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A
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B
Federal Credit Union Banking built on innovation, guided by real people. Memberships open to the public. More@mitfcu.org federally insured by NCUA the Anti highway movement, like any movement, has always been a coalition. It's different groups of people with different backgrounds and different interests finding a common cause. Because a lot of people don't like urban highways, local neighborhood groups generally don't like highways through their neighborhoods. Transit advocates and housing advocates don't like highways where they could have train lines and apartments. And of course, environmental activists generally don't like highways anywhere. Period. In theory, these groups should all be able to work together to fight the highway. But sometimes the coalition cracks and we have seen that quite dramatically in Portland, Oregon.
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C
Wow, everybody got so quiet, you all. It's like you've been to a lot of committee meetings in this room.
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D
Something that tells me this might be a committee kind of crowd.
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C
Yeah, I think that is entirely true.
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B
I'm Ian Coss and welcome to the Big Dig from GBH News. Today on our Highway Teardown tour, we are in Portland where I linked up with Lillian Carbake that voice you just heard, who is an excellent transportation reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting. We wanted to bring together advocates from different groups who share a common goal of healing the damage done by urban highways, but who come at that goal from very different angles. So that's the main theme we're working towards. But we could not resist a little historical prelude, something so pertinent to our tour, we could not not talk about it. So that's where we start. We recorded this conversation live with Oregon Public Broadcasting at Literary Arts, a wonderful bookstore in East Portland.
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D
I'm very excited to be here in Portland because Portland, I didn't know this before we started planning this event has the distinction of the original highway tear down, the original highway removal. Give it up. Right.
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C
I think this crowd is more excited about tearing down highways than probably most
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D
crowds before the Embarcadero. Right before the Big Dig, they were doing it here. So to get into this history, we've
- [04:24]
C
got with us Sean Granton, who I don't know how to introduce Sean because Sean is such an iterate volunteer in so many different organizations in Portland. But we brought Sean because in his free time, he spends time going to the Oregon Historical Society looking up records from things gone past in Portland and leads the dead freeways bike ride, which I had to. Ian is not from Portland. And so the concept of a bike ride where people learn about dead highways was confusing to him. Why that's a thing.
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D
I mean, I should say this is right in my Venn diagram of biking in dead highways. This is right up my alley. So, Sean, for somebody who has never heard of such a thing, what is a dead freeways bike ride?
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E
Well, it's a tour that we look at the highways that were like sold as a sure thing and were put dotted lines on maps for years and then just didn't happen. Or on Harbor Drive, where we did have a highway downtown that we got rid of. And that's where you're talking about before the Embarcadero. And we didn't need a earthquake to remove that one. We just decided, Sorry, sorry, San Francisco.
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D
So I guess the question I have about Harbor Drive is why this highway of all highways? You know, why is this night different from all other nights? Basically, you know, maybe to explain that, one of the things I took away from studying the Big Dig was that most big ambitious ideas never happen.
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E
Yeah.
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D
And that the big digs of the world are the far, far outliers that survive a thousand possible deaths to make it to that point. And so when I look At a project like Harbor Drive, something unusual happened there that the status quo was left behind.
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E
So I think there's a few different factors that went into why Harbor Drive got removed and why. Let me just quickly go back to what Harbor Drive was. Basically Harbor Drive was US 99W going through the heart of downtown. And it was interesting cause it was one of those few highways that was started before World War II. So it's like they were planning this in the 30s and it opened in stages a little bit before World War II. World War II put a stop to a lot of that stuff and then finally got finished. And it wasn't a very long highway, I think maybe only a couple miles at best. And it was a very remedial divided highway. I think there were like left turn lanes that he had to cross traffic. It was, it was a very like outmoded highway. Like they build it and then it's like, oh, this is already over capacity and we're already seeing all the flaws in this design. So Fast forward another 20 something years to the late 60s. And there was talk, especially with the highway department because you know, highway departments like always look at this stuff and they're like, well, how can we improve this? Like, and obviously it's like we're going to put some more lanes, we're going to like tear some more of this and do more of that.
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C
And.
