Which commute is the worst?

BACK STORY: Hint: It's not Sunset Highway anymore

By Peter Korn

The Portland Tribune, Sep 12, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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.

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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.

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