Archive for September, 2007

Three months under our belt, we feel like we just began, so we figured why not have a launch party?! On Monday, October 22nd from 3-7p we will celebrate the launch and rapid growth of EcoShuttle, to celebrate a vision to revolutionize the travel habits, our community’s sustainable practices, and the measures to protect the environment. Complimentary organic wines and other beverages will be available with some hors d’oeuvres. The event is free and open to the public. Located at:

Hotel DeLuxe
729 SW 15th Ave, The Editing Room
Portland, Oregon 97205

Continental Breakfast + Be a tourist in your own city

For POVA members only, a specially-designed City Tour sponsored by POVA, Raz Transportation and Plans & Action. The tour will begin and end at OMSI’s south parking lot (look for the Raz motorcoach). You will see sights you may not have seen before - Chinatown, Old Town, Pearl District, Nob Hill, the International Test Rose Garden, and Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The consensus is in. Driving around in Portland is a long and uneventful waste of time. Articles recently published in the Oregonian (see previous blog) report that Portlanders spend at least 38 hours in traffic in one year. That’s 38 hours staring at the tailpipe in front of you as it spews toxins into your air supply. That’s 38 hours a year you spend in a stressful situation. 38 hours that I’d rather have back.

Clearly, the solution lies in an innovative transportation model that eliminates this conundrum. Regrettably there is a moratorium in place barring all new transportation companies from picking up and dropping off in downtown Portland and at PDX. (more…)

Transit, shorter commutes limit the city’s relative misery, a national study shows

Portlanders benefit from efforts to reduce sprawl.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007
DYLAN RIVERA
The Oregonian

Rush-hour traffic clogs the nation’s cities more than ever, but the Portland area appears to be fighting the growth in misery behind the wheel better than many regions.

Portland-area motorists were delayed 38 hours in 2005 because of rush-hour congestion — about 14 percent less than the 44 hours a year average for the nation’s top 85 metro areas.

Take away our mass transit, and the region’s congestion delay would be 21 percent longer.

The results of a Texas Transportation Institute study released Tuesday also confirm what many veterans of stop-and-go interstate headaches already know: The Portland-area’s rush-hour commute moves in relative slow motion. Streets and highways move traffic 29 percent slower during rush hour than they do in nonpeak times, a rate that almost exactly matches the average for the 85 biggest regions.

That puts Portland’s rush-hour pain in league with some very big cities — we just experience our pain over shorter distances traveled more slowly.

The same report caused local disbelief in 2003, when it ranked the Portland area’s congestion worse than Seattle’s. But the Texas A&M University analysts took a year off to refine their research methods. This year, Seattle ranked higher, meaning more delay, than Portland on the report’s main indicators.

But rankings don’t capture the daily toll commuting exacts on the region’s motorists, who suffered a collective 33.7 million hours of rush-hour traffic delay in 2005.

Autumn Hayball of Sandy on Tuesday morning drove down Burnside Street from Gresham to her job at AIG Insurance in downtown’s KOIN Center. A radio station had warned of trouble on Interstate 84, so she took Burnside as an alternative.

“A couple months ago, a big milk tanker dumped over, and we were out there forever,” she said. “You’ve jut got to hope that your boss is OK with you being late every now and then.”

This year’s report appears to affirm the region’s compact growth policies and transit investments, said David Bragdon, president of the Metro Council, which governs Portland-area land-use and transportation planning. It doesn’t mean traffic is nonexistent in the Portland area but it’s growing at a slower rate than elsewhere, he said.

An average Portland-area commuter’s 38 hours of delay in 2005 was 15 percent more time slogging through traffic than in 1995. In the nation’s 85 largest metro areas, average hours of delay per traveler grew by 22 percent to 44 hours in the same decade.

“We can’t say, ‘Gee, things are better here than 30 years ago,’ because that’s not true,” Bragdon said. “But we are performing better than most other metropolitan areas our size.”

Congestion has touched every urbanized corner of the nation. And it has crept up in regions of all sizes and shapes.

In 2005 alone, it caused urban Americans to collectively travel 4.2 billion hours more and buy 2.9 billion gallons of gas to do so. And it sliced $78.2 billion from the nation’s economy in gasoline expenditure and commuters’ time.

“Congestion’s getting worse: It affects more areas, more neighborhoods,” said Tim Lomax, a research engineer and co-author of the study.

