Interesting how successful the car manufacturer lobby was in the US, transforming whole cities and life styles of ordinary Americans for generations.
Similar dynamics still go on. Where I live Portland is overwhelmingly the major metro area, but the Oregon DOT is run out of the state capital, Salem, a much smaller and much more suburban community a bit south of the metro area. Despite supposedly being qualified professionals, it's clear ODOT sees things entirely in a car centric way. The only projects they're excited about pushing forward are freeway expansions. Portland is rather emphatic on NOT wanting that, but rather a multi-modal transit network that actually works with the density we have. In recent years ODOT has gotten so tired of the popular backlash on their projects in Portland that they've started playing deceptive games around the public notification process to try to sneak stuff through without pushback.
This whole nation just somehow lost its mind over the ideal of a car centric suburban lifestyle. And yes, some of that was straight up racially motivated, in the trend of white flight. But there were lots of things that fed into it imo. And to be fair, there are plenty of people who do like a suburban lifestyle where they live on a culdesac and have to drive to a strip mall for routine errands. But if you look at the overall migration pattern, all the growth is happening in the 20 or so major metro areas, and in particular in the ones that offer the combination of high income jobs and a more urban lifestyle. Yet somehow all these DoT's across the nation are still acting like the dream of the 1950s is their only priority.
Unless you have some kind of information to explain it, my bet is the Oregon DOT only provides grants for some related projects that the city of portland executes.
Your argument is being made in isolation of political-economic reality, at least as it currently exists in the united states. Tax receipts that could be used for roads (aka not property taxes which currently fund schools) flow out and up from city residents, primarily to the federal government, then to states, and lastly to municipalities. Cities don’t have the same ability to set tax rates as the nation or a state for the simple reason that it’s far more feasible for someone to change cites vs states, to say nothing of county.
Federal dollars are given to states, which are combined with state taxes to build highways, freeways, and other high speed high volume roadway. This constitutes the majority of all road spending, and cites simply have to integrate with that.
1. The I84/I5 interchange. ODOT wants to upgrade it. There has had to be an extreme amount of community push-back to get the proposal even half way integrated with the city itself. As it stands now, it includes partial capping and better bike and transit options above ground. However, it still expands car capacity.
2. The I5 bridge across the Columbia River. It needs to be replaced for seismic and age reasons. The community wants there to be expanded infrastructure for non-cars across one of only two bridges across the Columbia near the city. The other bridge was built recently(ish) and doesn’t have any meaningful non-car transit options. The community wants, at a bare minimum, there to be light rail going from Portland to Vancouver, WA included in a bridge project. So far, that hasn’t quiet materialized.
3. There are many roads in Portland still “owned” by the state. 82nd Ave used to be a good example, though it was transferred to the city last year. These roads have notoriously poor maintenance and high traffic deaths since they really aren’t well-designed for urban areas. (Too fast, too wide, too many access points to be a proper highway, etc.)
4. When the initial freeways were built in Portland, the original plan was for there to be several more highways than there are today. You can see many locations in the existing infra where a highway was meant to connect in but was never built. The Mt. Hood freeway is an example. It took very significant community pushback to get those projects cancelled.
Here’s my take on this, as a Portland resident. The state of Oregon is willing to spend billions of dollars upgrading transportation infrastructure in the Portland area. Why the fuck does 99% of that have to go to highways? Why can’t, say, 50% of it go to vastly expanding bike infrastructure to reduce the cost of road maintenance? That still leaves 50% of, again, billions of dollars of projects to car projects. I’m not even talking 50% of the state transportation budget, I’m talking 60% of the money they would already be spending in our community.
We basically just want more efficient transit methods to get more funding. It’s ok (to me) if the I84/I5 interchange gets improved. It currently sucks and doesn’t feel safe. But I’m not in favor of doing that project without first spending a lot of money or more effective and efficient transportation options. If there’s billions of dollars to be spent on infra, it should absolutely be going to bikes and transit first.
It doesn’t really matter who has jurisdiction, to people who live here
In your second example the community wants to force a light rail project into a bridge project, which sounds like the community had no idea what anything costs and is just repeating something theyve been told is good. There are also rules about funding diversions to exactly stop municipalities from taking money from other levels of government and spending it on things outside of those programs. The community may decide it wants a lot of things - light rail is a whole different proposition than a bridge project.
