Two years ago I thought that Oregon’s land use system had some problems, but was mostly working.
I’m changing my mind.
The controversy over whether to convert West Burnside and Northwest Couch Streets into a one-way couplet is to me some evidence that our land use system has failed. Downtown Portland is likely the most intensively planned area in the entire state, being as it is the focal point of the largest planning department in the state, and being subject to more regulation than likely any other urban area in the state. If any area should have sensible and consistent planning, it is the central city.
Yet take a look at the last 10 years or so of development in the core. First, the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT) cheerfully installed stop signs and belly curbs (there’s a better name for those peninsulas of sidewalk that stick into the road at intersections, but I don’t know what it is) throughout Northwest Portland, and cut in half the capacity of the main avenues in and out (5th, 6th, 14th, 16th, 18th, and 19th). Next, the planning people upzoned a good chunk of the industrial area to allow high-traffic stores, apartments, and condominiums to be built from Burnside northward. Then, the design review folks required the developers to put in street improvements to make the streets even narrower, and more friendly to pedestrians but less useful for cars. After one department cut traffic capacity and another increased demand, PDOT gets the idea of undoing Planning’s work on Couch so that it can reduce the capacity of Burnside.
I can understand this mess happening in a small town that doesn’t have the level of sophistication of Portland’s planning and transportation staff. Well, no, actually I can’t, because I think that a town that had one planner and one transportation engineer would never have gone this far down the road (tramway?) of having two departments push competing visions for a street. In a small town, the planner would have told the transportation maven about the proposed development, and the transportation maven would have told the planner, "Don’t narrow that street; we need to make it wider." Problem avoided.
To my mind the Burnside-Couch question was settled 40 years ago, when the City Council (guided, if I recall rightly, by an astute question from Commissioner Stanley Earl) voted down a similar proposal, though without a trolley. It’s long past time to let the old Burnside-Couch couplet idea drop.