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E
And that was around the time like late 60s, just sort of the mood in the air of people doing activist stuff in Portland, that maybe that's not the answer. Maybe we can stop this from getting even worse than it is. Because one of the big things that Harbor Drive did was that it denied us access on the west bank of the Willamette River. There was a little bit of five, six foot sidewalk on the waterfront side that you could theoretically walk if you really wanted to. If you wanted big cars speeding right by everybody.
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C
Like a walk down by the river with a highway next to you.
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D
So it's like a strip, like a sidewalk with highway on one side and
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E
river on the other.
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F
Yeah.
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E
And so the idea in the air came up, it was like, what if we can go just, you know, promenade down by the river like without, you know, six lanes of speeding traffic going by, like, you know, high speed and leaded gasoline and all that stuff of, you know, the 60s. And there was also a few other things coming around the corner. I5 through downtown or at least through the east side over here was completed so that you already had freeways on both sides here. Like, why put It. Why have another one here? So there was that there. And also just this environmental acts that started around that time, that was like, a tool that a lot of activists could have in their pocket when they wanted to challenge these things that didn't exist before.
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C
Did.
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D
Was there pushback, though? I mean, it's like, now when you talk about highway, it's immediately like, but what will this do to the traffic on the other highways? And how will trucks get there?
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E
And, yeah, I mean, there was. I mean, it was. I think the big pushback came from, like, a lot of downtown businesses because they were just worried about access. They wanted more access. They wanted that bigger, newer, shinier Harbor Drive. You know, they were trying to make downtown more accessible for cars. And they're never gonna win against the suburban development. Like, you're not gonna win against a mall. Like, if you want.
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D
Like, if you wanna drive and park and shop, you can't beat the mall.
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E
I mean, you're gonna just keep on tearing down blocks to put more parking garages and widening streets and that. And, like, then you're not gonna have a downtown anymore. And you just sort of, like, killed yourself just to compete with the Washington Square malls and the Clackamas town centers of the world, which, for those of you in Boston are shopping malls that are in Portland, Oregon. And it just had the right balance, the right concoction of community activists, state government. Like, we had Tom McCall as governor, and he was pretty progressive for his time and was amenable to the idea of doing something different before that, most elected officials in the United states in the 50s and 60s would not say no to any freeway project and would just look at you sideways if you suggested not building something?
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D
Was Tom McCall, the governor or the activist able to make the business case that we need to envision a downtown in which it's a nice place to walk and get around without.
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E
Tom McCall was persuasive. Before he was a politician, he was a journalist and he was a news broadcaster. So he had the powers of persuasion at his disposal. And, you know, I think he was also a smart, shrewd man in a lot of different ways that, like, you had, like, the, you know, your stereotypical hippie activists that were trying to go against this. And then he was, you know, the serious, reserved, like, politician guy. So, like, you know, people, you know, and it's unfortunate, but people listen more to when people like that say stuff rather than, you know, some guy that's got beads in his hair and stuff and, you know, his name Moondog no offense to moondogs in the audience.
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C
I think that coalition building was also really important part of it as well. It was one of the big things that kept coming up was like, we deserve access to our water. Our river is extremely important to the city of Portland, and it's extremely important to the people and the businesses, and we deserve, as humans a right to access that water. And I think that that was, like, it sounds very hippie dippy, but I think it was very valuable as a coalition building platform for what is like, a pretty unsexy project. Like, tearing out a highway is not. Like, it's hard to capture the imagination, especially when we were the first people to do it.
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A
Right.
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D
You couldn't get, oh, look at these
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C
great pictures from other places that have done it. Right. Yeah, I think that was. I think that was part of it. We were doing weird stuff in the 70s and 80s too, in Portland. Like, we did a lot of interesting, radical things when it came to city planning and transportation and zoning that no one else was doing.
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D
It's so interesting, those moments when, like, the quote unquote, adults in the room suddenly start paying attention and taking seriously something that had been just like a pipe dream.
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F
Yeah.
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D
When is that moment? Is it right around the late 60s? Right around 1970?