The study ranks 85 urban areas of the nation along a variety of measures of congestion and transportation efficiency. Overall it surveys 427 urban areas.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach and San Francisco-Oakland regions had the worst congestion, with 72 hours and 60 hours per motorist per year, respectively. Spokane and Brownsville, Texas, tied for 84th, with just eight hours of delay per year per traveler.

Considered an authoritative look at rush-hour congestion nationwide, the report plays into ongoing debates over whether the nation should raise gas or other taxes to relieve bottlenecks and maintain an aging, out-of-date infrastructure.

Congestion relief doesn’t just mean making mornings and afternoons less stressful: The time of rush-hour delays means real money. One Portland economist estimates that short commute times for motorists save the Portland area $2.6 billion a year, boosting the metro area’s annual economic output by 3 percent.

“Rush hour” has expanded in Portland from 4.8 hours a day in 1982 to 7.6 hours a day in 2005.

Transit use helps ease the rush-hour headache — significantly in the Portland area, the Texas study said.

Buses, MAX trains and streetcars saved the region 6.7 million hours of rush-hour delay — placing Portland 13th in the nation in savings because of public transportation use. That means Portland saved more hours than larger areas such as Denver, ranked No. 17, and San Jose, Calif., No. 21.

Even Houston, with a far larger population, ranked only No. 14 — that’s despite the many thousands of people a day who use its huge bus system.

A Portland-area commuter’s average 38 hours a year of congestion delay would be eight hours longer — 46 hours a year total — if buses and rail service halted tomorrow. That includes the cumulative effect of more riders adding more congestion to the roads, Lomax said.

“TriMet’s ridership is huge compared to cities our size,” said Andy Cotugno, planning director for the Metro regional government. “We’ve got twice the number of riders that we should have.”

The study judges congestion in two key ways. Portland rates poorly in one and better in another.

First, the study compares rush-hour travel time with travel time in off-peak hours. Portland’s index of 1.29 means a trip that would take 20 minutes at noon would take 25.8 minutes in rush hour.

On that measure, Portland ranked No. 21, relatively high for the No. 25 metro area by population. But Seattle ranked even worse at No. 17, in a three-way tie with Baltimore and Orlando, Fla.

Seattle had an index of 1.30, meaning a 20-minute trip would take 26 minutes.

Does that mean we’re as bad off as Seattle again?

Not really, Cotugno said. That’s because Portland-area commuters have shorter distances to travel, he said.

“If you’re driving on that freeway system in Seattle you’re driving probably 50 percent longer distances than you are here,” he said. “Even if you’re stuck in congestion, you’re doing it for fewer hours a day than they are elsewhere.”

A second, more popular measure of congestion makes the Portland area look more favorable. The “annual delay per traveler” estimates the extra travel time during morning and afternoon rush-hour periods, divided by the number of motorists at those times.

Portland-area drivers, with 38 hours a year in delay, ranked No. 33 out of 85 metro areas. For a region ranked No. 25 by population, that’s a relatively good result. Areas with more hours of congestion per traveler ranked higher: Seattle, with 45 hours of congestion ranked No. 19.

So what’s better, to be in a place like Atlanta or Houston, where freeway speeds send commuters farther faster? Or a more compact place like Portland, New York or Chicago, where trips are slower but shorter?

“The shorter tends to overwhelm the slower in my mind,” Lomax said. “The closeness of where you start and where you wind up means you actually spend less time on the road than say if you were in Atlanta.”

Dylan Rivera: 503-221-8532, dylanrivera@news.oregonian.com

©2007 The Oregonian

There were a couple articles this week on the front page of the Oregonian by Dylan Rivera that showed that you waste a week’s worth of work due to sitting in traffic, 38 hours to be exact. Now that study was in 2005, and if you’re driving in the same traffic I am at peak hours, I can already tell it’s getting worse every time I hit a rush hour in this city. If they did a September 2007 study, I’m sure it’d be well over 40 hours a year.

(more…)

New York City is making a substantial effort to reduce their level of greenhouse gasses and harmful toxins that pollute the city’s air. Could they be catching up to Oregon as one of the leaders in the green revolution?

According to the Christian Science Monitor, a small cooperative in Manhatten’s lower east side is using a Biodiesel blend to create the building’s heat supply. The city plans to follow suit by heating all the city buildings with a 20% Biodiesel blend (B20) by 2012. (more…)

-By LAUREN L. DILLARD
Of the News-Register

More than 14,000 members of Yamhill County’s nonfarm workforce commute to jobs outside the county every morning, according to Pam Ferrara of the state Department of Employment.

