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East Oregonian
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Avoiding Portland
traffic at all costs
t doesn’t take a traffic engineer to
determine that Portland is highway-
impaired. Traffic in Oregon’s
largest city is slow.
How slow is it, you ask?
A few years ago, the state
Department of Transportation estimated
that 34,600 hours a day were wasted in
Portland traffic jams. That’s nearly four
years of people’s time that was wasted
each day. We’d bet the number is much
larger now.
And just think of what all that
stalled traffic does to the climate. A
car or truck stuck in Portland traffic is
producing carbon dioxide but getting
zero miles per gallon. By that standard
alone, Portland must be a major
contributor to climate change.
Portland traffic is so bad people
headed for the airport often have to
factor in an extra hour of drive time
just to avoid missing their flights.
Portland traffic is so bad the state
Legislature set aside $25 million to
help agricultural shippers in the nearby
Willamette Valley avoid it.
The plan is to build an “intermodal
facility” somewhere in the Willamette
Valley south of Portland. Trucks will
haul containers full of hay and other
agricultural commodities from farms
and processors to a loading terminal
where the containers can be loaded
onto railroad cars. From there, trains
would go to ports in Tacoma or Seattle
for export overseas, thus avoiding
I
Portland traffic snarls. The Port of
Portland handles only a tiny number
of container ships, making the trip to
Tacoma and Seattle necessary.
It should be noted that there are
already three such intermodal facilities
in the region — including one at the
port — but all are in Portland. Trucks
hauling containers to those facilities are
just as likely to get caught in traffic.
If Interstates 5, 205 and 405 had
adequate capacity, and if traffic not
bound for Portland could avoid its
multi-lane parking lots, many problems
could be solved. But, for whatever
reason, that is not to be.
Having a $25 million intermodal
facility in the valley represents the
next best thing for valley growers and
processors who still have to get their
crops and goods to ports for shipment
to overseas customers.
In the running are two proposals.
One would be built in Brooks, a
few miles north of Salem. The other
would be a repurposed paper mill
in Millersburg, a few miles south of
Salem.
What about the rest of us?
Eastern Oregon drivers have to make
hard decisions when planning trips
to points in the Willamette Valley or
Oregon Coast. Do we try to avoid the
ever-growing rush hour time windows,
just brave the traffic, or plan lengthy
detours that can add hours to a journey?
Any solution appears to be years
AP file photo
Traffic in Portland is a challenge for drivers looking to get anywhere else fast.
away, and expensive to boot.
The Oregon Transportation
Commission voted unanimously
recently to seek federal approval for
tolling Interstates 5 and 205 through
the Portland area and to study creating
a seamless loop of tollways around the
city. Those tolls might also extend to
Interstate 405, Interstate 84, U.S. Route
26, State Highway 217 and sections of
U.S. Route 30.
Unless there’s a massive national
investment in public transportation
networks, such as passenger rail —
highly unlikely — we will have to
rely on our automobiles for decades to
come. And tolls may be the only way to
get new roads built.
Those of us who have experienced
East Coast traffic snarls sincerely hope
the Portland planners take to heart the
lessons learned there. Any toll road that
forces drivers to stop and make change
creates miles-long backups.
Only systems like EZPass that allow
vehicles to whiz by and record the
toll electronically have any hope of
reducing congestion. Drivers without
passes could have their license plates
scanned, with automated bills arriving
in the mail, much as camera speed traps
operate. It smacks of Big Brother, but
it works.
Any solution that allows us to travel
around Portland, rather than through
it, is worthy of pursuing — even tolls.
No one likes to pull out their wallet just
to get from point A to point B in their
automobile. But to do nothing, and
allow our roads to become ever more
unusable, isn’t an option.
We need to think big for the future.
President Eisenhower thought big in
the 1950s when he built the national
interstate system. It transformed our
nation. What will transform travel in
the 21st century?
OTHER VIEWS
Climate change effects
getting more real
Orange County (California) Register, Aug. 14
ven — or especially — among
those who agree human-caused
global warming is happening, the
footnote has been the understanding that
no individual weather event or catastrophe
is caused by the overall temperature rise.
Until this summer in the Northern
Hemisphere.
It’s not just hot here in California,
where it’s always hot in July, August and
September. It’s not just Death Valley,
where German tourists always flock to
feel the heat they (formerly) couldn’t at
home.
