An Exit Strategy from the Procrastination Superhighway

by Kevin Donoghue

Back in 1993, Portland adopted its Transportation Plan, A Time for Change, against a background of growing concern for suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, air pollution, global warming, and even fuel costs. The plan had understood itself as a necessary corrective “to something fundamentally wrong in how we as a government and as citizens make decisions about building and using transportation systems.” (p.1)

A Time for Change imagined our city through lenses of a utopian and a dystopian transportation future, the former a place where children could walk to school and parents could shower after biking to work and the latter a place where families have fled to the suburbs and the city has become but a parking garage.

The planning horizon for each future had been fifteen years, and clearly one has been chosen for 2008.

Notwithstanding the sizable benefits from the leadership of Trainriders Northeast and Portland Trails, the interim has seen decisions to shutter neighborhood schools and open several more parking garages. METRO has converted its fleet to natural gas, but after we have built a new highway in the West End. In a paraphrase of Jane Jacobs: “This is not the rebuilding of Portland. This is the sacking of Portland.”

While implementing our transportation plan has stayed the course on the procrastination superhighway, citizen activists are signaling for an exit strategy ahead. When traffic engineers recommended doubling the automobile traffic capacity of Franklin Arterial in the essentially discredited Peninsula Traffic Plan, neighborhood leaders reclaimed the public process and redirected it consistent with A Time for Change.

While the city has indeed corrected course and is moving forward with its new Peninsula Transit Plan, a new highway project is coming over the horizon. MaineDOT is announcing its plans to widen I-295 through the peninsula and is aggressively seeking federal earmarks through our delegation in Congress, included among whom is former mayor and the father of A Time for Change, Congressman Tom Allen.

MaineDOT will invoke alternatives to widening as obliged by the Sensible Transportation Policy Act but is unlikely to recommend against widening and even less likely to identify funding for alternatives. The most meaningful alternative, commuter rail, remains but a mere twinkle in the eye of the governor.

Meanwhile, the only thing between the sand and gravel folks and a lucrative fait accompli is the public.

February 12 at 7 pm, there will be a crucial public hearing at the Clarion Hotel on 1230 Congress Street on whether we should seek federal earmarks for highway widening or for greater public transportation. The hearing will be hosted by the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation Study group (PACTS), a federal transportation planning committee on which I serve as the one and only local elected official.

February 21 at 7 pm, there will be a public forum at the new Ocean Gateway on the Eastern Waterfront on our priorities for work on the Peninsula Transit Plan. I am chairing the planning committee, whose outcomes are expected to include recommendations for the new bus routes for METRO.

A Time for Change was back in 1993. Now the time for action has been established: 2008.

Please tell me your thoughts on transportation planning in Portland: kjdonoghue@portlandmaine.gov