, so jobs get switched without actually losing many people.
_ There’s always a few employees about to retire, some others who will take early retirement, some who will quit for that dream job in London, Seattle, or god help them, Fargo ND. There’s a few low-paid people who can get paid time off only when they are “forced” to be laid off, to receive unemployment benefits, and when they are ready to come back, are often readily hired again without the loss of seniority – they negotiate their layoffs in advance with management.
_ The switch from maintenance projects to capital projects is based on using more SDC funding (including from Parks & BES), state STIP and MTIP funds, and other matching funds, including I suppose PCEF funds, so you’ll see a lot of re-allocations of funds from other sources.
_ There’s also the whole “bumping” issue – senior planners at BDS taking positions from planners at say PBOT because they have more years as employees – which causes chaos between agencies, which again the city would prefer to avoid.
_ Finally, Human Resources had a scheme whereby existing city employees could sometimes be allowed to become part-time (instead of 40 hours/week be 32/week or 24/week) with a similar reduction in benefits, but still retain their jobs and seniority. The accumulated savings in FTEs (full time equivalencies) would often save many other employees from cuts.
ODOT. What a time to misplace a billion dollars! When a parent gambles away the rent money you’re kinda screwed, but when a roomie drinks it up you know what to do.
Mr. Brouwer, as the finance head, can’t last long. Kris Strickler is going to wear that minus ten figure price tag for whatever time he remains. The OTC are no doubt shocked, shocked, but this happened on their watch, as well as the governor’s.
It’s time to start getting value out of the money we spend on transportation infrastructure.
Unfortunately these kinds of accounting errors are common for all transportation agencies, be they state, local, transit, federal, and so on. I remember numerous reports from the Portland city auditor making the same complaints about PBOT for not following generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) as used in the corporate world, making increasingly erroneous assumptions about revenue projections, wear-and-tear, the maintenance deficit, and so on – and how it was becoming increasingly impossible for the city to independently verify various claims by PBOT accountants.
A billion dollars is a lot. It’s about 20% of their budget, and just sounds really bad. Is there some function of a finance department to examine the assumptions built into a budget? I know that negativity is not appreciated but maybe they could pass around a hat with bells on it so one person has a license to de-gasify things.
Now they all look like fools.