You could fit most of the Old Port inside Portland's obsolete Exit 6 interchange

With debt to this post on Streetsblog, I was curious to see how much of the Old Port could potentially fit in the acres of downtown real estate occupied by the Exit 6 interchange on Interstate 295. Most of it, as it turns out. In the gif above, an aerial view of Exit 6 alternates with a rotated view of the Old Port at the same scale. That's the green-roofed City Hall at the western end of Exit 6 near the USM parking garage, and the Custom House is at the other end near Preble Street. Post Office Park occupies less space than the lawn of a single cloverleaf loop.

This cloverleaf intersection, by the way, is one of the most dangerous places to drive in the entire state — it's the home to several designated "high-crash locations" and has been described by state officials as having an "obsolete" design that whips cars into vortices of high-speed merges. But those are just lovable foibles! Our highway engineers literally can't think about getting rid of this adorable, city-eating monstrosity.

The Exit 6 interchange is a prime example of Governor Paul LePage's socialist land policy, whereby acres of extremely valuable real estate are wasted in extremely inefficient uses by the central-planning bureaucrats at the State Department of Transportation.

Tonight: final public meeting for Libbytown freeway ramp removals

Tonight at the Clarion Hotel near the Portland Transportation Center (on bus line 5) from 6:30 to 8:30 pm will be the final public meeting of the "Libbytown Circulation Study," which I'd written about previously here.

This will be the final meeting before the consultants present their recommendations to the City Council for endorsement. Word has it that they'll propose removing most of the connecting on- and off-ramps to Park and Congress Streets (shown in red below), except for the northbound on-ramp from Park Ave. This would open up acres of land for transit-oriented redevelopment.

Other positive elements of the plan would add sidewalks on both sides of Fore River Parkway to the bus station, shrinking the intersection of Fore River Pkwy. and Congress Street, new traffic calming, improved sidewalks, and landscaping elements on Congress and Park, and new, high-comfort bikeways that would connect the bus and train station to Deering Oaks Park and the Bayside Trail.

The public will have additional opportunities to weigh in on the plan when it goes to City Hall, but if you've got a free evening, consider coming down to Libbytown tonight to see what's in the works and express your support for a significant pruning of freeway infrastructure.

Public hearing on Libbytown freeway ramp removals

Tomorrow, the Libbytown Traffic and Streetscape Study holds a public workshop at Portland City Hall, Room 24, from 5 - 8 pm (entrance is off Myrtle St. on the east side of City Hall). Displays illustrating the proposed changes will be available from 5-6:30 pm and 7-8:00 pm for comments, with staff available to answer questions. A presentation on the neighborhood conditions and the proposed changes will take place from 6:30 - 7 pm.

This study is a pretty big deal: it proposes to remove multiple freeway ramps that connect to Congress and Park at the western gateway to the city, immediately adjacent to our bus and train station (in fact, the cruddiness of this intersection was one of the first things I blogged about when I first moved to Portland years ago). 

All of the alternatives under consideration would sell off acres of empty space currently occupied by looping freeway ramps and make that real estate available for transit-oriented infill development, like housing or offices. All alternative would also install high-quality, separated bikeways to connect the bus and train station to downtown Portland, plus better sidewalks and calmer, smaller streets throughout the neighborhood.

Doing these things would be relatively cheap, and could be implemented in the next few years, but only if these ideas receive public support.

Here's my personal favorite option, alternative 1b (note the conversion of a freeway ramp into a bike path, which could extend all the way into Deering Oaks Park and ultimately connect to the Bayside Trail):

Click here for a more complete view of the alternatives being proposed.

Freeway deconstruction: now in progress

To anyone who doubts whether Portland will ever be rid of Interstate 295 through downtown and along our Back Cove waterfront: we've already started to dismantle freeway infrastructure from the 1950s. And so far, drivers have hardly noticed the difference.

In the 1950s, before Interstate 295 existed, the original Veterans Memorial Bridge was built with a freeway-like on- and off-ramps on either side of the Fore River to carry high-speed Route 1 traffic. Here's a road map of the area from 1957, when the Route 1 expressway was brand-new:

Here's a view of the grade-separated off-ramp on the South Portland approach that existed until early last year:

And here's what it looks like now. Fewer lanes, a cheap stop-sign controlled intersection, and a nice wide new path for bikes and pedestrians:

Has South Portland become choked with traffic since losing one of its oldest freeway spurs? No, it hasn't been.

