Which commute is the worst?
BACK STORY: Hint: It's not Sunset Highway anymore
Jim Clark / PortLAND TRIBUNE
Engineer Dennis Mitchell and dispatchers at the command center in ODOT’s Portland office respond to stalls and accidents on local highways.
Bob Applegate lives south of Hillsboro and drives downtown each morning on U.S. Highway 26 . He leaves his home at 7 a.m. and knows it will be an hour and 10 minutes, at least, before he reaches his job at the Port of Portland.
“You pick the wrong moment, and the traffic is completely slowed from Murray Boulevard on in,” Applegate says. “And you can throw in an extra 20 minutes.”
Applegate thinks his commute on the Sunset Highway must be the worst that Portland has to offer, though the afternoon backup he’s seen on the Fremont Bridge heading north toward Vancouver, Wash., on Interstate 5 has made him wonder.
Esther Anunciado might be on that bridge. She is certain she’s got it worse than Applegate. Anunciado moved to Vancouver 11 years ago, and since then she’s had to navigate the traffic on I-5 every day, driving to Portland for her job as an architect at Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects. I-5 south in to Portland has to be the slowest commute of all, she says.
Anunciado, who has come to dread the daily bottleneck created by the Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River, says that if she doesn’t leave her home by 6:45 a.m. it takes her at least an hour to get to work.
“If you leave at 7 you’re dead meat,” she says.
But the anxiety and frustration felt by Applegate and Anunciado are only the half of it; there also are the commuters coming into Portland on I-5 from the south, and on Interstate 84 from the east.
So who has it worst?
According to statistics supplied by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory at Portland State University, the winner — or rather the loser — is Esther Anunciado’s I-5 crawl toward home. The average speed of vehicles traveling the six and a half miles on I-5 from the I-84 interchange to the Interstate Bridge is a snail’s pace 22 miles per hour between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.
The numbers from the PSU lab originally had the city’s worst commute facing drivers heading westbound on Highway 26 in the afternoon. The average speed of cars during the rush hour heading back to Washington County was 18 miles per hour for the stretch of Highway 26 running from downtown to Oregon Highway 217.
But the data don’t take into account the widening on Highway 26 completed this summer. The highway is running much smoother, says Dennis Mitchell, region traffic engineer for the Oregon Department of Transportation, and more recent mapping confirms it.
Which leaves I-5 northbound during the afternoon as the slowest rush hour commute of all. Congratulations, Vancouver commuters. Or not.
More tortoises, fewer hares
Of course, commute comparisons are only part of the critical issue of Portland-area traffic. Rush hours are expanding into the late morning and early afternoons, trucking firms are reporting increased costs resulting from freight taking longer to get to where it needs to go. Traffic in Portland is getting worse, and solutions proposed so far tend to be of the long-range variety.
So, in the meantime, the Portland Tribune wanted to try to measure how bad the commute is on four major routes into and out of Portland — with the help of the PSU lab.
The results: We’re moving slowly out there. And some are moving more slowly than others.
I-84 eastbound in the morning records the fastest time: an average rush-hour speed of 37 miles per hour, surprising because I-84 carries more vehicles than any other local freeway, according to Mitchell.
That’s good news for commuters from Portland’s east side and for those from Gresham. They also have an advantage in the form of the street grid east of the Willamette River, Mitchell says, which offers plenty of straight shots west, including Northeast Sandy and Southeast Powell boulevards as well as East Burnside and Southeast Division streets. West-side commuters have fewer options because of the West Hills, Mitchell says. As for commuters coming in from Vancouver, there’s just no way around the Interstate Bridge.
According to data from the PSU lab, I-5 southbound in the afternoon has the highest variability among Portland-area freeways, which means the average commute time is less dependable.
The congestion data counts traffic without unexpected hitches. And, according to national transportation statistics, about once a month commuters can expect to hit some sort of traffic incident that significantly increases their commuting time. On average, half of the time commuters spend in freeway delays is due to incidents — crashes, breakdowns or road construction.
Those unexpected incidents can have profound effects.
Rob Burchfield’s nightmare occurred a couple of years ago. Burchfield, the city of Portland’s traffic engineer, watched as an overturned truck at the Terwilliger curves shut down I-5 northbound. “It rippled through the whole system,” he says. Highway 217 became jammed, arterial streets such as Southwest Barbur Boulevard became congested, even Interstate 205 and Highway 26 slowed, all because of the truck on I-5.
“Everything’s connected,” Burchfield says.
