Senior planner: shortage of local road funds

Sees federal funds as answer

Vilas Bhuchar, Dec 09, 09.

Stuart Gwin, senior planner of the Portland Bureau of Transportation, told 170 new urbanists and transportation specialists gathered at an early November transportation summit in downtown Portland that a shortage of funds to build local streets is making it difficult to create dense, walkable neighborhoods, according to New Urban News.

According to the story, Gwin sees dense, walkable neighborhoods as crucial to reducing automobile travel and thus cutting greenhouse gas emissions. However, most of the places that the three-county Metro government would like to see converted into denser environments don’t have the same network of short (200-by-200-foot) blocks that downtown Portland has - needed to make walking both comfortable and efficient.

Thus, without funds to build these local streets, Grin “told the summit that leaders in the region are finding it nearly impossible to convert many areas outside of downtown into mixed use precincts where people can readily do without a car.”

Just how many local roads and how much money are needed to achieve “a mix of uses and housing types at a walkable, transit-supporting density”? According to the story, Gwin estimates that the number of intersections per square mile would have to be “250 at least”, and for a place like Gateway Regional Center (a 650-acre urban renewal area in East Portland), increasing from 100 intersections per sq. mile to 250 would cost about $70 million.

While Grin believes that this is more than property owners, developers, or local government can afford, he think federal funds could compensate for this. He is quoted as saying:

For us to have the kind of environments we want, we have to find a way to fund the local street network. I can’t see any other way than through federal policy.

According to the story, “federal funds are allocated mainly to highways and arterial roads, with the intention of increasing mobility and reducing congestion.”

Gwin believes it’d be more useful to spend this money on local street networks and says, “We’re going to have to recognize there’s not as much importance in creating state networks as in creating local streets - to make good cities.”

Finally, the article notes that, “Senator Thomas Carper (D-Delaware) has inserted into a climate-change bill a provision that would authorize federal spending on local networks. As of mid-November, the bill had not been approved.”

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(Photo credit: Ben Amstutz)