The biggest impact to losing a freeway spur has been that thousands of residents of South Portland's neighborhoods now have safe and convenient access to the West End of Portland by foot or by bike.

And this is only the beginning.

The Increasingly Lonely Road

Last summer, when gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon, the driving factors behind the price-spike were supply (the world's oil resources are limited and the remaining oil is increasingly expensive to extract) and demand (on top of growing consumption in the U.S., the economies of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies were growing at a breakneck pace, and sucking up an increasing portion of the world's oil supplies).

Then the global recession happened, and oil prices settled down - but still nowhere near the levels where they had been in the 1990s. You might recall that some people blamed "speculators" on last summer's price spike. The recession, I think, proved the falsity of that claim: through the depths of last fall's credit freeze, "speculators" with any cash to spare were few and far between (and its unlikely that the few that remained would have bothered with oil futures). Yet oil prices, adjusted for inflation, still remained much higher than they were in 1998, the peak of the Clinton-era boom.

So where do we stand now, looking toward recovery? Don't look now, but gasoline prices are creeping up towards $3 a gallon again. On the supply side, some new oil discoveries represent the payoff from increased exploration from the days when prices were sky-high. But those new discoveries are still hard to get to, and the oil is going to be expensive to extract.

On the demand side, lots of unemployed people stopped driving and almost everyone resolved to drive less to save money in the United States this past year, and consumption dropped a few percentage points. But while we were taking a breather, emerging Asian economies continued to grow at a breakneck pace - the global credit crisis registered only as a brief dip on their GDP growth charts, and now they're growing as fast as ever.

So where does that leave us? On the supply side, the global "pie" of oil supplies is a little bit larger, provided the customers are willing to pay more for their slices. But on the demand side, countries like China, India, Russia, and Brazil are gobbling up a lot more oil.

So when our economy returns to "normal", and if we go back to the gas pumps to consume as much oil as we did in 2007, we're going to have to pay a lot more for it, because hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are also making bids to buy this limited resource.

More realistically, though, Americans probably aren't going to go back to the gas pumps the way we did in 2007, ever again. We're driving less as we get older, and those of us who still do drive are going to drive for shorter distances in more fuel-efficient vehicles. And prices will remain high, as demand elsewhere in the world gulps up the remaining oil. That's the conclusion of a number of commodities experts and economists summarized in this article from Barron's. An excerpt:

Unfortunately for U.S. drivers, $3 or more might be the new norm...

"It's pretty clear that the 2007 level will be the peak in [domestic] gas consumption for a long time to come, if not forever," says Ed Morse, the former head of commodities research at Lehman Brothers and now a managing director at Louis Capital. Goldman Sachs expects the nation's gasoline demand to fall 0.5% in the second half, tick up 1% in 2010, then remain flat in 2011, as supplies tighten and prices stay high.

This has important implications for state highway agencies, which rely on per-gallon gas taxes for their budgets. If gas consumption is declining or flat, that means there's going to be less money available for highway construction - even as construction costs continue to increase. Raising gas taxes will only serve to depress demand even further, and cause more people to drive less as a way to save money.

States like Maine will increasingly have trouble maintaining existing roads, and building new roads (and increasing our maintenance costs even further) will be out of the question entirely.

That's the fiscal reality. But it's anyone's guess when the alternate-universe space-cadets in Augusta, who are still planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on freeway widenings, will get the message.

Three concepts for Franklin Street - Detailed

These are photos of the display boards that were being shown at last night's public meeting in City Hall. In addition to these, MRLD had also produced a really neat 3-D animation of the three concepts - hopefully they'll be able to put those videos online soon. All of these alternatives have 4 lanes from I-295 to Congress, and 2 lanes from Congress to Commercial.

You can click these photos to enlarge them for more detail.

The "Urban Street Concept"


The "Parkway" concept:

The "Multi-Way Boulevard" Concept

ACTION ALERT: Call Rep. Pingree to Save Pedestrian Access to Back Cove!

The Maine League of Young Voters has just sent out a new action alert with a focus on including pedestrian and bike access through the Exit 7 underpass, between Franklin Street and the Back Cove Park. This connection has been called for in city Comprehensive Plans since the 1980s, and is a high-priority "missing link" in Portland's trail and sidewalks network.

Unfortunately, the Maine DOT engineers in Augusta - people who rarely drive through this intersection, and have never walked through it - have decided, by bureaucratic fiat, to block pedestrian access at this location by widening the freeway off-ramps, allegedly for "safety" purposes.