Portland's transport org doesn't spend billions of dollars and they do have leverage to spend tens of millions on bike projects if they were actually a priority to the city.
But the majority of funding comes from gas taxes and car registration, and bikes aren't paying it, and represent a tiny fraction of the people and goods moved each day.
Even if it is common sense, it is new and rare, which is newsworthy.
[1] https://pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-a...
Where someone lives is a compromise. Everyone wants the best of ALL words: the dense urban area with a subway entrance on the same street, plenty of shopping and other entertainment. They also want a ski lift up a mountain, finish your day ski day in your own backyard, and a tropical beach in the front yard, among the other benefits of rural living. That is physically impossible no matter how much money you have, so you make the best of what you can get even though it cannot be perfect.
With the current situation of the US subrubs are the best compromise, but as things change different compromises become better. Right now dense areas are a lot more expensive for a lot less space, and often that space comes with the problems of living in a very old building.
Note that change will not happen overnight. Even if 30000 square foot apartments (intentionally be absurdly large to make the point) in neighborhoods with good schools was free it would take a lot of time for people to move even though the rent savings would allow for more than enough other lifestyle changes as to make it a better compromise for most people.
Yup, it's generally just a balancing of priorities and trade offs. For me, having to drive everywhere I need to go would make me really sad, so I chose an urban environment, in a neighborhood where there's a good mix of residential and commercial, that is decently well-connected to public transit. But that means I have to deal with more noise, crime, and homelessness, and don't get to have a yard, despite higher living costs.
But that's my trade off, and others don't prioritize the same things I do.
60% of Americans prefer living a a community with larger houses and having to drive miles to get to school, stores, and restaurants versus having smaller houses and businesses within walking distance. Urban residents are divided almost evenly and 49% of them would prefer to drive miles to get to businesses if it meant that they could live in a large house. [1] I suspect the discrepancy with the previous survey is because both scenarios had the participants living in houses and if they were asked to pick a walkable apartment community or the car-dependent house community the number of people who would pick the denser community would be lower. The data is clear, more people prefer the suburban and rural car dependent lifestyles than the walkable urban lifestyle. Making arguments that people just don't know what they want is incredibly condescending and controlling.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/26/more-americ...
Suburbs existed before the car. See "Streetcar suburbs" on youtube.
Going from $3 train tickets to over $30 tickets hurts a lot more than going from a 50 cents a gallon gas tax to a 60 cent one. In my particular case, moving to a user-pays system would mean that I would save $500 a year in car registration taxes that are used exclusively to fund the transit system, which would more than cover a fair increase in the gas tax.
The cost operating costs for a train can be much less (a train can be fully automated which really brings costs down), or much more (if you run drivers and conductors). However as until the train is full requiring that you buy more the costs do not change at all.
Roads have similar concerns - the cost to build and maintain a road is mostly fixed, but it scales to much slower. A full bus every 5 minutes has far more people than the same road with the maximum number of moving cars, so you need to build more roads faster, thus the capital costs of roads is much higher.
Also, most buses don't have 5 minute headways, so if you're going to assume that you may as well assume that every car contains 4 people. Additionally, a 100 person articulated bus coming every 5 minutes is equivalent to 20 single occupancy cars per minute (or 1 car every 3 seconds), which is typical for a busy street. You need really short headways to match a car lane, shorter headways to beat it, and even shorter headways to justify making the lane exclusive to buses.
I did not say people are stupid. More like people are creatures of habit and often fail to realize how a change they could make would cascade into making things better. That is they are more likely to be pessimistic and see the downsides.
People know what they want when given the existing choices. Frankly the existing choices for dense city living suck for most people (bad schools and they can't afford as much space are big ones), so it is no surprise that people choose suburbs: it is the best choice. The real question is can we reform the dense urban areas so that people will decide they want it over suburbs?
There are advantages to density, and advantages to rural living, but yiur cannot have both at the same time.
Even if the responses were the same ignoring prices, I would probably put more weight on the market prices (i.e what people actually do and the resources they devote to it). Why do urban areas cost more and have a lot of people if people don't actually want it?