dream of car free portland

The new I-5 Columbia River bridge proposal has got everyone in Portland talking about peak oil and the demise of car culture. The proposal involves a wad of public funds ($4.2 billion dollars) a 12 lane toll-bridge, light rail connections and several new interchanges. As anyone who's spent an hour or more waiting to cross from one state to the other can attest, the situation is gnarly and a solution is definitely in order. But must the solution involve more freeway lanes? Won't more lanes eventually mean more cars and thus more congestion a short while down the road? In other words, if we build it, they will come.

It works the same way with storage space. I recall when I first moved into a tiny studio apartment of my very own sometime in the middle 1990s, I had absolutely nothing excepting a card table, a mattress and a few books and sentimental objects. Over time, my possessions amassed in direct proportion to the size of the space over which I was master, each apartment growing in size and the collection of belongings expanding equally to fill the void. Now I own a small 3-bedroom bungalow with an unfinished crawl space and a garage, and all possible nooks and crannies are packed to the gills with one thing or another, screen printing supplies and art glass, garden tools and bins full of old journals and notebooks, an unused freezer, a few old amps.

While it seems little more then a grand tangent, I have a point: Building wider roads and highways to allow for more traffic seems to be simply a stopgap solution, a makeshift bridge to a tomorrow that does not look any different from today. Wider roads mean more cars, much like a bigger apartment for me always meant more junk. But tomorrow, after the zillion dollar bridge, we will still need a solution, a wider highway, more bridges, smaller cars...something? Shouldn't we rather plan for a future when cars are a thing of the past? -when oil is in even shorter supply and/or regular joes can no longer afford to purchase what is left? -when straddling that bicycle each morning at 6:30 for the soggy, rainy-day commute isn't just something hard-core bike people do?

The bridge opponents argue that we should settle simply for a pedestrian and cycling bridge as well a light rail track spanning the river. And I smile sagely when I hear that the city government of Portland has appointed a Peak Oil Task Force dedicated to the study of alternatives for the city's future (http://www.portlandonline.com/osd/index.cfm?c=42894). And truly, a giant bridge project seems incongruous with our city's stated goals of planning for a future without oil.

I for one like to imagine Portland on the edge of the future, with one foot already in it. It would be nice to live and breathe in the one town in the country that got it before it was too late, who were planning for it, and thinking ahead, and who weren't caught with their collective pants down wondering what the hell happened.