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Curing Seattle's Portland envy

By Wendell Cox, Adjunct Scholar Evergreen Freedom Foundation

It's time for Seattle to get over its Portland envy. For more than 15 years Seattle officials have trekked south to Portland to admire its light rail system and attend seminars on its anti-sprawl, "smart growth" policies. In contrast, Seattle has had a reputation for some of the nation's worst traffic congestion and some of the worst sprawl. To hear the Portland publicists tell the story, a new kind of urban area is being developed on the banks of the Willamette, one where people will forsake driving alone, where freeways will be neither built nor expanded, and visitors from Europe will confuse it with home.

It may therefore come as a surprise that the just released 2000 US Census travel data does not bear all this out. Yes, Portland has achieved a modest increase in public transit use — since 1980, the last Census before light rail opened, 8,000 workers out of the new 230,000 in the Tri-County transit service area chose transit — only four percent of the employment increase. Over the same time, the share of people using transit to get to work in Portland dropped more than 20 percent, slightly above the national rate. To reduce traffic congestion requires attracting people who drive alone from their cars, because it is the work trip's concentration during a few hours that produces the worst regular traffic congestion in virtually any city. The Census data makes it clear that light rail has made virtually no difference in Portland's traffic.

Without light rail and with its sprawl, it would be expected that Seattle would have done even worse. It did not. From 1980 to 2000, the King County transit service area added 16,000 transit commuters out of 275,000 new jobs, or nearly six percent of new travel. Transit's work trip market share dropped, by a smaller 15 percent. This is not to suggest that transit has made a difference in Seattle — it has not. Both Seattle and Portland have low transit work trip market shares, at 9.6 percent and 7.6 percent respectively. Heavy transit investment in either city can make little difference because transit's base market share is so low, and more importantly, because the downtown locations that contain virtually the only places that transit can provide auto-competitive service are such a small and declining share of metropolitan employment (10 percent or less).

But with respect to indicators that do make a difference, Seattle did much better during the 1990s, when Portland added another light rail line and strengthened its anti-sprawl policies. From 1990 to 2000, 51 percent of new workers in King County did not drive to work alone. This compares to a respectable, but lower, 33 percent in Portland. Seattle's superior performance results from a larger increase in car pooling and working at home. The car pool gain may indicate that Seattle's high occupancy vehicle strategy is paying off.

Surprisingly, even Dallas did better than Portland, with 38 percent of new commuters not driving alone. Even more surprising is that its three new light rail lines and one new commuter rail did not contribute a single rider to this accomplishment. Transit work travel declined by 3,100 in Dallas County. Other new urban rail areas have also done poorly. The share of people driving to work has risen in every urban area that has built a new rail system except for San Diego and Denver, where the transit gains have been miniscule. All of this demonstrates the futility of including money for Sound Transit in the regional transit funding package.

Then there is the matter of traffic. Smart growth advocates claim that greater traffic congestion is an outgrowth of sprawl. It would therefore be expected that traffic trends have been worse in sprawling Seattle than in anti-sprawl Portland. Again, not so. Since before light rail opened, Federal Highway Administration data indicates that Portland's traffic density has increased at a rate more than 50 percent above Seattle. And while Seattle's traffic remains worse by most measures, Portland is catching up. In 1990, Portland's Travel Time Index (Texas Transportation Institute-Federal Highway Administration measurement of time lost due to traffic) was 23 percent behind Seattle's. The latest available data (1999) shows Portland to have moved to within 10 percent of Seattle. Now Portland has the highest Travel Time Index of any metropolitan area its size.

Solving Seattle's traffic problems is no small task. Sprawl will continue so long as population growth continues and incomes rise, because people prefer to have their own houses and more space, not less. But the last 20 years in Seattle and Portland show that neither smart growth nor rail transit deliver on their promises.

Wendell Cox, as well as being an adjunct scholar for EFF, heads Wendell Cox Consultancy, serves on the Amtrak Reform Council, and was a member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-85).

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org