We read dual articles in the Oregonian and the Tribune today that the business community thinks we have a critical shortage of road capacity, which hurts the economy by restricting freight mobility.
This fascinating conclusion came from a study that Oregon Business Council and Portland Business Alliance commissioned that looked at the cost of congestion.
The answer, of course, is to raise gas taxes to fund a road construction program.
Anyone want to guess what was missing from the articles?
That's right - any mention whatsoever of the $5 billion we have spent on light rail rather than road improvement, and whether maybe, just maybe, if all that money was spent on increasing road capacily we wouldn't have found ourselves in the situation we are in now.
Steve Clark, publisher of the Tribune, is the point person to carry the message to the public about the congestion issue. The Tribune has cheerleaded the light rail agenda virtually since its start in the year 2000.
They really think we are stupid, don't they?
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4 comments:
I agree we are wasting our money on light rail. But this nonsense about freight mobility is garbage.
I'm in the trucking business so I know something about the topic. These businesses with OBC and PBA are looking to increase public works projects so they can suckle up. If it were really a problem you would see trucking groups and individual companies complaining about it to Salem.
The bigger economic hit will come when they raise fuel and road taxes.
Steve Plunk
Not only has Clark and the trib cheerleaded light rail and streetcars they have misinformed the public all along the way.
Telling readers that Metro has been working on congestion releif was one of their favorite whoppers.
What a crock that is.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Metro is a congestion maker not a congestion reliever. So much so that they are dead set opposed to traffic releif because they preach that it will cause more traffic through this asinine theory of "induced demand".
Anyone, Clark or ?, who thinks Metro is interested in, or is working on, or is the agency to lead on congestion releif is either hopelessly a complete dumbazz or shamelessly dishonest.
Any "BIG LOOK", "New Look" or "re-Thinking Portland" Clark is involved with is handicapped and
biased towards the staus quo we've seen fail us for 20 years.
Many involved in trucking have been complaining about a need for a third bridge to Washington for nearly a decade now.
We are going to Salem and writing our legislators. We are just ignored so many just give up.
Its also pretty hard to keep people involved when the city of Portland and Metro go forward in a crooked way as well. A huge amount of Oregon's trucking companies have exited Oregon and most of all Portland. You can just as effectively operate anywhere off of I-5 from Washington.
There has been a huge unerinvestment in roads in the entire state of Oregon. ODOT has enabled this by doing almost nothing for the last decade. And the people at Metro have voted against funding roads as well. They always preach the mantra that if you build more capacity, it will soon fill up. Has anyone noticed they never seem to have any valid independent statistics to back up this bogus arguement?
Even states with constrained budgets like California are building roads again. Oh - and one last knife to stick into ODOT. The bridge rebuilding they are always tooting their horn about is in part being done to replace a faulty bridge design used by ODOT for nearly 20 years. Yes that's right - the dummies at ODOT are replacing the poorly designed bridges they built years ago. And you will notice nothing about this major FACT is never mentioned.
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