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E
It was around that time, yeah. Because one of the things that they did, and I think it was like 1969 when the conversation really got started. So, like, I was talking about the esplanade, little bit of, like, pavement they had between the highway and the river. And then there was, like, on the other side, maybe like a 6 to 10 foot strip of grass between that and what is now Naito Parkway. And so they had a picnic on that little strip of grass and encourage everybody, the media and all that to come down to it. And, you know, the idea is, like, wouldn't it be nice that we can have, like, this picnic by the river without six lanes of highway between us and that. And that was a great moment that people started saying, oh, oh, yeah, like, that's a good idea. Like, I mean, we're a river city and, like, we have no real access to the river anymore. It's all cut off by a freeway on one side, a freeway on the other side. So it sort of sparked the imagination.
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C
Also. There was, like, I said, they were doing weird stuff. So the Sunset magazine, which used to be like, it was like Life magazine, It was everywhere. We were on the front cover in the early 70s because a bunch of Portland activists just made their own traffic Diverter, which still stands.
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D
Can you give me paint a picture of that?
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C
I can.
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D
DIY traffic diverter.
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C
The Lloyd Center Mall, which is most well known for Tonya Harding skating there, was built in the late. I knew I'd get figure skating in here somewhere. And it was built in the late 1990s.
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D
Fill that out in your bingo cards. Tanya Harding.
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C
So when it was built in the 1960s, it impacted the Irvington neighborhood, which is in central Portland here. And it was one of the other neighborhoods that was also impacted by the building of the highway as well. Right. So there was all of these residents that were extremely concerned about what all of the traffic to the new mall was going to do to their neighborhood. And they were like, hey, we want to stop traffic. We want to build a diverter. Turns out that wasn't legal. The city code did not allow for you to redirect traffic. And, you know, they kept trying to push for it, they kept trying to ask for it, and then eventually, the neighborhood just got together one Saturday and poured concrete and planted a tree in the middle of it. And you can see in the picture a cop car pulling up, seeing about 40 people there, pouring concrete, and just left, Just turned around. And now that diverter is maintained by the city of Portland, and it's on one of our major bike boulevards in the city on Tillamook. And it's been rebuilt many times. The original concrete DIY build turned out to not stand the test of time, believe it or not. But we were doing weird stuff, and that was on the.
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D
That sense of, like, ownership, like the
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C
COVID of Sunset magazine. And so you have to kind of wrap your head around the idea that we were just doing weird stuff. Part of it is this, like, Wild West, Oregon sort of thing of, like, nobody's really gonna notice what we do out here.
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E
The New York Times will never pay attention to us. So let's just go at it.
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C
And then Portlandia happened, and then the New York Times wrote a piece about how great we were every week until they stopped doing that.
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E
Now we're on fire.
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D
You know what the Boston equivalent of that diverter is? Are you familiar with the Space Saver?
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C
No.
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D
So, anyone ever. Yeah. Yeah.
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C
Yes.
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D
So, you know, after we get a big snowstorm, once you shovel out your parking spot, you get to keep your parking spot because you did the work to shovel it out. Come on. So what you do is you put something in the parking spot, like a toilet maybe, or, I don't know, an armchair.
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C
How big does it have to be to Be annoying for people.
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D
It just has to be big enough that somebody wouldn't like if it's just an orange traffic cone, Right?
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C
Yeah. They'll move.
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D
The person just gets out and moves it. Hence the porcelain toilet.
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E
You don't know what's in that. Don't want to.
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D
So I feel like, sorry, I'm diverting us. But the.
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C
No pun intended.
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D
That was actually not intended. Gonna get. Okay. I'm not gonna attempt a pun. The best puns are unintentional. So there is a sense that there is something distinctly Portland about the Harbor Drive story, that New York has highways by the river, and plenty of cities have highways by the river, but there was this confluence of a road that wasn't desperately needed.
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E
Yeah.
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D
And a really kind of quirky mix of activism and political engagement.
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E
I like the term quirky for Portland
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D
people in the right positions of power and that. That kind of soup came together in the early 70s.
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G
Yeah.
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D
My last question about. I mean, we could talk about Harbor Drive all night, I'm sure. But I'm curious. Since this was done, you know, about 50 years ago now, you know, I took a walk along the west side of the river today, and you can see the trees are big. They're grown in. Portland has been running this post highway removal experiment longer than any other city. So how. How has it borne out here in terms of the businesses, in terms of the use, what it's done for the downtown?
