Report: The Portland Transportation Disaster: The High Cost of Anti Auto Planning in Portland
By Randal O’Toole
Executive Summary
Portland’s transportation system is experiencing a profound and measurable decline. Over the past four decades, congestion has surged, transit ridership has collapsed, and traffic fatalities have risen sharply—even as Portland and Metro have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on transportation planning. The data show that these outcomes are not accidental but are the predictable result of policies explicitly designed to suppress automobile use, despite the fact that automobiles carry more than 95% of all passenger travel in the region.
Rather than plan for the mode that overwhelmingly serves residents’ needs, Portland and Metro have focused almost exclusively on transit, walking, and cycling—modes that together account for less than 5% of passenger-miles. The region has not built a new freeway since 1983 and has instead pursued strategies that reduce roadway capacity, slow traffic, and intentionally increase congestion. These policies have failed to reduce driving, failed to improve transit performance, and failed to deliver environmental or safety benefits.
The evidence shows that automobility remains essential to economic opportunity, equity, and household well-being. Cars provide access to many times more jobs and services than transit, at lower cost per passenger-mile, and with far greater flexibility—especially for low-income residents. Meanwhile, decades of federal regulation have made automobiles dramatically cleaner and safer, reducing toxic emissions by more than 90% and cutting fatality rates by over 75%.
Portland’s current approach has also undermined safety. Since the adoption of Vision Zero in 2015, traffic fatalities have nearly tripled in the city, with most pedestrian deaths occurring on non-freeway arterials at night and involving homeless or intoxicated individuals—conditions that speed-limit reductions cannot fix.
This report concludes that Portland’s transportation crisis is not inevitable. It is the result of policy choices. A data-driven strategy—one that improves vehicles and roadways rather than restricting them—offers a far more effective path to reducing emissions, improving safety, and restoring mobility for all Portlanders.
Randal O’Toole is a land-use and transportation policy analyst and director of the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute. He is the author of several books including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. In addition to working with state-based think tanks such as Cascade Policy Institute, he has had fellowships or visiting professorships at Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and Utah State University. He writes from Central Oregon.