When an accident or stall occurs, quick removal of the vehicle is critical, Burchfield says. That job falls to the Oregon Department of Transportation’s command center on Northwest Second Avenue, where dispatchers monitor the information coming in from detectors beneath the highways and from the hundreds of surveillance cameras along the area’s roads.
The dispatchers can send crews out to help solve traffic problems and coordinate efforts to reroute traffic. Electronic signs direct drivers to alternate routes, and stoplights on affected streets are programmed to provide longer greens so the rerouted traffic does not stack up.
Rush hour lasts hours
The system helps, ODOT’s Mitchell says. But more efficient removal of road blockages still won’t change the basic commuting scenario.
“The population is growing, there are more trips being made, but we don’t have any new roads being built,” Mitchell says. “We’re not widening the freeways. The regional decision was to limit the freeways to three lanes in each direction plus auxiliary lanes. Right now every freeway has a bottleneck, and that’s not going to go away.”
Yet according to Mitchell, the primary effect of more commuters has not been to lengthen individual commute times. Rather, Mitchell says, the increased traffic is lengthening the time that constitutes rush hour.
“Instead of getting a one-hour peak, you get a three-hour peak,” he says. He now considers rush hour in Portland to be from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Still, commuting times appear to be longer for just about everyone compared with a few years ago. Between 2002 and 2004 — the most recent year for which statistics are available — the average travel time to work for Portlanders rose from 21.9 minutes to 23.5 minutes.
Approximately 308,000 Multnomah County residents drive to work each day nonetheless. About one in 10 takes public transportation, and one in 30 commutes to work by bicycle.
Those numbers have to change, according to Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder. Burkholder says people will stop car commuting when public transportation is available. He cites Metro statistics showing that where light rail is available in the Portland area, about 30 percent of nearby commuters are giving up their cars to ride the MAX.
Still, preventing California-style freeway congestion without new freeways will be difficult, Burkholder says. He thinks the answer may be toll roads.
Toll roads can solve two problems, Burkholder says. They can raise money and manage traffic. They can manage traffic through what Burkholder calls differential tolls.
An example: Higher tolls on freight vehicles during rush hour discourage truckers, who have more leeway on times to travel than commuters. Burkholder says such tolls already are in place in Southern California.
Another model, Burkholder says, comes by way of London and Stockholm, Sweden, two cities concerned with drivers entering the city during peak traffic periods. There, according to Burkholder, fees on toll roads are higher for vehicles entering the city during rush hours.
The message is clear, Burkholder says: “We have a good transportation system. Use it (and pay) or change your work time.”
Some go by surface
The best strategy, Burkholder says, is getting people to live closer to where they work. And according to Burkholder, progress has been made in that regard. The average trip to work in 1990 was 10 miles, he says; in 2000, it was seven.
“That’s the biggest impact,” Burkholder says. “Reducing the distance people have to travel. In the long run what we’re going to have to do is think differently. The biggest issue is, How do we reconfigure the city so people don’t have to travel as far?”
Until then, commuters will be left to their own resources, which increasingly means finding alternative routes.
Commuters from Beaverton have been turning to Northwest Cornell Road, to the ire of some Northwest Portland residents. Commuters who might otherwise take I-5 north into Portland from Wilsonville have been using Southwest Macadam Avenue and Barbur Boulevard.
Sometimes the alternate routes work, according to Burchfield. But more often, he says, trading a bottlenecked freeway for surface streets rarely pays off.
“Most of the time when you see those bottlenecks it’s still faster to stay on the freeway,” Burchfield says.
peterkorn@portlandtribune.com
Sidebars:
Traffic jams don't stop the data flow:
www.localnewsdaily.com/news/story.php?story_id=115802212303499800
Suburban traffic presents a few twists:
www.localnewsdaily.com/news/story.php?story_id=115802240453638100
How do you commute?
We want to hear your commuting stories.
The Portland Tribune publishes special in-depth reports on issues facing the region several times a year. These sections are called Rethinking Portland, and the next one, on Nov. 28, will focus on transportation.
As part of our research, we are inviting readers to e-mail us about how they commute to and from work. Why do you live where you live, why do you work where you work, and how do you travel between the two? How has your commute changed over the years? And, because about 1 million more people are expected to move to the region over the next 20 years, how do you think your commute might further change?
Please e-mail your stories to Rethinking Portland editor Connie Pickett at rethinking@portlandtribune.com. We may contact some of you for additional information for the section.