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E
Well, I mean, I think it's having waterfront park is a bigger asset than having six lanes of mostly stopped traffic, like running. Running by the river. And I mean, it's definitely been a way that we've sold ourself as a city of like, what we've done and like having a nice, you know, nice waterfront again. And I think eventually, I mean, there's always gonna be some. Some old guy, usually that would just be like, I wish they built the new Harbor Drive or Mount Hood Freeway. It would only take 10 minutes to get to Gresham. And, you know, they're. And they. They lurk in comment sections everywhere. So. But I mean, I think most people can see what the benefits that we've reaped from removing a highway or not putting in a highway. And you look at the neighborhoods where they did put the freeways in, like I5 through North Portland, the Minnesota Freeway, and the home prices depreciating in value fast. Crime went up, people moved away. And then you just had this noisy, continual highway plowed through it that just kept on going. And do we want to look like that too. And people were like, no, no, we do not want to look like that. And that was definitely a powerful, powerful motivator.
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C
How did you accidentally do the perfect transition into our next two guests?
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E
I just got the skill.
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D
Thank you, Sean.
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C
Thank you, Sean.
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B
So Portland built the coalition once to radically rethink one of their urban highways. But can Portland do it again? That's coming up. Support for the Big Dig comes from New England Recovery center providing inpatient addiction treatment in state of the art facilities located in Westborough, Mass. All major insurance plans accepted. Learn more at newenglandrecovery.org Support also comes from the Harvard Business School Baker Library featuring an exhibit on Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. It's open to the public. Details at library hbs.edu.
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D
I want to do a bit of
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B
a reset here for our second half because it's a totally different road we're talking about with a totally different set of circumstances. That would be Interstate 5, the big one for anyone on the West Coast.
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D
As of now, there is not a
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B
serious conversation about removing the highway altogether. In fact, the state wants to do the opposite. They want to widen it, add more lanes. There are a lot of parallels here with the episode we did in Austin, Texas. Once again, the state wants a bigger highway. The city doesn't. And just like in Austin, the bargain deal on the table is a so called cap or cover. Basically, in exchange for widening the road, OR DOT would help cover up a short segment of I5 so you could have a park or even housing right on top of the expanded highway. Everyone wins, right? What's interesting and challenging about Portland is that this bargain from ODOT, as it's called, has driven a wedge straight through the Highway Fighting Coalition, a bitter wedge. On one side you have a group called the Albina Vision Trust, a neighborhood group focused on the immediate impacts of the road. On the other side you have a group called no More Freeways, which as the name suggests, is more of an environmental group focused on the climate impact of highways. Now, to be clear, both groups don't like i5. Both groups would love to get rid of the road entirely, but they now find themselves on opposite sides of this fight. Albina Vision Trust believes that this opportunity to cover up the road in their neighborhood is worth the cost of widening the road. No More Freeways believes that no amount of parks or caps or housing is worth the cost of adding more highway lanes to the city. Lillian and I invited members from both groups to talk through the issue. But I want to stress this is not a debate. In some ways, the State's plans for i5 have pitted these two groups against each other, and we did not want to simply replicate that dynamic here. All right, back to the conversation.
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C
So joining us now is Sharon Gary Smith and Chris Smith, Come on up.
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D
No relation.
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C
No relation. Sharon Gary Smith was born and raised in Portland and was one of the residents that was displaced with the i5 expansion in North Portland. And Chris Smith, okay, I would describe Christmas as the epitome of a citizen activists. I don't think we have enough time to list every single committee that Chris Smith has served on, but probably the highlights. Portland StreetCar Planning Commissioner, TPAC. What other Alphabet soups am I forgetting? Chris?
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F
MPAC.
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C
MPAC. There we go. There we go.
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D
So I don't know my way around this town, but I took a walk today and I was really struck. I started over on the western side of the river and downtown and I saw where Harbor Drive used to be. And you can walk right along the water and there's all this open space. And then I walked up and over the bridge, one of the many bridges. And the other side of the river is so, so different. It's convention center, it's basketball arena, it's train tracks, it's many, many lanes of highways. I mean, the two sides of this river could not be more different.
