First Look at State Transportation Package, Council Approves TNCs

The Legislature shared a first look at a proposed transportation package earlier this evening. Here are the first articles about it:

• Threaded live-tweeting from BikePortland
• "Oregon transportation plan calls for I-5 tolls, gas tax hike, payroll tax" at the SJ
• "Lawmakers offer transportation plan" at the Portland Tribune
• "Oregon transportation tax plan would add lanes to I-5, Hwy 217" at the Oregonian 
• "Oregon transportation funding proposal includes 5% tax on new bicycles" at BikePortland
• "Oregon Legislature Reveals Transportation Funding Package" at Oregon Environmental Council
• A national perspective from Streetsblog, "Oregon’s Transportation Funding Deal Might Make Bikes More Expensive"

There's a lot of highway widening and "congestion relief" but not a lot about carbon dioxide pollution, climate change, and making it easier not to drive. We'll see. More will come out about it, and there will be more to say later.

At the Congress for New Urbanism:
TNCs add traffic, erode transit
(CNU25 in Seattle, via Twitter)

This evening Council voted to move forward with TNCs. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Update, Wednesday May 10th

There's a nice opinion piece from John Miller of Wildwood/Mahonia in the paper today!

Update 2, also the 10th

The Committee is again meeting this evening to discuss the concept, and in thinking about it, it seems wildly unbalanced still, with a tremendous autoist bias. Safe Routes gets $10 million annually, paths outside the right-of-way get $15 million annually, but mostly it's road expansion for about $500 million annually ($5 billion over a decade).

Collaged (with comments in red)
from the May 8th slide deck and presentation

Maybe as they flesh out more detail and even modify some of it, it will seem more balanced, but at the moment, it's table scraps still for non-auto travel.  It's also not really very coherent, and instead is an awkward political compromise: "A camel is a horse designed by committee" and all that!

And some reaction to the Wednesday meeting:

• "3 things that could derail Oregon's $8.2B plan to fix roads and ease congestion": The total scope, a 6 cent gas tax increase, the statewide payroll tax for transit.
• On Friday at BikePortland, "The latest on Oregon’s bike tax proposal from Street Trust policy director Gerik Kransky"
• Here we go! At Willamette Week, "Oregon's Proposed $8.2 Billion Transportation Package Includes Some Shaky Assumptions About Traffic Jams"
• On Monday at BikePortland, "Bike industry leaders oppose bike tax proposal amid push for alternatives"
• On Thursday the 18th in the Portland Tribune, "Studded tires escape fee hike"