Oregon owes a lot of its strengths to rail infrastructure, much of which unfortunately no longer even exists (including the Oregon Electric and Red Electric Interurban Passenger Railways, an elaborate and extensive streetcar grid they interfaced with as well as an integrated bunch of trolley lines.) The turncoat auto industry lobbied to have our taxpayer dollars funded passenger interurban and municipal routes torn out and paved over or else neglected into failure after privatization in acts of premeditated sabotage and treachery; this is before they further betrayed the nation by moving manufacturing out of country decimating the American workforce to only be rewarded for this sedition by being subsidized by our taxes along with being bailed out multiple times only for the executives to pocket the money we were taxed for their personal profits of plunder and pilfering pillage. The further we move away from the logical layout provided by streetcar grids and electric commuter interurban railroads the uglier and less livable the city and its suburbs become. An intelligent coastal city would take advantage of this limited time of people crowding in to install city assets that will benefit us for generations such as a rail route beneath the Willamette meaning the Steel Bridge won’t break the light rail circuit interrupting all MAX lines every time it lifts, and railway going between Vancouver and Portland when the new bridge is finally finished. I-5 should be buried on the inner east side stretch to make the area tolerable and reclaim space for the Black community to rebuild their community they had stolen from them. The WES should expand to extend down to Salem reuniting the Portland metropolitan area with our capital. It makes perfect sense to build the full Southwest Corridor (Purple) Line with railway stations on Marquam Hill and at Portland Community College Sylvania Campus, for example, and zero sense not to.
Electric cars also destroy the environment through resource mining, manufacturing processes and ultimately going to the landfill in mass droves. The pollution they cause is simply unnecessary as is the amount of urban space squandered on parking and other paved over autocentric wastes. MORE VEHICLES ON THE ROAD MEANS MORE AVOIDABLE DEATHS WILL CONTINUE TO CONSTANTLY OCCUR!They also perpetuate redlining, urban sprawl, the food deserts that come from that invariably, along with cities that are not navigable as a pedestrian or bicyclist and are, in fact, inhospitable to humanity along with being lethally horrendous towards animals.They add to traffic congestion. Commodification of societal needs and normalization of trying to substitute rampant consumerism where we need standardized, regulated and uniform public utilities doesn’t work.
Putting the financial burden of transportation inefficiently and directly on the individual citizen is simply not wise or fair and hasn’t been the norm for even 80 years. We need to invest in commuter rail that’s properly implemented as it typically is overseas. A commuter rail system is an engineering marvel while buses are just buses. The most reliable predictor ofa neighborhood being impoverished is if it has no commuter rail connection. The American people are apathetic through decades of disenfranchisem*nt and a lot of that marginalization (eg Robert Moses’s racist urban renewal) is through divestment of public infrastructure, utilities and programs to help the American people. We can’t undo the social inequities inflicted upon and retained by redlining until we transcend the highway robbery carcentric built habitat that physically structurally reinforces them. We’re past the point of car dominated transportation being anything better than a tragic hindrance or an outright travesty. Public works materially improving life for the taxpaying citizenry will bolster civic pride.
Transcontinental High Speed Rail should integrate seamlessly with commuter rail networks so it can evenly function as one cohesive system and this will convert flyover country (CONUS flights should be virtually eliminated) back into a thriving heartland by functioning as an artery of commute and commerce which will reduce clustering on the coasts. Similarly, wholly integrated circuits of commuter rail blended with interurban routes, light rail lines, street car grids, subways, and even trolleys along with electric ferries functioning together as a comprehensive, coherent series of interwoven systems would prevent people from having to live on top of each other in city centers in order to have quick access to urban cores and downtown areas so this would stimulate our local economies and prevent gentrification from demolishing cherished heirlooms of our historicity, destroying our classic neighborhoods, shredding the fabric of our communities and toppling our civic landmarks and architectural heirlooms along with other social capital such as venerable culture generating venues. We lost so many marvelous structures for nothing more than mere surface lots as our city was hollowed out on the heels of white flight to the lily white, poorly planned suburbs. Whole swaths of communities were obliterated in a racist/classist attack on the people of Portland and we lost entire neighborhoods along with cultural centers such as the Jazz District, our Italian and Jewish neighborhoods as well as other minorities who weren’t even assisted with any sort of fair, decent assistance to relocate. The absolute annihilation of our city still adversely hinders us collectively to this hamstrung day, and the groups targeted, intensely even if so many folks don’t know enough to connect the dots of cause and effect.
Numerous studies show that built environments of hom*ogenously bleak and bland duplitecture dreck that profiteering developers push on us for their privatized gains to our public loss for the riches of themselves and corporate slumlords not only cause homelessness from being financially inaccessible to most Americans, but also cause depression from creating such a devastatingly sterile, cold, unloving urban habitat that’s too congested and overcrowded to work properly as a correctly engineered built environment. Our roadways are overcrowded and no amount of widening them and adding lanes will do anything to help it because it just leads to induced demand that inevitably grinds to a halt at snags and bottlenecks down the road. Shouldn’t American cities be thriving centers of culture and character rather than austere and chintzy morasses of mediocrity?
I believe that we can design the cities of our nation to reflect a future that embraces humanity and that we also must for America to have any sort of a bright future ahead of it. Right now we are mired in the destruction of our cities from the inward attacking neocolonial oppressors who weaponize their clout of wealth against the nation for their own off-shore un-American gains of privileged, parasitic, private profits. This greed fueled anti-social exploitation is present day feudalism driving us into another gilded age. Tons of new petrochemical building “luxury living” housing units remain empty serving only as financial assets in investment portfolios of hedge fund, “private equity” and permanent capital firm cretins sheltering dubiously acquired wealth instead of as direly needed shelter for humans. We deserve a landscape we can be proud of and country should come first before corporate looting and exploitation. Legacies are important and live on forever.
With space opened up in our cities we could rebuild beloved structures now gone missing from economic and environmental disaster utilizing new technologies such as hempcrete and 3-D printing. We could create vertical agriculture, green pocket areas, etc. on spots currently now just serving as paved over squares and nothing more. 20% of Portland is parking lots and paved over area not even suitable for that inefficient usage. We can extend democracy into offering the taxpayer residents democratic say in what their city consists of, how it looks and how it operates promoting civic engagement and participation.