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C
Which one did you like walking on better?
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D
The walking over the bridge was. Was my favorite part. Is that like a cop out answer?
- [24:49]
C
No, I don't think so.
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D
I mean, I do kind of get excited about all the lanes and ramps now.
- [24:55]
C
I need to know which bridge you walked over, though.
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D
I went. It was like a high one. You could walk down low or walk up high.
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C
The steel bridge.
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D
The steel bridge.
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C
Great bridge. It's one of our only bridges that isn't operated by Multnomah county or Tribec.
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G
So fun fact, fun fact.
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D
Cross that off your bingo card. So basically what I want to just set up is that we've been talking about that western side where the highway was removed, and now we're talking about the eastern side where I5, the busiest highway on the west coast, I believe is still very much alive and well,
- [25:29]
B
depending on your plans.
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C
Well, is an interesting condition.
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D
Alive, alive. So, Sharon, you lived in a neighborhood called Albina that is exactly on this side of the river, right where i5 now runs. Can you take us back to the when you were a kid in Albina, what that neighborhood looked like and how it Changed in your lifetime.
- [25:57]
G
For those of you who don't know, Albina was called the Harlem of the West. It was the cultural heartbeat of Portland. Jazz clubs, food, restaurants, all kinds of businesses thrived in an area that was economically independent. We were right there on the river. Million dollar views. But because of the practices and the racist policies, let me name, that's what the highway construction was really all about. That was all for the public good. That's what it says in the documents that displaced us. We were the public. So who were they talking about? And so that intentional displacement and push out to the far edges of East Portland is what decimated Albina.
- [26:49]
D
I was looking at some of the maps of Albina in the 40s and then going forward to today, and I think a lot of people, you might have an image of what urban, quote, urban renewal looks like. You know, maybe you take some houses and you clear some lots and you throw up a big building, you put in a highway. But this is more than just a few lots.
- [27:12]
G
It is 800 homes were removed.
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D
800 homes in this whole area. It's not just the neighborhood was divided. It was truly a big chunk of houses was just erased entirely to become, as you said, these huge public goods for some other public. That was not the public being removed.
- [27:32]
G
And it was signed off on by our city government and my family. I have the documents from Multnomah County Tax department that says that it was to remove urban blight and for the peace and safety of citizens of Portland.
- [27:52]
D
Could you talk about what the highway looks like today? So if you just. If you live in the area, if you're passing through it, how do you experience Interstate 5 in Albina?
- [28:05]
G
When Interstate 5 gets close to Albina, you're talking about passing directly underneath what was Elliott School. My elementary school is now Tubman Academy for Young Women. There are days when the teachers cannot let the students outside because the emission levels and the noxious gas is so bad that they declare it is an unsafe, environmentally unsafe day for young people whose minds and bodies are affected. And yet this has gone on for so long because it didn't matter to those in authority to stand in the yard and listen to the roar of those semis, people rushing from suburbs past and through the inner city to get quickly up the road through Albina.
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D
So part of the reason we're talking about Albina and i5 is that this section of highway is getting a fresh look right now.
- [29:12]
C
Is it fresh?
- [29:13]
D
I keep using, I keep really stepping in it with the adjectives.
- [29:16]
G
Don't you think that was a very cute way to put it.
- [29:19]
D
A charming, heartfelt look.
- [29:21]
C
It's getting a look.
- [29:22]
D
It's getting a look.
- [29:23]
G
Not threatening.
- [29:23]
D
Okay. It's alive. It's getting a look. So, Chris, could you. Could you take us back? How did you first hear that Oregon Department of Transportation wanted to make some changes to i5 in Portland?
