What City Observatory Did This Week Special Session: The old bait and switch. ODOT is pulling the same tired playbook: crying poverty while promising to fix potholes and plow roads, then quietly diverting every available| City Observatory
Oregon Public Broadcasting plays a key role in informing Oregonians about public policy, and they do an excellent job. But when it comes to today’s special session, OPB reporting left out, or glossed over some| City Observatory
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is asking to raise gas taxes 6 cents a gallon, and increase other fees, supposedly to cover shortfalls in maintenance and operations. But nothing in the proposed legislation submitted| City Observatory
On August 26, three days before a legislative special session to consider raising transportation taxes and fees, radio talk show host Lars Larson interviewed City Observtory’s Joe Cortright. Here is a computer-generated transcript of that| City Observatory
LC 2, being considered by the Oregon Legislature, repeals the mandate for ODOT to develop congestion pricing in Metro Portland Pricing was the promised concession to environmentalists in the last two transportation packages for allowing| City Observatory
Ten things legislators, reporters and citizens should know about the special session In the next week, the Oregon Legislature will meet in special session to take up transportation finance. A draft bill, LC 2,| City Observatory
What City Observatory Did This Week Caution: Scam Alert. The Oregon Department of Transportation’s plans to move ahead with the I-5 Rose Quarter project when it lost over $400 million in federal grants, was refused| City Observatory
New and Improved ODOT! Now with “accountability*”| City Observatory
Unaccountable: Even when the legislature enacts “sideboards” to prevent costly ODOT mistakes, the agency easily evades or repeals them The big buzzword in Salem, when it comes to addressing the Orgon Department of Transportation’s huge| City Observatory
Caution: Scam Alert The Oregon Department of Transportation’s plans to move ahead with the I-5 Rose Quarter project when it lost over $400 million in federal grants, was refused additional funding by the 2025 Oregon| City Observatory
Score this round for the Detroit freeway fighters: For years the Michigan Department of Transportation has been trying to sell the city and neighborhoods on rebuilding I-375, a roadway that devastated historically Black neighborhoods in Detroit. Now, to use the preferred highway department euphemism, they’ve “paused” the proposed reconstruction.| City Observatory
America’s unshakeable belief in a non-existent trend in murder. File this under extreme cognitive dissonance. As we have always pointed out at City Observatory, the data shows decades of steady decreases in crime in US cities. By every measure, but especially by murder rates, crime is vastly lower now than it was in the 80s or 90s. Despite a blip in disorder and crime in the wake of the pandemic, crime rates are again continuing to decline, almost everywhere. But survey research s...| City Observatory
HB 2025 doesn’t fix the Oregon Department of Transportation’s financial problem—it makes it even bigger| City Observatory
Economic Segregation| cityobservatory.org
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT’) has a big management problem: huge cost overruns on highway mega-projects. Just three Portland area highway projects—The Interstate Bridge Replacement, the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening and the I-205 Abernethy Bridge have chalked up cost overruns totaling $4.8 billion in just the past five years.| City Observatory
Every time Oregonians are asked to pony up more money for roads, ODOT trots out a report saying that they’re definitely going to improve their management and stop blowing through budgets. And they’re doing it again. In 2025, as Yogi Berra would say, “It’s deja vu all over again.”| City Observatory
Adding more freeway capacity at the Rose Quarter will thousands of tons to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions| City Observatory
Portland Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases| City Observatory
Portland transportation: PBOT is broke, the city has a $600 million annual O&M deficit, 50% of streets are in “poor or very poor” condition, and traffic deaths are up sharply. | City Observatory
IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments| City Observatory
Building a city so its residents don’t have to drive so much powers economic growth| City Observatory
IBR is once again delaying releasing a new cost estimate for the Interstate Bridge Project. It’s an ominous sign that the cost is going to be much, much higher.| City Observatory
A new report purports to provide a roadmap for accountability at the Oregon Department of Transportation. In short, its a work of conflicted consultants, with a long history of cost overruns and excessive spending, offering slightly recycled versions of measures that have failed to control costs for the past decade.| City Observatory
For some time, City Observatory has pointed out that compared to other large US metropolitan areas, Portland earns a billion dollar a year “green dividend” because area residents drive about 20 percent less than in the typical US metro area.| City Observatory
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Oregon’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down. | City Observatory
The City Observatory is a study of modern-day cities and urban development practices.| City Observatory
