The Oregonian reported a few days ago that in the next 20 or so years, the population of the Portland metropolitan area is expected to grow by about 1 million persons. The article focused on where these people would live — what developed areas would increase in density, and what undeveloped areas would be developed. The thought that came to my mind was the more prosaic problem of transportation. To what extent can our transportation system be expected to move our future neighbors from place to place?
Let’s start by assuming that one-third of the new arrivals will use public transit to get to and from work. That’s 333,000 persons. Can they all travel by train? A two-car MAX train can hold about 200 people (that’s a guess, not an official statistic). It will take about 1,666 trainsets to carry the transit-using arrivals to and from work. If the morning and evening commutes are spread over three hours each, that’s about 560 trains an hour, or 280 each way on a double track.
A MAX track can’t handle 280 trains an hour; its capacity is more like 20 trains an hour at the peak, with everything working exactly right. So a new light rail line can handle 60 trains each way over a three-hour period, meaning that if my assumptions about transit usage are right, we will need four new MAX lines to handle the demand.
That’s not likely to happen in the next 20 years.
Most of our freeways are jammed in morning and evening rush hour, so our roads aren’t going to take up the slack, unless we increase our freeway mileage by 50% or so. That’s not likely to happen either. (The story of the Mount Hood Freeway still reverberates here.) And the area planned for the next spurt of growth, the new city of Damascus, has no freeway access; it’s farther from freeways than almost any other area within the urban growth boundary.
I don’t yet have a solution for the transit problem, but I do have one small idea to offer for a different problem the article mentioned, which is planning for schools. The writer suggested that Metro adds to the UGB, but the burdens of traffic, sewer, water, and schools fall on local jurisdictions. In particular, school districts such as Beaverton and Tigard at the edges of the UGB have problems buying land for new school sites once it’s come into the UGB. Metro has been buying land for greenspaces in and out of the UGB. I’d like to suggest that as Metro expands the UGB onward and outward, it allocate some of its funds to buy school sites in advance of UGB expansion, that it can then give to the school districts that need to build new schools. It’s a small thing, but one that can make a big difference.