- [29:41]
F
Sure. And let me put it in the context of what I like to think of as the second generation freeway revolt. So we heard about the first generation of freeway revolts in the 70s when people got tired of running freeways through our cities. So we stopped new freeways in cities, and the federal government basically declared the interstate system complete in the 90s, around the time the Big Dig got started. Since that time in the 90s, we have added about 75% more lane miles to the freeway network in the country. So we didn't stop. We just made the existing ones wider. And in this region, we widened 26 several times. We widened I5 to the south of Portland, and we widened 205 not that long after we built it. So the urge to add freeway lane miles has not stopped. In 2012, I was serving on the planning commission here in Portland, and we were looking at redoing the central city plan for the next 20 years. And as part of that, ODOT came to us and said, hey, while you're looking at the land use in what we call the north northeast quadrant, we'd like to look at what we do with Rose Quarter. And that's where they proposed.
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D
And just to define Rose Quarter is this stretch of i5.
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F
It's the stretch of i5 between the interchanges with i405, which is the west side Loop through downtown, and i84, which is the highway that starts here and goes to Connecticut.
- [31:07]
D
So basically, the Rose quarter stretch of i5 is under a lot of pressure because it's receiving traffic from two other interstates as well as carrying all the north south traffic. Well.
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C
And it's part of this corridor that's capped by a bridge that has need to be replaced for quite a long time.
- [31:24]
D
So it's under a lot of pressure.
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F
It's under a lot of pressure, but it's 1.8 miles.
- [31:29]
D
Got it.
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F
And ODOT came to us and said, hey, we want to add what they call auxiliary lanes. Lanes are lanes. They accommodate more cars. The label auxiliary doesn't really mean anything. And I looked at that in the context of the whole central city plan and said, okay, for 20 years, the biggest investment we're going to make in Portland's central city is a freeway expansion. This makes no sense. And that's when I cast my first no vote in 2012. It started to attract funding in 2017, and that's when I sent the infamous email to a bunch of my friends saying, who wants to get together and oppose this crazy idea? And that spawned the no more freeways campaign.
- [32:09]
D
I gather that you don't support more highway lanes.
- [32:13]
F
So our basic thesis is that in an age of obvious climate change where traffic in the Portland region is 40% of our contribution to greenhouse gases, it makes no sense to keep digging the hole deeper and making the problem worse. And we spend tremendous amounts of money that we could spend on things like taking our orphan state highways that kill people on a regular basis and make them safer, where we could invest it in transit to move people sustainably. Putting it into the most expensive, least efficient, most geometrically space taking mode single occupancy vehicles. Makes no sense. Let's stop.
- [32:58]
D
Lillian, I hate to do this to you, but we don't have a representative from oregon. Here with us.
- [33:03]
G
That's a good idea.
- [33:04]
D
Could you. Could you do your most generous Steelman case for why the state wants to expand this road?
- [33:13]
C
I mean, the simple answer and the thing that you'll hear again and again from Oregon.com is that it's a bottleneck and they're trying to fix a bottleneck. The other part is that suddenly ODOT seems to, when it is convenient for them, say, oh, we're gonna right the wrongs of the past, right? So, oh, we screwed up last time and a few other times, but this time we're gonna do it right. And one of the ways we can right the wrongs is give us the extra lanes, the auxiliary lanes, and. And we'll cap it. And you can reconnect all of the scars that were created by the way that they broke up the communities that they went through, specifically Albina. And it seems like there is this idea that ODOT wants to say we screwed up. We're going to not screw up this time because if you give us enough money, we're going to do it right this time. I see Sharon over there ready to talk, and I feel.
- [34:16]
G
I'm trying to have feelings for odot.
- [34:21]
C
Did I accurately capture the. Did anybody feel like ODOT was not appropriately represented?
- [34:28]
G
I think what's important is that ODOT moves to wherever the money is. And there was significant federal money for the highways. They're not operating off of popcorn and Kool Aid stands. Significant Money we had been at the table, and in fact, we received the largest federal grant in this last administration in September, $434 million in little old Portland, Oregon. And included was money for the covers. So our approach is how do we bring pragmatism and a thought about recrafting, rebuilding, and creating the best scenario for those who've been harmed the most. Therefore, everyone will benefit. And that's the Albina Vision Dream that is being actualized.
- [35:23]
C
I'm really curious from your perspective, like, your community was not consulted when they put i5 through it last time?
- [35:30]
G
Of course not.
- [35:31]
C
And this time they proactively brought you to the very large, ever expanding table of people that they consulted. When you heard about the idea of a highway cap, was it coming from odot? Was it coming from you? And you're like, hey, other places have this. Why can't we have it?
