CD...I'm not the religous sort, but would expect God has bigger issues to deal with than a piddly user tax for a single insignificant city no?

Anon..give me a break. It was California, specifically the regional air quality authority that first forced the auto industry to change its polluting ways. They were both chicken and egg. The industry had no consumer incentive to make cleaner cars and fought new regulations at every step, just like today they have little consumer incentive to make cars with better mileage, which is why the government just passed updated CAFE standards, again over the objections of auto makers. Don't rewrite history here okay?

No wants want to play in dirty water, true enough, but industries that were dumping waste into public waterways had no reason to clean up their act until they were forced to do so. In point of fact, if one factory invested millions to clean their water, while their competitor up or downstream did not do so, the cleaner one would likely lose market share, not gain it. It is called the tragedy of the commons. Look it up. Rivers are no longer catching fire because of regulations passed by liberals against the foot-dragging and gloom and doom projections of conservatives. Global warming policy resistance is simply a repeat performance.

My $3000 bike comment was aimed at Jerry's proposal. Your argument on that point is with him, not me, though I like his idea.

Maybe an SUV with 4 passengers is "greener" than a partly loaded bus...I don't know. But few SUVs have 4 passengers at any given time, and few buses are fully loaded, so I really don't get your point. I don't know of any reliable data anywhere that shows cars are greener than transit measured overall. Enlighten us.

Anon...thanks for the enlightening. I know you did not mean to , but you now have presented a good argument for electric light rail and streetcars.

Also...do you really want to exchange that one bus for 32 SUVs, all things considered?

Anon...do you also amortize the energy costs of building roads and bridges and maintaining them into your assumptions about cars? ODOT is burning a lot of diesel right now keeping the passes clear.

Mel...I agree the wear is "negligible" per trip, and may be not measurable between passenger vehicles, but what about cummulatively? Most Portland streets are local and do not have heavy trucks on them except the ocasional moving truck. Yet they still must be repaved ever so often. Part of that is simply weather, sun, and so forth, but part is wearing down no?

On bikes...Amsterdam has a similar climate and significantly more cycling year around. As infrastructure increases, and cycling becomes safer, it will continue to grow here. Yes, winter cycling takes extra gear and fortitude, but is quite doable in Portland. I cycle comuted for 11 years from Portland to Gresham, cutting down to only a few days a week in winter, picking my spots between storms. My experience suggests you are underestimating the potential.

As for cleaner air...I'll say it again. It was big government forcing the car companies to install catalytic converters, forcing the petrol companies to drop lead, and so forth. And....there is only so much room on our strets for people driving their own cars everywhere.

Bottom line, and back to the original post. Portland and other communties have a lot of streets to maintain with a diminishing gas tax. Its alaways easy to argue they should allocate existing resources more efficiently or differently, but there are voting constituencies for the other services they fund, including cyclists.

Anon...yep...I'm on a farm. Locally the sprawl was stopped by the state land use system in the 70s. My house was built in the 20s, as was my neighbors.

And yes...my farm could end up growing condos or single family homes or something else yet to be determined now that it is inside the urban growth boundary. Though with the subprime meltdown, who knows?

Portland and the entire metro area chose higher density over sprawl in the 90s when the 2040 plan was developed. People were asked to choose between low density sprawl, high density (no UGB expansion) and a corridor and center plan that called for higher densities along major road/transit corridors and centers, like historic downtown Gresham. This plan included modest UGB expansions. The public response strongly favored door number 3, and that is more or less the plan we have been following since. And...we have time and again elected officials at all levels who basically support that plan.

You may not like it, but that is reality in Portland.

I have checked housing prices ad hoc for years. Prices in Portland for rowhouses with no yard match those for ranch houses (similar square footage) in Damascus on an acre. Portland's new condos, skinny homes, and rowhouses have sold like hotcakes. Yes, some families who want more space for less money move farther out, which has always been the case. But the tens of thousands of older Portland homes on 5000 square foot lots were large enough to raise large families in the past, and they are still large enough for the smaller families of today.

How would you go about "adding capacity" to SE Division street, Burnside, Stark, Macadam Avenue, Corbett, NW 23rd, Alberta, and countless existing streets that are hemmed in by buildings? What neighborhood would you drive a new freeway through?

I was downtown today and 2 things caught my eye. The first was the number of bicycles at teh PSU campus, even in the dead of winter. The second was a packed to the gills Max train headed out of town at 6:30 PM. I tried to imagine all those cyclists and all those Max riders in individual cars and what that would do to traffic. Not pretty.

Higher density, increased transit, and increased cycling are all logical and inevitable consequences of growth in a finite world, with or without urban growth boundaries.

Anon...no, we never voted directly on the 2040 plan, but there were many opportunities for citizens to express their preference, and tens of thousands did so. I am a critic of Metro when they do public involvement and don't bother actually listening to what people say, but in this case they did listen and the plan reflected what they heard. For many people it was the lesser of 3 evils.

