Thinking about Greenhouse Gas Performance Measures: At the MPO

Tuesday the 13th the technical committee for our Metropolitan Planning Organization meets, and there are a number of items of interest.

at the Oregonian

The Oregonian has a very interesting piece on No More Freeways formal letter to DLCD calling for revisions to Metro's Regional Transportation Plan. Metro is the Portland-area MPO and their plans and processes are similar to — but not identical with — many of the plans and processes here at SKATS.

The critique No More Freeways makes about the failures and even fakery at the MPO to do what they say they are going to do on climate and emissions reductions is essentially one we can also make here. Some of the details will be different, but in broad terms the MPO here is engaging in the same lipservice to emissions reduction, but is still planning on capacity increases and road widening, which will increase emissions.

Just look at the fantasia for OR-22/OR-51. It's an ODOT project, but the MPO is boosting it. It's framed up as for safety, but it's not about slowing cars and safer cars. It's about speeding up and flow. It's about induced demand and more cars. It's anti-climate.

Front page on Sunday

Previously on the OR-22/OR-51 project:

• "ODOT Wildly Overengineers Early Concept Drawings for OR-22 and OR-51 Project" (2022)
• "Tell ODOT to Think about Climate on Costly OR-22/OR-51 Proposals" (2023)

I don't know if the Oregonian article will disappear behind the paywall, but it is very much worth reading.

On emissions

The technical committee will be discussing Federal greenhouse gas emissions performance measures, and we here will have an opportunity to be more or less serious about them.

The first task is to decide whether to recommend to the SKATS Policy Committee to support the ODOT target, similar to the majority of the federal performance measures, or to develop a SKATS-specific target. And if the recommendation is to set a SKATS-specific target, which methodology to use.

There's some complicated math and also the targets are for a subset of the Salem-area street system, the "National Highway System," our main arterials and highways, not smaller arterials, collectors, and local streets.

The NHS in blue

And the targets are for visibility only, and have no consequences attached:

Like the targets for many of the other performance measures there is no penalty for missing the target, nor a reward for meeting the target.

So there's lots of discretion here locally to say how serious we are going to be.

The committee will also discuss the Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan, which needs a stronger emphasis on speed, not merely speeding.

And they will start discussing the process for the 2027-2032 funding cycle. You may recall that because of cost escalation, the MPO hit a big pause on the 2024-2029 cycle, reserving funding for project completion rather than using it to initiate any new projects. So there is a backlog of project applications that could be funded in this new 2027-2032 cycle. There is also an opportunity to rethink and slot in new projects that might better meet our moment in safety and emissions reductions. This will be interesting to follow.

The TAC meets on Tuesday the 13th at 1:30pm. Meeting information, agenda, and packet are available here.