To be fair, the Maine DOT is proposing some positive steps: adding a traffic light at the end of the northbound on-ramp (at the 'd' in Bayside in the birds-eye view below), for instance, would give pedestrians a safe place to cross the offramps. And, although it's probably not the best use for the Maine DOT's rapidly-dwindling funds, I have no beef with adding another lane to the northbound ramps, which wouldn't affect pedestrian access and would give cars a place to rest while they wait for the light.

But there's no need to add another lane to the southbound ramp (the one that curves along Back Cove), which is nearly 1/2 a mile long and never has traffic congestion issues. The Maine DOT keeps on citing an arbitrary prediction of 30% traffic growth, which will supposedly neccessitate the extra lane. But in the past 20 years, there's been no measureable growth in traffic here - roughly the same number of cars come through here today as in 1985.

So now that gas is headed towards $4 a gallon and GM and Chrysler are bankrupt - now Augusta expects thousands of additional cars to materialize here? That's baloney, but unless we make a lot more noise, this stale lunchmeat will be forced down our gullets, with a lot more traffic to go along with it, at a cost of $2 million to you, the taxpayer. Building the safe, well-lit sidewalk that the city actually needs, instead of an extraneous highway lane, would cut the project's bill in half.

Portlanders sent a lot of grassroots complaints about the Maine DOT's spendthrift bullheadedness this past winter. In fact, I'm pretty confident that Exit 7 may have been a tipping-point issue in the Legislature's ultimate decision not to raise the state's gas tax this summer, as a few key legislators were forced to ask themselves why they should divert tens of millions of dollars away from Mainers' disposable incomes, just to prop up the DOT's Circus of Whimsical Asphalt Fantasias.

But now, we need some top-down pressure on the DOT. The $2 million that Augusta plans to spend on this widening project would come from a federal earmark approved in 2005, at the behest of Rep. Tom Allen. Now that Rep. Chellie Pingree has taken over that seat, she's in the best position to hold the Maine DOT accountable. After all, what's the point in her fighting for funding in Washington if the Maine DOT is just going to piss it away on projects like this one?

So here's your chance to hold these renegade bureaucrats accountable for once: call Rep. Pingree today. She and her staff are friendly and want to hear from you, but more importantly, if we can muster a few dozen phone calls, our chances of getting a safe pedestrian connection to Back Cove and saving a cool $1 million in the process will be much, much better.

Here's a sample script that you might want to use as a guideline, but feel free to riff with personal stories about walking and biking in greater Portland, and the importance of this connection:

-- 207-774-5019 --

"Hello, this is a message for Chellie Pingree. My name is ________ and I live in [City, ME.] I'm calling to express concerns over how the Maine DOT is planning to spend our federal earmarks to expand the freeway ramps on Exit 7, without providing adequate pedestrian access between Bayside and Back Cove. Some elements of their plan - like adding a new traffic light and crosswalks - are moving in the right direction. But their plan to widen the southbound off-ramp, thus blocking pedestrian access to Back Cove Park, goes against our state's goals for energy independence, fiscal responsibility, and reducing pollution. Please encourage the Maine Department of Transportation to spend some of the money from the federal government on sustainable transportation alternatives for our future, not more highway!"

Also important: let us know if you called, either by sending a quick note to Katie at the League office in Portland or by leaving a comment here.

Franklin Street Public Workshop TONIGHT

Help envision the future of Franklin Street. Tonight, at the Ocean Gateway building on the waterfront (one block east of the Casco Bay Lines ferry terminal), Portlanders will be getting together to discuss how Franklin Street should look in the future.

What kinds of buildings should go up in all of the empty space surrounding Franklin? How wide should the street be? How wide should the sidewalks be? Are there other streets in Portland that you'd like to see emulated on a redesigned Franklin Street?

Public input from tonight's meeting will set the agenda for the city's Franklin Street Committee and its traffic and planning consultants as they come up with a final plan for city approval. With a plan in hand by the end of the summer, the city could start rebuilding Franklin within the next two to three years.

I'll be there as a facilitator. Come introduce yourself if you're a blog reader whom I haven't met yet.

April 29, 6 to 9 PM, at the Ocean Gateway Terminal
There will be food!
Click here to pre-register.

Below: Franklin St. in 1966 (left) and in 1970, after the devastation of urban "renewal." See the Maine Sunday Telegram's excellent article and accompanying photo slideshow here.

Exit 6: The Interchange Must Change

The recently-completed Peninsula Transit Study found that Exit 6, the cloverleaf interchange at the junction of I-295 and Forest Avenue, was one of the single biggest impediments to pedestrian and bicycle travel in the city, and that it needed major changes.