It was hovering around 90 degrees
Fahrenheit at the Arctic Circle in Norway
and Sweden last week. In July, the hottest
temperature ever recorded in Scotland
was hit — 92 degrees in a village near
Glasgow. It was 106 in Japan, also that
nation’s highest ever.
And while it’s often in the triple
digits in the air here, the Pacific Ocean
had never in 102 years of daily water-
temperature readings hit 78 degrees at the
pier in La Jolla where the Scripps Institute
is — until this summer.
Rising ocean temperatures are another
feature of global warming, and will
radically alter our formerly famous
Mediterranean climate insofar as night-
time air temperatures go. Unlike most of
the rest of the country, when California
has a 95-degree summer day, it’s never
been unusual for the outdoors temp to
cool to the mid-50s by late evening. Felt
anything like the upper 50s lately? Up
and down California, last month saw the
highest minimum temperature statewide
of any month since 1895, rising to 64.9,
from the redwood forest to the Coachella
E
OTHER VIEWS
Ambitious better than
indifference on homelessness
R
The Eugene Register-Guard
epublican Knute Buehler is making
homelessness a centerpiece of his
campaign for governor, and the focus
is welcome. He has released a seven-point
plan for ending unsheltered homelessness
in Oregon by 2023 — and while details of
his program are open to dispute, Buehler
has done a service by elevating this issue
to the state level. Buehler and incumbent
Democratic Gov. Kate Brown should
debate homelessness with the same urgency
they devote to education and health care.
Homelessness has tended to be regarded
as a local problem, or an urban problem
— but it’s an Oregon problem, affecting
every county in the state. And at a time
when Oregon’s unemployment rate is
uncharacteristically below the national
average, the number of homeless people in
the state is growing. In a meeting with The
Register-Guard’s editorial board, Buehler
cited a 2017 federal report that found a 6
percent increase in the number of homeless
people in Oregon over the past two years,
and that Oregon has the nation’s highest
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the
East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and
not necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
rate of youth homelessness.
Buehler said he’s talking about
homelessness because he’s hearing about
it from voters all over the state — they
see its effect on law enforcement, health
care, education and the quality of life.
The scale of the problem demands state
leadership, Buehler said, and he’s right. He
also showed a firm grasp of the fact that the
many costs of homelessness, ranging from
increased emergency room visits to a loss
of human dignity, can exceed the cost of
programs to address it.
Buehler proposes improving Medicaid-
funded mental health services, opening
4,000 temporary shelter beds, creating
4,000 spaces in supported housing
programs, providing rental assistance
for low-income families, expanding
affordable housing programs, giving local
governments more authority to regulate
behavior such as lying on sidewalks,
enhancing job training and other measures
to address or prevent homelessness. The
overarching goal would be to provide
people with the means to move toward
self-sufficiency.
Valley, Ron Lin and Javier Panzar report
in the Los Angeles Times.
And so, yes, to answer many
Californians’ understandable question,
climate change is contributing to the
unprecedented wildfire seasons we are
seeing this year and last. Global warming
is without a doubt a culprit in the suddenly
year-round fire danger we face throughout
our state. The higher temperatures mean
dried-out trees, forest undergrowth and
grasslands. Those plants burn more easily
when a spark of any kind ignites them —
mostly, of course, also man-made sparks,
but now with drier kindling to deal with.
And the snowmelt and river levels are
lower, too, because of climate change.
The San Francisco Chronicle cites a
report in which researchers at Columbia
University and the University of Idaho
showed that human-caused warming
had dried out our forests so much that
fire seasons throughout the West have
expanded by an average of nine days
every year since 2000.
So — now that the demonstrably real
effects of climate change are affecting
our California lives every day, what to do
about it? It’s only human to lament the
lost opportunities, the fact that responsible
scientists warned us two decades ago that
this would come to pass if we didn’t halt
the rise in greenhouse-gas production.
But humans have faced existential threats
before, in the last century — from world
wars, from nuclear weapons. Now is the
time to not give into despair but to lobby
our leaders, and governments around
the world, telling them to stop sticking
their heads in the (hot) sand, believe the
science and begin a technical approach to
reversing the real problem humans have
brought to our planet.
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
U.S. PRESIDENT
Donald Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the
newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual
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