If you wonder sometimes why Oregon can’t seem to come up with enough money to solve our transportation problems, maybe the reason is that we’re spending money the wrong way.
In June the legislature was told we had an $800 million backlog of road maintenance. That doesn’t even count improvements to take care of more traffic, such as widening the Albany-Corvallis Highway, much less future projects to ease congestion such as a new bridge across the Willamette River north of Albany.
We already know that gas tax revenue has been mostly flat and can’t be expected to pay for all that. We also know that the state has borrowed hundreds of millions to fix roads and bridges in the OTIA program, money that’s being repaid from higher vehicle fees over many years. So the additional huge sums required to update our surface transportation system are hard to find.
So what do our leaders do? Gov. Kulongoski has just signed House Bill 5036, which among other things calls for borrowing $250 million for an extension of light rail in Portland, plus $20 million to support the development of streetcars in Oregon. We are, in other words, doing our best to recreate the transportation world of a bygone age. More than 100 years ago, even Albany had a street car. It used to be pulled by a horse, later by a little engine. It went away because people’s needs changed. And along came a wondrous invention called the automobile, which enabled people to move about independently, more or less.
The $250 million in borrowing authorized in HB 5036 will pay for a 6.5-mile extension of a light rail line from Portland to Milwaukie. The bill says the line will reduce congestion. Maybe so, but not that you would notice. Roads in the metro area remain very congested even where light rail exists.
The bill says the new line “will reduce the cost and time required for family wage earners to commute to work, permitting more of Oregon’s workforce to obtain jobs for which these workers are qualified.” What does riding a train have to do with being qualified for work?
As for the $20 million streetcar fund, also funded by lottery-backed bonds, it’s supposed to make grants to cities to buy streetcars made in Oregon.
Quick, let’s peel back the asphalt and uncover some of those old streetcar tracks downtown — if they’re still there — so we can apply for a grant. It won’t do anything for transportation, but it might be fun and it’s a project for which the state has money to burn.