The measure they promoted about not increasing density in neighborhoods was a response to problems that croped up when the city of Portland planners drew up plans that would have displaced single family homes with rowhouses in several areas, including Sellwood, Multnomah, and Albina. They redirected the focus to corridors and centers, which are not single family neighborhoods. For example, the Clackamas Town center is now being tansformed into a mixed use area with higher density housing, offices and other uses.

As for Oregonians in Action, the problem with ballot measure solutions is they never account for the down side. Cut taxes, but don't bother identifying what services to cut. Provide retroactive property rights but don't deal with what happens to the neighbors of new subdivisions and gravel pits. Limit density but don't mention the sprawl that will result. Single issue measures are a bad way to make public policy.

State land use regulations require all the 26 cities of the Portland Metro area to have new development built at average densities of 6-10 units per acre. As I understand it, this is a result of a negotiated agreement between all these cities that dates back to 1981.

I expect most citizens, including myself, prefer lower density living. If we put it to a vote we would probably vote against growth...period. Parts of the country have zero or negative propulation growth and declining economies, but we happen to be a place that has high growth and a vibrant economy, so we have to decide how we want to deal with it. Any path we choose has tradeoffs.

Sure...most of Oregon is open space, and is likely to remain so whether we opt for sprawl or density. I think the point is not "most of Oregon" but the Portland Metro area, where we have 1/2 the population of the state living in perhaps 1/100th of the land area. And the land area the surrounds the region has some of the highest productivity agriculture anywhere in the nation, let alone the state.

We all make our individual choices. I still ride my bike for more than pleasure...exercise being top of the list. If I did not have a home-farm based business, I would be commuting by bicycle now, and would take adavantage of the safer infrastructure than existed a decade ago.

My point on the train being packed was not that there were no cars around. My point is that without the train (or bus) all those people would have added to the cars on the already crowded road.

When you say the train capacity equals 4-5 cars an hour, are those 4-5 cars stuck in traffic or moving freely at legal speed? I find these arguments against transit tedious frankly. They posit a world of freely moving cars in an urban environment that simply does not and cannot exist. In LA the average freeway speed is something like 19 MPH, and this is where we are headed in Portland. You did not address my comment about where you would add all this road capacity, even if you had the money to do so. Who's neighborhood would you sacrifice?

Chris...sure engineers can design any structure you want for a price. Marquam and Freemont bridges are both double deckers, but for limited distances. A double deck running the length of I-84 would be a 10 or 15 mile bridge. That is a bit spendy, whether you use a napkin or an advanced CAD system. And yes, one can engineer a bridge on soft silts that will withstand an earthquake, but again at very high cost. And I'll repeat...what do you do with all those cars AFTER they exit? Surface streets are limited in width and can't be made wider without cutting into already very small Portland blocks.

I've never advocated for cars or suburbs to "go away," and have no expectation they will do so. I do support designing neighborhoods, streets, towns and districts that are easy to walk and cycle in, and I do support transit. I don't view this as either/or, but rather as all of the above. Like my Greek ancestors said, everything in moderation.

Anon...it would take 10 times the amount of rail we have built and free tickets to "relieve" congestion. The bottom line is that in big cities, like what Portland is rapidly becoming, traffic is always a problem no matter how much transit you build. Portland's traffic is a symptom of its growth and maturity, and we will never be able to have free flowing roads in a region of well over a million people. Big cities without traffic are dying cities, like Detroit and Cleveland.

I stated that I like what I am seeing in the places I mentioned, I did not say I was advocating that those neighborhoods and communities develop in any particular way. I agree with you that it should be up to local neighborhoods to figure out their own future. But, local decisions should be made within a larger context, meaning that if we don't want to see the urban growth boundary expanded too much, we in our local neighborhoods need to be willing to accept some density increase as our fair share of the burden.

When I lived in Sellwood I joined my neighbors in opposing upzoning that resulted in fine older houses being torn down to make way for cheap rowhouses. After a lot of discussion, a compromise was agreed to that focused increased density along the main corridors like Tacoma, 13th, Milwaukie, and so forth. This made sense because most of the buildings are cheaply built one story structures. Replacing these with 2-4 story buildings is economical, allows more frequent bus service, and provides more customers for more stores and cafes.

This pattern was extended to other Portland neighborhoods, like Division, Hawthorne, NW 23rd, and so forth. Some suburbs have adapted these ideas, notably Lake Oswego and Hillsboro in their downtowns.

I don't know of any communities where rezoning has been voted upon. I have advocated that here in Damascus, given the magnitude of the change we are facing, that the citizens be allowed at least an advisory vote on whatever plan eventually emerges.

In the very good old days there was no zoning. But some property owners built things that were noisy, gave off odors, or blocked out the sun. London burned to the ground in the 17th century because of crowded, shoddy buildings in an unregulated boom market. So citeis found they needed zoning, and we now live in more complex circumstances. Cest la vis.