Rail and City Planning Horror Stories
Portland, OR is considered the poster child for light rail, smart growth and city planning. The latest 2 posts on the American Dream Coalition Blog shed light on how wrong this designation is, and another example from Seattle.
Business owners in downtown Portland are dismayed to realize that a two-year project of reconstructing the city’s bus mall to accommodate light-rail trains will force Tri-Met, the region’s transit agency, to reroute hundreds of buses to streets in front of their businesses. “Buses are noisy,” says one. “They set off car alarms just from the vibrations.”
This reconstruction is a part of Tri-Met’s plan to blanket the region in expensive light-rail lines that will carry former bus riders. Existing light-rail lines traverse downtown in an east-west direction. Although there is no funding to build a light-rail line south of downtown, Tri-Met wants to build a north-south route through downtown so it can extend the route south when such funding becomes available.
. . .
The estimated costs of “public amenities” for Portland’s South Waterfront District — known to its detractors as the “So What” district — have doubled, and the final estimates are not yet in. Street improvements and parks are expected to cost $50 million more than their original estimates, and “affordable housing” will cost even more.
The district is planned as a high-rise, high-density office and housing complex connected to downtown by a streetcar and connected to several hospitals in the hills above downtown by an aerial tram. The city rejected an ordinary housing complex that originally proposed by the landowners because it was not dense enough.
And city planners wonder why housing has become so unaffordable.
And then there is this from Washington state:
In a five-to-four ruling, Washington state’s supreme court refused to overturn the condemnation of someone’s land for a train station. Sound Transit, the agency responsible for Seattle’s light-rail boondoggle, wanted someone’s land for a commuter rail station. The agency held a public hearing on the condemnation, but the only notice of the hearing was an agenda posted on the agency’s web site. Thus, the landowners had no idea their land was being considered for condemnation until it was too late.
Washington state law requires prior notification, which is usually given by posting notices in local newspapers and on signs around the property being considered for condemnation. But the supreme court said a web site notification was sufficient.
Does anyone really believe that this system is, or intended to be, fair?
Naivity spring eternal, I guess.