The Week Observed: June 20, 2025
What City Observatory Did This Week
HB 2025: The Oregon Legislature's "transportation package" simply doesn't add up: The bill promises more than $5 billion in mega-projects but provides vastly less revenue.
It doesn't add up: You can't be accountable, unless you actually do "accounting."
HB 2025, the transportation package in the Oregon Legislature purports to address ODOT's massive financial problems, but only makes them worse
The bill provides only a fraction of the money needed to actually pay for promised mega-projects. HB 2025 provides just $1.75 to $1.95 billion in resources for five listed projects that together need about $3.5 billion--and likely more.
HB 2025 also provides nothing to cover entirely certain and predictable cost overruns on the largest highway project in the state, the Interstate Bridge Replacement, which is likely to end up costing $9 billion--when long delayed cost estimates are finally released. The bill also provides nothing for the $1.1 billion Hood River Bridge. Adding these projects would push the mega-project hole to $5 billion; far greater than the funds allocated in HB 2025.
In all, its an excuse for ODOT to pretend that funding is available, to launch mega-projects based on low-balled cost estimates and optimistic assumptions, only to come back and demand more money later--exactly the same management failures that produced the agency's present financial problem.
Must Read
Trump vs. Cities; Autocracy against Democracy. On Saturday June 14, millions of American's took to the streets to march for "No Kings." Cities were again the focus of marches across the nation opposing President Donald Trumps policies. As Axios reported:
More than 5 million people took part in "No Kings" demonstrations in over 2,100 cities and towns across the country, with an additional 300 "Kick Out the Clowns" rallies being held. Philadelphia saw more than 100,000 attendees and Chicago 75,000, while smaller towns such as Pentland, Michigan, reported 400 in a town of 800, organizers said.
The right to peaceably assemble, in a public place, in a city, is fundamental to democracy. Apparently Trump senses urbanism as a threat to his autocratic ambitions, at least judging by his all-out assault on cities across the nation.
As The Associated Press reported, President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities:
Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.” Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
In the 1970s the New York Daily News famously headlined a story: Ford to city: Drop Dead. Today, the message is "Trump to cities: Drop Dead."
Public Spaces are Democracy IRL: Writing at the Philadelphia Citizen, William Penn Foundation director Shawn McCaney points out that public spaces play a vital role on our democracy. Demonstrations--which happen on streets, parks, squares and in and around public buildings--are the way people exercise their fundamental rights.
As McCaney writes:
Our Constitutional right to freedom of assembly is more than mere permission to gather, it’s also a form of political expression itself, with the formation of a group, the composition of its membership, and who leads it also sending important messages. These critical democratic functions of in-person public assembly were on full display in the mass protests across the world a decade ago, including the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in New York City the same year, and the anti-government protest camp in Independence Square in Kyiv in 2013.
Congestion pricing in New York reduces traffic . . in New Jersey. The evidence of the profound and comprehensive success of congestio pricing continues to mount. The latest bit comes from the Regional Plan Association in New York, which looked at changes in regional traffic patterns. There's a pretty standard mythology in traffic modeling that there's a "lump of travel," and that if you constrict traffic in one location in simply builds up somewhere else. Hence the menace of "diversion" and the idea that while tolling might benefit one area, it would come at the expense of greater congestion nearby or on parallel routes. But that's not what happens: far from being a zero-sum game, reducing traffic in tolled areas (lower Manhattan) reduces traffic in the region (other boroughs and even New Jersey). Here's RPA's conclusion, as reported by Streetsblog:
"Far from being a policy to benefit Manhattanites at the expense of the region, the [toll] has actually resulted in less traffic overall, even in some places that models predicted it could increase," the organization noted. In the Bronx, for instance, time lost to traffic jams dropped from 2,384 hours per average weekday in the year before congestion pricing to 1,984 hours per average weekday in the period after congestion pricing was implemented, a drop of 17 percent or 10 minutes for every hour drivers were stuck in traffic. Ten percent of that drop was directly attributable to congestion pricing.
As we've pointed out at City Observatory, this kind of "traffic evaporation" regularly occurs when roadways are temporarily put out of commission by construction or disasters. This is the logical inverse of the fundamental law of "induced travel"--wherein adding highway capacity only generates more traffic: constricting capacity or pricing travel reduces travel and congestion. It's a lesson that needs to be learned and applied everywhere.