Long Term Effects of Transportation Infrastructure on City Form and Implications

Another class I am taking, Public Space, involves a term-long project analyzing aspects of PBOT’s response to COVID-19 for businesses, the Healthy Business Permit. An expansion of the Safe Streets Initiative, the program offers free, temporary permits and some assistance for businesses to take over sidewalks, parking spaces, or street space in order to effectively operate while complying with statewide public health directives (of course, they are “temporarily” closed right now, due to Governor Brown’s order as a result in a massive increase in cases in the metro and across Oregon). All in all, where the permits have been utilized, the program has been considered successful.

 

While the initiative is exciting as a broader opportunity to discuss the use of streets as public spaces beyond people moving (and one to discuss the role of PBOT as a steward of some of the most accessible public spaces in the city), it is not without its drawbacks. Due to the nature of the program, its necessarily hasty unrolling, and the required infrastructure/city form required for a successful permit utilization, many geographies and communities have been left out of the process. In fact, a widely distributed NYTimes article from July discusses just that. In cities like Portland with similar initiatives, where communities of color have been displaced out of the more dense, walkable, and tightly-knit business districts, those communities have not participated in these programs.

 

As I mentioned, a major barrier to the program’s success is street design and neighborhood form. So, I thought it might be interesting to consider the longer term effects of urban transportation planning on city form and the implications for communities outside of Portland’s walkable, gridded, inner neighborhoods that resulted from early streetcar suburban development. My previous blog post covering the TREC Friday Transportation Seminar featuring Charlene McGee discusses the effects of this form and displacement on public health and safety; as such, this is not a new conversation. However, I think it’s important to consider the reality that barriers to initiatives like the Healthy Business programe go beyond capital (whether social or financial). Those barriers are literally built into the form of our city.

 

The map below (Figure 1) shows the streetcar lines of Portland in 1920 as blue lines with pink dots representing existing Healthy Business permit locations. I was able to find the shapefile for the streetcar lines from the City of Portland Open Data site. In order to obtain the data for Healthy Business permit holders, I had to reach out to Nick Falbo, a Senior Transportation Planner with PBOT (who was kind enough to accommodate my request quickly). The other shapefiles are from Metro RLIS Discovery.

 

As is apparent, the majority of the permits are located along the form of streets designed early as transportation and business corridors. There is only one permit located east of 82^nd, and even that one is located near both SE Foster and a historic streetcar line. Of course, the location of these historic streetcar routes informed subsequent transportation lines; as such, the concentrations of permits is not incredibly surprising. However, it does make clear that even the best of intended responses to the pandemic are limited in their effectiveness. Even moreso, as the pandemic has made clear many urban inequities and exacerbated others, it has made even more obvious the need for more, targeted  investments in areas of the city lacking the form necessary for equitable participation in programs like this one—or even active transportation as a part of daily life (as I discussed in my previous blog).

 

Figure 1. Portland Healthy Business Permits (current) and Historic Streetcar Lines (as of 1920).

Map by Author with data from the City of Portland, Metro RLIS, and Portland Bureau of Transportation.