Members of the Metro Policy Advisory Committee and other representatives traveled to downtown Sherwood Wednesday as part of a tour of the Southwest Corridor.
Reporting aboard TriMet Bus 2108
Planners studying transportation in the southwestern wedge of the region have organized countless meetings and met with myriad stakeholders. They've pored over hundreds of surveys from residents and analyzed decades of data.
But Wednesday night, those planners and more than a dozen members of the Metro Policy Advisory Committee were offered a unique perspective on the Southwest Corridor – an on-the-ground look at what leaders from Tigard, King City, Sherwood and Tualatin think their cities need.
In a 2 1/2-hour tour that stretched from downtown Portland's "Hairball" interchange to quaint, charming downtown Sherwood, MPAC members heard stories about how transportation poses challenges for corridor commuters – and how transportation could be a tool for new hope for the area.
The tour was held on a TriMet bus marked "VIP Coach."
In Southwest Portland, Jay Sugnet talked about how historic Barbur Boulevard makes it hard to provide for smoother transportation in the area. Sugnet, the director of the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability Barbur Boulevard corridor study project, highlighted a number of problems created by roads that were designed for another time.
The biggest challenge Sugnet listed might be the area of South Portland, where residents are wary after decades of transportation projects built to help people get through – not around in – their neighborhood. The Hairball interchange, at the west end of the Ross Island Bridge, is the most obvious. But the Portland Aerial Tram is another example.
"It was yet another transportation facility that did not provide any neighborhood benefits," Sugnet said.
Further south on Barbur, Sugnet points to more problems. Only half of Barbur has a sidewalk. Some of its bridges are built on timber pilings, not steel or concrete. Others are too narrow to accommodate bike lanes. As the bus rolled south on a wide stretch of Barbur – five lanes plus medians – a woman ambled across the street, mid-block, with no marked crosswalks in sight.
Competing interests
Halfway down the corridor, Portland Community College's Sylvania Campus draws students from all over the region. But its entrance is a mile south of Barbur Boulevard.
If planners decide to pursue high capacity transit on the Southwest Corridor some day – and regional leaders say such a transit project is decades away because of a lack of funding – they'd have to decide whether to jog a line off Barbur to the campus to serve PCC students.
Sherwood Mayor Keith Mays may have been joking when he hollered "Let them walk!" from the back of the bus, but his humor underscored a challenge for any transit project – it's a zero-sum game, and money spent on improving access to the college could come at the expense of extending a transit project to his city.
PCC has about 27,000 students; Sherwood has roughly 19,000 residents. TriMet planning director Alan Lehto pointed out that some enterprising PCC students have realized that part of the campus is only five blocks from Barbur Boulevard, and carved a path through the woods to provide a shortcut.
What if, he said, that were improved so that transit didn't have to directly serve the campus?
The scrum for a place in line wasn't just internal. Tualatin City Council President Monique Beikman pointed out that the TriMet bus carrying the MPAC delegation was probably the only TriMet bus that would travel Tualatin-Sherwood Road that day, week, maybe even month. More than half of the jobs in Tualatin have no access to transit.
"Everybody wants more of us," Lehto said.
That's not necessarily true. King City Mayor Ron Shay talked about the ongoing effort by some Southwest Corridor residents to use city-level ballot measures to try to stop light rail from coming through their towns. He didn't take a stand on the effort in King City, but lamented its timing.
"They forced us to spend $3,000 to put it on the September ballot," instead of November, Shay said.
Similar measures made the ballot in Clackamas County and King City; petitioners failed to qualify in Tigard, Sherwood and Tualatin.
More than transportation
The Southwest Corridor has a dozen partners, but Metro is leading the project study because of its experience managing federal environmental reviews like this. Staffers at Metro have been adamant that this isn't just a typical transit study, for reasons beyond the absence of a pot of gold at the end of this EIS rainbow to build another MAX line.
The transit system was designed in the 1970s; hundreds of streets lack sidewalks to encourage alternate transportation; decaying strip malls line Barbur Boulevard.
The project's printed material has its share of fancy illustrations suggesting that street trees magically make new development occur, but those on the tour seemed aware that rebuilding streets and shifting bus routes is only part of the battle.
The Southwest Corridor, said Metro Councilor Kathryn Harrington, "can be better at serving us in the 21st Century. This is not just about transportation problems and solutions."