Nearly 2,400 head to Multnomah County, bound largely for Portland, and 7,000 to Washington County, bound for Hillsboro, Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin and points between, said Ferrara, a workforce analyst for Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties.

And almost to a one, they wish there was an easier, quicker way. After all, it would be nice to get a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning.

Options include private cars, YCAP buses, TriMet buses, Max trains and Metro vans. Many combine at least two of those options, and some combine three.

Katie Allwander has one of the nastiest commutes.

She lives south of McMinnville in the farming community of Hopewell. She works for the Small Business Administration in Portland, and the run between them is both long and difficult.

A business development specialist, she is currently driving to a park and ride lot in Sherwood and relying on TriMet from there. She spends about 30 minutes in the car getting to Sherwood and another 60 minutes on the bus getting to downtown Portland.

That’s a lot of time on the road, and she figures she’s not alone. “I see a lot of people in McMinnville who I see on the road and on TriMet coming into Portland,” she said.

The SBA reimburses the cost of commuting via mass transit, so it would be advantageous to Allwander to cover more of her trip that way. However, she’s had a hard time finding something that will work for her.

She recently looked into joining a new Metro VanPool running from Newberg to the Lloyd District in Portland. A program at carpoolmatchnw.org helps match riders with similar needs, and that sounded good.

“It would be nice to kick back and relax, read books, make me more effective,” Allwander said.

But the VanPool, considered eminently flexible by its organizers, isn’t flexible enough for her. The local van doesn’t leave Newberg early enough in the morning.

YCAP offers bus service from McMinnville to TriMet’s Hillsboro rail stop and Sherwood bus stop, both of which feature park-and-ride lots.

For the ride up, northbound buses depart at 6:02, 8, 9:30 and 10:10 every morning. For the ride back, they depart at 3:25, 4:16 and 6:40 every afternoon.

In addition to those runs, designed to serve commuters, YCAP offers morning runs south, afternoon runs north and mid-day runs both ways. Still, it doesn’t fit everyone’s schedule.

That would leave Allwander waiting in Sherwood for 45 minutes for a bus back to McMinnville. “It would make my day longer than it already is,” she noted.

Today, gas is running $2.69 at most McMinnville stations. That would make an 80-mile trip to Portland and back $7.17 in a car getting 30 miles per gallon.

Allwander figures she burns two gallons getting to Sherwood and back. With the SBA reimbursement for the rest of her commute, she’s only out $5.38.

But that doesn’t count insurance, maintenance, repair and depreciation, of course. The IRS computes the average per-mile operating cost at 48 cents, at which price a daily commute to Portland would run $38.40 and Allwander’s Sherwood run around $30.

Though the Newberg VanPool didn’t pan out for Allwander, it’s looking for additional passengers for its Highway 99W run, and it might work for others.

Metro covers half of the cost of leasing a van for any group willing to carpool under its program.

Will Worrall is leasing a seven-passenger van from Enterprise for the Newberg VanPool’s weekday run to the Lloyd District. The riders split the cost of gas and insurance, which ranges from $2.60 to $4.13 each, according to Metro.

Worrall would like to find some people from Newberg, McMinnville or elsewhere in the region interested in joining his VanPool. His seven-passenger van still has space left, and he could swap it for a 15-passenger van if demand warranted.

Alternatively, he wouldn’t mind seeing someone in McMinnville launch his own.

“The deal is, the way to get a VanPool started is that it has to have a champion,” Worrall said. “What I would love to do is get four or five VanPools going along 99. If somebody from McMinnville wanted to champion it, he would need to find at least four riders.”

Allwander thinks the ideal solution would be a train. “Trains haul a lot more people than cars or vans or even busses,” she said. “If I could catch a train in McMinnville to take me into downtown Portland, I would drive the 15 miles.”

Newberg businessman Matt Simek and Newberg legislator Gary George have set about championing that very idea. In fact, Simek has lined up an array of public and private support sufficient to cover the cost of an initial feasibility study.

However, any rail run up the valley appears to be a long way off. And so does any bypass through the Newberg-Dundee bottleneck to speed auto and bus traffic.

So for now, Allwander will have to be content with driving from Hopewell to Sherwood and taking TriMet’s 94 Express to her downtown office.

Check us out at our booth setup at the muddy boot organic festival. Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of some other famous Cousteau, is the key speaker and world renowned advocate for ocean protection. Musical guests include March Fourth Marching Band, Freak Mountain Ramblers, and Jackstraw. Get your tickets NOW!