QP Shrinking 82nd Avenue for People in Cars

At TriMet’s December board meeting, director Tyler Frisbee lectured attendees on how 82nd Avenue business owners and motorists should embrace TriMet’s takeover of auto lanes for exclusive busways.TriMet refers to these as Business Access Transit or BAT lanes—which is Orwell’s doublespeak for the opposite effect—reducing business access for people in cars. Portland Bureau of Transportation’s alleged “improvement” of 82nd only turns a street made for cars into an avenue for the minority of pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders.82nd is another flagship for how PBOT intends to “improve” more streets -- by taking away auto lanes to be re-striped as “bus-only” lanes. Traffic modeling shows, of course, this will greatly distress peak-hour travel times by 50 percent and divert motorists to I-205.TriMet’s 72 bus line will be the only beneficiary of this change. A bus that runs every 12 minutes during peak hours, means BAT lanes will be unused most of the time while motorists eye an empty lane, confined to Los Angeles style gridlock.TriMet and PBOT are moving towards a likely February decision on the BAT lanes -- and many business owners have threatened legal action for loss of access to their shops.Director Frisbee, meanwhile, took 10 minutes to make unsubstantiated assertions, to which Cascade’s President, John Charles, has written a response you can read at cascadepolicy.org. Like an evangelist, Tyler Frisbee pleas for Portlanders to repent from their car-centric ways and embrace the narrow vision of PBOT’s Transportation System Plan -- whose tenets are known as “Vision Zero:” Stop designing roads around people in cars to make driving more painful, and convert major roads into avenues for walking, bicycling, and public transit.At the February meeting, the TriMet Board should withdraw this idea and end its war on the majority of people in cars.