Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Facebook RSS

Golden Fleece Award – Issue 56

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

GoldenFleeceWhat Do You Get for a $52 Million Street Retrofit? More Traffic!

A Golden Fleece Award with gold braid goes to the wizards in the City of Portland who smoked $52 million of your bucks on a makeover of S.W. Moody. They raised it 14 feet and widened the right of way to 75 feet. This according to the Cascade Policy Institute.

So it should have accommodated more traffic. If you guessed this, the late Johnny Carson would have replied “You are wrong, Diesel Breath!”

What ate up the extra width? Two pedestrian walkways, a two-way bicycle track and a double track for the streetcar, among other things. All to make way for the Portland-Milwaukie light rail line boondoggle.

Get this: The “dominant mode of travel” on Moody? Cars. And since the “retrofit that only a government could love,” the percentage of auto traffic has increased, despite the reduced lane capacity. All we can say is “Brilliant. Simply brilliant.”

Share

Comments are closed.