A Brief Portrait of Multimodal Transportation Planning in Oregon and the Path to Achieving It, 1890-1974

Abstract

Excerpts: "With its statewide land use program, urban growth boundaries, Transportation Planning Rule (TPR), active (often activist) citizenry, progressivedominated government, and, in Portland, modern history of transit investment and self-consciously alternative urban self-concept, Oregon has gone further, for longer, and been more successful than most places in pushing back against automobiles' dominance of environment, lifestyle, and landscape. "Two moments in time brought particular change. In shifting away from freeway-building in the 1970s, Portland-area and state planners decided that transportation decisions and infrastructure need no longer dictate land use but could serve it. And with the 1991 TPR, Oregon became a pioneer in managing what has been called the transportation land-use connection. "The story of Oregon's 'multimodal' transportation planning must be written in such as way as to inform [the] commuter ... about the system he thinks just is, how it got there, and how and why he should appreciate its substance. As much as possible, the story, as it is begun here, relates complex subject matter to his life and times, delving into the big controversies that come from society's deep disagreement over conservation and development, aesthetics and wealth. It dips into older history, then moves more or less chronologically. In order to do justice to the various practitioners and players, it includes four stages of action: the national, the metropolitan, the state governmental and the local." "A full history to the present day would also attend to some of the less attended-to aspects of transportation planning, the ones that do not as often appear on newspapers' front pages. These include freight planning and its relationship to the business and corporate communities; the specialized work of modelers, system-design technologists, economists, and intelligent-transportation engineers; and the visions, dreams, schemes and projections of futurists, whose imaginings in bygone eras truly led to the very infrastructures we see today. Some current visions-from hydrogen highways to cycle-towns, bullet trains to electric-car cities, biofueled states to right-priced thoroughfares-will become the daily environments of tomorrow, while other visions fade away."