- [35:48]
G
We proposed it. It certainly wasn't a new idea with odot.
- [35:52]
D
And were you looking at other cities as examples, like you mentioned about Seattle
- [35:56]
G
and back east, where I have been to cities, and you've got all this activity. And I realize the freeway is running under it. So I like no more freeways. But until I see something happen to i5, we're trying to make sure that we all get involved in the process of restoring.
- [36:14]
D
I want to ask. So, Chris.
- [36:15]
G
Yes.
- [36:16]
D
You know, the state has this vision of expanding the road. Albina has this vision of restoring and recreating this neighborhood. What is your vision for i5?
- [36:29]
F
So I want to emphasize that at no more freeways, we are big fans of Albina Vision Trust. We believe in the project that they're on. We have a respectful disagreement about whether it's worth widening the freeway to get it capped. The way we're expressing that is, you know, we've been through two rounds of environmental assessment, and in that, ODOT has never studied the idea of capping it without widening it. So, you know, we have been suing ODOT for about four years now. We have an active federal lawsuit, an active state lawsuit. And basically the goal is to get where we can study alternatives, including capping without widening, including a transit alternative instead of expansion of the lanes. But none of that means that we're opposed to what our BINA Vision Trust is doing.
- [37:20]
D
Yeah, I mean, this goes back to, you know, in the story of the Big Dig in Boston, in order to get the Federal Highway Administration to support this tunnel alternative, they had to add lanes. It was the Big Dig as much as it was about, you know, addressing the harms of the past and transforming the city. It was absolutely a highway expansion project for the city of Boston. And it seems like that bargain has. It seems to come back around again and again and again where it's like, we'll give you the amenity, but we want more lanes. And I don't know, what do you make of that choice? And I guess I'll put that to either of you. The fact that you're in that face
- [38:08]
G
with that choice, I'm looking at you, okay?
- [38:10]
D
Everyone's looking at you.
- [38:11]
G
This is how we do support.
- [38:14]
F
We think that in the current era, with what we know about climate change and all the other competing transportation needs, it just makes no sense environmentally or fiscally. We are adamant that we're about not having more freeway lanes. It just doesn't make any sense.
- [38:32]
C
I just want to frame the idea that. Is that a false dichotomy that has been presented over and over again. This because. And it's not just exclusive to Oregon. It's not just exclusive to Portland. Like, when this federal money flows in, they have this obsession with throughput and level of service. And there is this idea that the only way to get it is to expand lanes. But when you actually look at those metrics and you look at what induced demand causes, it's just because you made a bigger glass, people end up just pouring, pouring more margarita in it. I mean, it's like as soon as you add lanes, they fill up. And there doesn't seem to be any willingness on the part of the funding bodies to think about what everybody in the community is saying, which is like, this is a problem and we'd like to come up with creative solutions. And you're the one saying that the only way that we can do this is to put a cap and add lanes. And I think it's frustrating that we keep having to answer that question. But then Oregon Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration doesn't have to answer that question, which speaks to no more freeways lawsuit. But I also think that this is not a unique to Portland question. Right. This comes up in every town, which is the idea that, like, money runs the show. State dots want that money. And they are continually putting communities in the position of if you wanna fix what we screwed up 50 years ago without consulting the poor communities, the communities of color that we put a highway through, the only way to do it is to accept this false dichotomy of add 20 new lanes to your highway. Right. That might be a slight hyperbole, but I'm sure, there's one somewhere where they want to put 20 lanes on it. And so I don't think it's fair to force citizens to justify that when you have the people in charge of the money and the people in charge of the highway planning refusing to come up with more creative solutions to that. The fact that the Albina Vision Trust is like, hey, but other places do a cap. Maybe we could have one, too. It's like, why should that be their
- [41:00]
G
job when you're flush? And they were for so long. And America had an obsession with highways. We love them, but I think it's going to take a shift, particularly in liberal Portland, to really understand the underpinnings of what this is. And this is not the only city, but we like to be a city that's touted and a state. And I think this is one of the places that we could catch up and stand up better so that no more freeways would have a massive coalition of all of us behind them if I heard our agenda. And so here we are.
