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West Eugene Forum

www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/search/1553101-47/story.csp
GUEST VIEWPOINT
West Eugene Collaborative being too narrow
BY MARK ROBINOWITZ
Published: Oct 27, 2008 05:00AM

The West Eugene Collaborative is an effort to bring together people from diverse backgrounds to examine solutions to decades of failed land use and transportation policies. However, the collaborative needs a broader range of perspectives to be effective.

The collaborative is an outgrowth of the failed West Eugene Parkway, a highway first proposed in 1951 and formally canceled by the Federal Highway Administration in 2007.

The parkway was not approved because it violated nearly every federal transportation law — including Section 4(f) of the 1966 Transportation Act, which prohibits highways built with federal aid from being built through protected parklands such as the West Eugene Wetlands.

Only $17 million of the required $169 million official price tag was appropriated, despite promises from parkway promoters that “the money was there.” And the state’s traffic analyses showed it would not solve traffic snarls.

In June 2001, an intergovernmental meeting called the West Eugene Charette brought together the Eugene, Lane County, state and federal governments. Participants agreed the parkway could not get federal approvals, and it was time to move beyond this failed proposal.

Mayor Jim Torrey, County Commissioner Bobby Green and Oregon Transportation Commissioner Randy Papé were part of this consensus, but a few weeks later they changed their minds and put a nonbinding resolution on the city of Eugene ballot that passed 51 percent to 49 percent.

This local resolution in favor of the parkway could not force the Federal Highway Administration to approve a road they knew was illegal, and the city never authorized a dime toward its construction.

After the city reaffirmed its rhetorical support for the parkway, Oregon Department of Transportation officials spent at least $2 million to study further a project that privately they knew was unlikely to be approved. If the June 2001 “no build” consensus had been implemented, our money spent on these failed studies could have been used to fix West 11th Avenue intersections to facilitate traffic flows.

Adding extra turn lanes would not solve all of the transportation and land use problems, but it would be part of the solution. If pro-parkway politicians had agreed to remove the parkway from life support when they agreed it was unlikely to be built, these fixes already would have been in place.

During the debates about the Parkway, a citizens-led alternative was developed — Wetlands: West Eugene Transportation, Land and Neighborhood Design Solutions (to read more about it, visit www.greenwasheugene.com/wetlands.html).

One of the West Eugene Collaborative’s consultants told me that the wetlands alternative was well presented, and one of the private citizens responsible for the collaborative told me she thought it was “brilliant.” But despite this private praise, wetlands supporters were not invited to participate, and the collaborative has avoided including it in its deliberations.

Worse, the collaborators did not welcome west Eugene’s neighborhood groups until after more than a year of meetings (they now have included two of the eight groups).

The wetlands alternative recommends a combination of road fixes and land use changes to improve traffic flow, reduce travel demand and mitigate dumb land use planning in West Eugene. West 11th could be improved significantly through intersection work without the collaborative’s expensive and unworkable suggestion for a “boulevard” widening.

A couple of small links, such as between Second Avenue and Garfield Street and First Avenue and Seneca Road, could fix connection issues without having to build any part of the parkway.

Perhaps the biggest bottleneck is the Roosevelt Boulevard/Highway 99 intersection, which the parkway Environmental Impact Statement admitted would remain a problem even if the parkway is built. Since the nearby Highway 99 bridge over the railroad needs to be replaced, a renewed focus on this area might find the resources to reconstruct this intersection.

Any road construction in west Eugene will be inadequate if the underlying land use issues are avoided. While it took decades to create the problems, the city continues to permit uses that make the situation worse.

Eugene could follow Hood River’s lead and ban oversized big-box stores, a law that the Oregon Supreme Court upheld in 2002. The recent approvals near West 11th of a Lowe’s hardware store next to a Home Depot store instead could have included mixed-use residential development — the only way that the proposed West 11th bus rapid transit line could be viable.

The wetlands alternative developed two options for the Belt Line Road/Roosevelt intersection based on projections of energy supplies. If gasoline prices remain relatively low, then this intersection would be expanded into a grade-separated interchange. But if the era of cheap gas is ending, then traffic also is going to be diminished as expensive oil slows travel demand, and therefore an interchange would not be needed.

The collaborative would better serve the community if it refocused on how to mitigate the effects of the energy and economic crises.

Mark Robinowitz was the primary “road scholar” for the wetlands alternative.