IDEAS IN MOTION: A CRITIQUE OF THE URBAN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PROCESS: THE PERFORMANCE OF PORTLAND'S 2000 REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLAN

Proponents of include public officials, professional planners and citizen activists. These new urbanists are becoming increasingly active in reshaping the urban transportation planning process and redirecting transportation plans away from an emphasis on highways to accommodate the growing number of automobile users, and are instead calling for a rebalancing of transportation investments to discourage single occupant automobile use and encourage alternative modes. New urbanists support regulations to reduce conventional suburban scale development patterns and support subsidies for higher-density, transit-oriented development. The new urbanist influence can be seen in the urban transportation planning process in Portland, Oregon. Portland's regional transportation plan for a forecast year of 2020 provides a good illustration of the tension in the urban transportation planning process of balancing accommodation of powerful decentralization trends and the advocacy of programs to reverse those trends. The new urbanism focus has two impacts: the public involvement process is tilted to stakeholders who are intent on curbing urban sprawl by changing urban development patterns and transportation behavior; and forecasts of the transportation modeling that show that compact urban development land use and transportation policies and investments do not perform well are largely ignored. Travel demand models show that transit ridership will not increase enough to diminish congestion or to justify the transit investments. This paper challenges Portland's transportation plan as not internally consistent or achievable. The land use and mode choice assumptions in the plan will result in intolerable congestion levels and will likely lead to a public backlash.