- [41:42]
D
Yeah. Chris, did you want to speak to that false choice that Lillian was talking?
- [41:47]
F
Well, I'll come at a little bit different way. We haven't used the C word tonight. Congestion.
- [41:53]
C
Oh, that was my job. I was odot.
- [41:57]
G
What C word?
- [41:58]
F
And of course, that is the justification, because everyone who gets in the car can understand congestion. Well, one, I think there is ample empirical evidence that you cannot build your way out of congestion in urban areas. There's also an increasing body of research that congestion is actually correlated with economic productivity.
- [42:19]
E
And.
- [42:19]
F
And the places that don't have congestion don't have very strong economies. So congestion is not necessarily something to be avoided. It means you need to look at different, more creative ways of moving people more efficiently, which is where transit and biking and walking come in. So we need to turn the paradigms that the dots use on their head and start going in a different direction.
- [42:40]
D
And where better to do that than in the place where the highway teardown revolution began?
- [42:45]
G
Hello.
- [42:47]
C
Thank you for providing some optimism, Chris.
- [42:50]
D
That's the margarita glass half full mindset. I would love to close with just a brief question for you both, which is if you could reimagine that stretch of i5 through the Rose Quarter from the ground up with no constraints whatsoever, what would that look like?
- [43:18]
F
While she's thinking, I'll start. We made the mistake in Eisenhower's time when we let the freeways into the cities. Eisenhower didn't intend that. He wanted the cities to use transit, but the state dots saw that 90% match. And they brought the freeways into the cities. So if I got to do it over, we would have a ring road around Portland and we'd have an arterial network inside that ring, including maintaining that street grid in Albina and serving it in a much more equitable way.
- [43:50]
D
But there would be no limited access highways inside that ring.
- [43:55]
F
Correct.
- [43:57]
G
I personally like that. I was thinking, Ann, some art and something so it's not such a bleak trip. It's going to have multigenerational housing. It's going to be the entertainment center again. It is going to be economic opportunities and entrepreneurship, which we had before, and continue. It's going to be a place that you want to come and hang out in like many of your folks did before. As an urban area that is not about removal, but restoration and retooling. That's what I see. And Albina is indicative of East Portland, those areas that are neglected and ignored and not seen. And that can be a model for the rest of the country as well.
- [44:49]
C
I think that was a perfect note to end on.
- [44:53]
D
Please give it up for our guests.
- [44:55]
G
Thank you. Thank you.
- [44:59]
D
Have a good night, everyone.
- [45:00]
F
Thank you.
- [45:01]
C
There's stickers by the door. You want stickers?
- [45:07]
B
As of right now, the state of Oregon is moving ahead with plans to Both Widen and Cap I 5. The Albina vision Trust continues to back the project. No more freeways opposes it. Next up on the Highway Teardown Tour, it's Louisville, Kentucky, where we look at a pretty radical highway teardown effort that did not succeed, at least not yet. To help us understand just how daunting removing a highway can be. If you've been enjoying these episodes as they come out and you want to hear them earlier, you can join our paid membership program, the HOV Lane. And if you're listening later and just want to support, support everything we do on this show, you can join the HOV Lane. It's right there at wgbh.org HOV Lane. Very special thanks to Lillian, Sage, Robin and the whole team at Oregon Public Broadcasting who helped us put on this event. If you want to check out more of Lillian's reporting, she did a whole series about rural public transit called Stop Requested. You can find that@opb.org the Highway Teardown Tour is produced by Fiona Boyd and myself, Ian Coss, with support from Isabel Hibbert. Our editor is Lacey Roberts. The executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. The artwork is by Bill Miller. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx. Hey, I want to make sure that you know this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed telling stories from the past to help us understand our present. Our first season is all about infrastructure. The second season is about gambling, and we've got more seasons planned. So if you want to stay on top of what the team and I are doing, go ahead and follow or subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen.
- [47:36]
D
We've got some really exciting stories coming
- [47:38]
B
up and I hope you'll stay with us.
- [47:40]
E
Thanks
- [47:44]
G
from PRX.