This interchange occupies almost 14 acres of land that sits smack dab in between our city's major University campus, our city's most used park, a rapidly-developing neighborhood, and they city's primary supermarket. Instead of facilitating access between these major destinations, Exit 6 confounds access, forces people to get in their cars for short trips, and adds significantly to traffic congestion in the neighborhood and on the freeway. It's also extremely dangerous for driver, who are forced into hair-raising merges on the exit's short ramps.

A more pedestrian-friendly diamond interchange, on the other hand, would make driving safer, make it easier to walk between Bayside, Deering Oaks, and the USM campus, and free up fourteen acres of land for redevelopment and parkland.

This is what it could look like (roll your mouse over the image, or click it for an enlargement):



Radically improved mobility through the neighborhood, whether by foot or by vehicle; acres of new parkland; millions of square feet of new office or housing space; millions of dollars added to the city's annual property tax revenue. Selling the excess land for redevelopment would fund the entire project at no cost to taxpayers.

The idea is so fraught with common sense and possibility for improving our city that, naturally, the Maine Department of Transportation's pinhead bureaucrats up in Augusta are against it. Their proposed project would cost a million dollars and do practically nothing to resolve the intersection's numerous safety problems.

Dan Stewart, who is supposedly our advocate for pedestrian issues in Augusta (makes me shudder to think what someone in Augusta who's indifferent to pedestrians would do), had this to say in an e-mail:

" I would think that pedestrian advocates would not want to delay these planned improvements for the years that it would take to study, develop and fund a diamond interchange, if indeed a diamond interchange is determined to be the appropriate thing to do in the area. Initial analysis has shown significant issues to creating a diamond interchange including possible widening of both Forest Avenue and I 295."

Translation from bureaucrat-speak: "we hate the idea of selling the land, we hate the Transit Study, and we'll drag our feet for years to spite your hateful city."

I'm especially fond of Dan's last sentence: MDOT's "analysis" says that in order to make the interchange smaller and more efficient, we'd need to widen it.

I can understand why they'd want to keep Exit 6 the way it is. It's loopy, just like them!

Cheonggyecheon

Cheonggyecheon is a small stream that once flowed from a cirque of mountains that surround the historic center of Seoul into the Han River, 6 kilometers away.

In the years immediately following the Korean War, Cheonggyecheon was overrun by informal refugee camps, shantytowns, and sewage. The stream was soon paved over for a wide boulevard; in 1968, during Korea's own urban renewal fad, an elevated highway was stacked above the road. In spite of its historic and cultural significance to Korea, Cheonggyecheon spent over half a century in an underground culvert, choked with filth.

Then, in 2003, in an act of political will that seems miraculous to me, Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak began a project to remove 16 lanes of stacked expressway and restore the lost stream beneath. Two years later, a vibrant, wild park had replaced a traffic-choked freeway. Believe it or not, the two photos above show the same section of stream (the two buildings in the center-right of the top photo, taken sometime early in the 2000s, are the same two buildings on the left side of the bottom photo).

Tearing out a huge downtown freeway didn't create mass gridlock, as the project's opponents had promised: traffic actually moves faster and more smoothly today than it did when the freeway was there. In an interview with the Guardian two years ago, Kee Yeon Hwang, a professor of urban planning, said that "as soon as we destroyed the road, the cars just disappeared and drivers changed their habits. A lot of people just gave up their cars. Others found a different way of driving. In some cases, they kept using their cars but changed their routes." In other words, people aren't as stupid as traffic engineers think they are. Koreans gave the project a definitive seal of approval when they gave Lee Myung-bak, the project's primary political champion, a promotion to the presidency in 2007.



By replacing idling cars with a naturalized waterway, Seoul also lowered summer temperatures in the center of the city and improved air quality and circulation. The Cheonggyecheon isn't yet a functioning watershed: the water flowing from the "headwaters" in the center of Seoul is currently being pumped uphill from the Han, instead of trickling down from the mountains. But it's still attracting wildlife, including fish and herons, and there are more plans in the works to restore elements of the stream's natural hydrology.

Of all the parts of the park I've looked at, this one's my favorite: three remnant highway abutments standing in the middle of the stream like a utopian apocalypse scene - a glimmer of hope that the brutal regime of freeways and highway engineering is losing its grip on the world's cities. Credit for the photo goes to Flickr user Ben Harris-Roxas: