For over an hour today I sat nearly entirely stationary in traffic in downtown Vancouver looking at the spires of the Interstate Bridge, filled with an ineffable longing and frustration to be moving, but unable to go anywhere at all because every way was barred full of frustrated drivers fuming literally and figuratively and equally stationary. A check of various traffic applications verified that the dark red line of stationary traffic extending well into Portland, but there were no alerts showing accidents, no flashing lights, no lanes closed. So, why did it take me nearly three hours to get to work this morning, a drive that takes thirty minutes without traffic and an hour to an hour and a half even under heavy rush hour traffic normally? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only person with that question, although thankfully once I got past the I-5, I-405 split and headed properly into downtown traffic got better, and better still once I got through the Vista Ridge tunnel and passed a few slow-moving 18-wheelers. Had that traffic been slow as well it could have been a far worse drive even than the one I had, and the drive I had was bad enough. It was a bad enough drive, at any rate, that I thought it worthwhile to write about, and I tend to only write about frustrations when they reach a level that can no longer be ignored.

One would think that in light of this sort of traffic problem that there would be obvious acceptance that Portland has a problem that it needs to fix, but that is not the case. For example, last year on March 31, 2015, there was an article that claimed that TomTom’s Travel Index had viewed Portland’s traffic as the 10th worst in the entire United States. The article [1] claimed that TomTom’s methodology was mistaken in that it unfairly penalized Portland for being a compact city, implying that most Portlander’s commutes were of the order of a twelve-minute commute becoming a twenty-five minute commute, rather than, say, a half-hour commute without traffic becoming a three hour commute, as was the case this morning. It is well and good that the author of the article, Joseph Rose, is no longer on the commuting beat, having moved on to write about culture, as he was putting himself in position to be crowned for his being in denial. One wonders if he has to deal with the commute in Portland, with the choice of driving down US 26 and seeing signs that show that it would take 73 minutes to get from Beaverton through the tunnel and thinking, that surely couldn’t be right, to trying to take local roads only to find that there are detours for water main repair along the route, and that not all of the people on one’s path know how to properly go one car at a time at stopped intersections. Yet this is not an everyday occurrence, as just yesterday it only took an hour to make the same drive both ways. Right now, Portland traffic is in the situation where it is possible to manage at times, very pleasant (albeit unexpectedly so) at other times, and downright unacceptable sometimes as well, especially on Thursday mornings, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Given that the political class of the Portland metropolitan area, and at least a certain amount of the journalist class, are still in denial about Portland’s traffic problem, it is obvious that no firm solutions have been taken to alleviate problems. As in so much else in life, one cannot solve a problem that one does not recognize. Let us not underestimate the difficulties to something worthwhile being done, though. We are talking about a metropolitan area that let a bridge [2] be used for decades while it was known to be structurally unsound because of an unwillingness to invest in infrastructure improvements. While it is undeniable that the metropolitan area of Portland-Vancouver is in denial about infrastructure difficulties, those of us who live in the area cannot assume a willingness on the part of the states, counties, and cities involved to do something constructive to resolve the problem even on the off-chance that they recognized something was actually wrong. Denial is not limited merely to a former journalist on the traffic beat who does not want to admit Portland’s traffic is as bad as it is, but it extends far and wide, and deep. In order to examine how deep it spreads, one need only consider what it would likely take for matters to improve.

Between Longview and Cascade Locks there are only two bridges that cross the Columbia River along I-5 and I-205. More than 500,000 people, including the writer, live in the north side of that river and a large percentage of these people work on the south side of the river. Aside from this, there are about a million and a half people on the south side of the river, and while there are a lot of jobs, especially technical jobs, on the west side, housing is more reasonably priced (although it is not reasonably priced anywhere in the area [3]) on the east side of town. Portland, as a metropolitan area, has some structural problems it has been entirely unwilling to solve, and that exist in large part because the area is in denial. One or more of several things needs to happen on a structural level for the underlying problems of Portland’s traffic to be alleviated. For one, either the area can do a better job of encouraging jobs and developments across the area as a whole so as to spread out the workflow traffic rather than have it concentrated along a few particularly heavy routes, do a better job of permitting construction near where jobs are, or can invest in transportation infrastructure to better allow people to get from where they live to where they work. None of these is rocket science, and none of them should be all that hard to manage, but doing any one of those three things appears to be a matter of particular difficulty.

Why is this the case? A big part of the reason is that the area of Portland as a whole appears to believe that it is a small city and that its hostility to urban sprawl means that it can avoid making the painful choices of how to best deal with massive growth. The hostility of the city of Portland to sprawl has not stopped in any way the rush of suburban construction in Clark County to the north, Washington County to the west, or Clackamas County to the south and east, and all of these people need to work and live somewhere, and travel between where they work and where they live. The only solutions that can be conceived of that would make this task feasible involve either intelligent development, which recognizes that development is happening and has an effect on the area as a whole, the building of housing to keep pace with the population growth, and investment in infrastructure. Often infrastructure investments lag far behind their need, as it is only the existence of a crisis that leads people to take the time and effort necessary to engage in such works. There once was a time when the world was stirred by the building of infrastructure, of roads and bridges, of canals and buildings, of homes and skyscrapers. We do not live in such times, though. It would be unreasonable to expect people to rejoice and celebrate what they resolutely declare to be entirely unnecessary at all, however desirable it would be.

[1] http://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/index.ssf/2015/03/portland_traffic_ranked_nation.html

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/the-bridges-of-multnomah-county-the-sellwood-bridge/

[3] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/some-minutes-of-the-vancouver-affordable-housing-community-forum-meeting-part-one/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/some-minutes-of-the-vancouver-affordable-housing-community-forum-meeting-part-two/