How well does your trail work?

I am a walker, I love to do a lot of walking. While it may not show right now with the pounds I need to do I have walked more than 15 miles in a single day.

When I visited Portland before moving up here in 2010 and early 2011, and after moving here I would do walks suggested by Laura Foster in her books "Portland City Walks" and "Portland Hill Walks" which are two books I would highly recommend if you want to do sightseeing in Portland on foot.

However there is also times I like to walk off road trails because they tend to be quieter and I can do some hard thinking along the way. When I lived in Salt Lake City I would walk the Jordan River Trail that travels the center of the Salt Lake Valley and when I lived in Spokane, WA I would often walk the Centennial trail that traveled from Spokane to Couer D' Alene ,Idaho.

Here in Portland I live realtively close to the Fanno Creek Trail which travels from Tualatin to Portland along several different rights of way and sometimes in streets. I have walked part of the trail that is along an old rail line but have not attempted to walk the who trail until last week.

One of the problems with attempting to walk the entire Fanno Creek trail is the lack of a map that is easy to access. In fact I have not been able to find any map that shows the entire trail from beginning to end that is current. I had to piece together all the information in order to find my way.

Compare that to the Jordan River Parkway which has easy to access maps:
Jordan River Parkway

Or the Centennial Trail in the Spokane area:
Centennial Trail Map

Which is part of Google Maps

How Economic Development affects Effective Planning

Mayor Dennis Doyle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my last couple of posts, I talked about the efforts of many cities to create economic development by inciting corporations with subsidies to locate. Today, I am going to talk about how corporations influence public policy and can have a detrimental effect on effective public planning.

I also mentioned in the first posting of last week that often times companies will relocated such as Sears Holdings moving from downtown Chicago out to the suburbs through government subsidies creating a situation where the new location is poorly accessed by transit by its poor location. Further when one set of subsidies expire the corporations will often come back demand more and threaten to move if they do not get what they want. The problem is these major national/multi-national corporations do not care about the cities and will go where they get the biggest subsidies.

Now lets take a look at how these issues can affect effective planning by using the example of Nike.

Nike is located in Washington County, Oregon near the city of Beaverton. Like many corporate campuses it was designed around the automobile and transit access is near impossible as can be seen in this Google map image:


View Larger Map

There is bus service along Murray Blvd to the east, and as you can see in the map it is relatively close to a MAX light rail station. Looking at the map you can see a forested area that extends from the south of Jenkins Road to the MAX Blue Line. This property is owned by NIKE and it was proposed that they would extended their headquarters across Jenkins to that piece of land.

However according to the urban plan because it is located at a MAX station it needed to include housing and two new roads needed to be built to better access the site. In addition the city of Beaverton tried to annex the site which affects Beaverton because the traffic created by Nike has to be solved by the city of Beaverton.

Nike responded by filing a lawsuit against the city of Beaverton to prevent the annexation so that they would not face paying higher city taxes. This shows another problem with these relocations (while NIKE was not relocated it provides a good example), that a company will get subsidies to move outside city limits so they pay less in taxes but the nearby cities often end up subsidizing the roads in order to get the workers to the new building.

In addition NIKE started lobbying state senators and legislatures to help solve their problem for them and Charley Ringo a State Senator from Washington County was more than happy to obliged fearing that NIKE would pull up states and leave and despite being a member of the Sierra Club drafted legislation that forbid the city of Beaverton to annex the area for 50 years. That's right for two generations nothing can be done to enforce the plan that was previously created to make the area more transit friendly and ensure that Transit Oriented Development is put in by the MAX station.

In addition after the legislature of the state of Oregon dictated what the city could do for the next 50 years, NIKE tried to influence the next election for Beaverton mayor by donating and promoting heavily the person running against the current mayor who they declared was not "business friendly".

It is hard enough to get good development done, situations like this make it even harder and do nothing to build a better community. While giving subsidies to major/multi-national corporations may be a short term solution to economic development, in the long run working to build a local economy that has a stake in the community does more than throwing millions out the door.

I am not saying NIKE is a bad company, however they are looking at their own self interest. The people that should have been looking out for the best interest of the community such as State Senator Charley Ringo who interesting enough did not run for reelection the following year should have considered not only what NIKE wanted by what was in the long term best interest of the community as a whole.

Related articles

• Economic Development: Benefit or Black Hole?

Portland Day 3

Day 3 in Portland was a very busy one. I was hoping to attend one of the morning mobile workshops but they where all filled up but as it turned out I would have some personal business to take care of so it all worked out.

I started off by getting up very early and catching the first route 20 bus to the Beaverton Transit Center. My purpose in this early morning jaunt was to ride WES which is Tri-Mets new commuter rail system from Beaverton to Wilsonville which is the first true suburban to suburban commuter rail system (unless you want to count some of the Conneticut DOT shuttles such as Danbury but thier primary purspose is to connect up with the New Haven to New York commuter trains).

I could have caught the first train after my bus arrived but I wanted to get some OJ but despite the early morning time (6:00AM) there was a good crowd getting off the train and a few people getting back on.

I caught the train that left at 6:28AM. There was a fully seated load getting off and a few people getting on. There is only 3 mid route stations but most of the passengers would board at the last two of those stations which suprised me. By the time we arrived in Wilsonville there was a full seated load. The Wilsonville station is kind of isolated but it does have connecting bus service to the state capital of Salem so many may have been state workers.

WES operates with DMU's (Diesel Multiple Unit) cars made by the late Colorado Railcar. These are the only DMU's that meet the current Federal Guidlines to operate on regular rail lines and fortunately despite the demise of Colorado Railcar another company US Railcar is taking over production.

The WES maintenance facility is located next to the Wilsonville station and I could only see one spare DMU car along with two RDC cars which are 50+ year old DMU's that the private railroads used extensively with the decline of passenger rail service in the 50's and 60's.

Leaving Wilsonville for the trip back we had a half a car load seated which comprised mostly of women which is unusual for commuter rail. However, the numbers evened up by the next stop at which time we had standing room only conditions. There was one lady talking loudly to a couple of friends who took up two seats so no one else could sit down next to her and a guy behind me who I saw later at Railvolution who made it clear no one was going to sit next to him. Some people are just down right rude and very inconsiderate.

The train remained SRO until we arrived Beaverton. I will discuss in more detail WES once I am done traveling.

My first Mobile Workship of Railvolution was in the afternoon and was "Portland's Maturing Streetcar Neighborhood's" which discussed how the Pearl District and its surronding neighborhoods came to be and we had question and answer sessions with one of the architects, devolopers and business owners that made the streetcar and the neighborhood successful.

One of the biggest surprises was the developer responsible for making the Pearl District what is is today was actually a suburban developer originally that is now solely focused on urban development.

Once will do several articles in the coming weeks going into more detail of what I learn at Railvolution and how it can apply to other cities across the nation.