Portland State Magazine Spring 2016

SPRING 2016 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 21 That’s a trend that creates both social and environmental problems, says associate professor Lisa Bates, director of PSU’s Center for Urban Studies. “Involuntary moving is very disruptive to work, education and life success,” she says. It’s also bad for the environment. She says when low-skilled workers have to move out of the city core, they have longer commutes to work, adding to traffic congestion and the pollution that goes with it. Traffic a growing headache Portland is also impacted by the presence of more cars on the road. According to the Oregon Department of Transportation, there are 92,355 more passenger cars in the tri-county area than there were five years ago. Kelly Clifton, professor of civil and environmental engineering who also works with PSU’s Transportation Research and Education Center, agrees that lack of affordable housing is a big contributor to traffic congestion. “Moderate and low-income households have a harder time living closer to work or in the denser areas that are well served by mass transit. So it’s not surprising that we see a rise in congestion,” she says. “The economic recovery and low fuel costs also result in more travel, which was dampened during the recession.” Portland’s mass transit system can’t keep up, Clifton says. TriMet built the MAX Orange Line and added more frequency to existing lines. Yet, she says, much of the region has relatively low transit service and poor connections for north-south corridors. “Until these service gaps are addressed, mass transit cannot be a viable substitute for driving,” she says. So, does that mean we should be building more roads? Not necessarily. Highway projects are expensive and take a long time to build. And, she says, there are lots of examples around the country where traffic is still congested even after new highways are built. There are other options. “We can take advantage of all of the new mobility offered by ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft, car sharing with things like Zipcar, Car2Go and Getaround, and bicycle sharing,” she says. Staying on top of the issues As citizens witness the changes happening all round them, how will they talk about them in a way that shapes a vision for a new era? Daily newspapers used to play a central role, not just in Portland but in the rest of the country, in shaping opinion and influencing local governments. These days, not so much. “Whatever role we expect the news media to play in a democracy is not being played. The alternatives we have now are haphazard and not at all up to the task,” Seltzer says. Substituting the Internet—fragmentary and often unreliable as a source of information—for more traditional media undermines the collective “we” in society and creates a world where everybody is pursuing their own little slice of reality, he adds. But Seltzer sees hope in the idea that maybe we’re just really young in our understanding of how the Internet can serve us, and that we’ll come out of this period of rapid change with a better idea of how the world—and the Portland region—is put together. “Our challenge is to not get too hung up on the past, but to figure out the era we’re in and what ‘forward’ means,” Seltzer says. “No matter how many people come here, we need to ask ourselves if we’ve retained the essential attributes that make this place what we think is a good place to live.”  John Kirkland is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communications.