by Randal O’Toole
Introduction to the series: Portland’s War on Cars
By Naomi Inman
This July, Cascade published a new report by adjunct scholar Randal O’Toole, “The Portland Transportation Disaster: The High Cost of Anti Auto Planning in Portland.” To accompany that report, Cascade is launching a month-long series about Portland’s 50-year “War on Cars,” culminating with a look at the 40th anniversary of MAX light rail and a personal reflection on the opening of the Gresham line by John Charles.
This series is rooted in a fight Portlanders have been waging for years—citizens and small business owners pushing back against the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) relentless campaign to prioritize bus and bike lanes while removing lanes for cars through road diets and BAT (Business Access Transit) lanes.
The 82nd Avenue project is just one example of PBOT’s overarching agenda, spelled out in the Portland 2035 “Transportation System Plan” (TSP) and illustrated in its 2-page directive to “prioritize walking, bicycling, transit,” and shift 70 percent of Portlanders into “shared vehicles.”
PBOT’s “strategy for people movement” simply does not include personal automobiles. Their own graphics illustrate the progression they want: 200 people in cars replaced by 200 people on a single light rail train.
In PBOT’s worldview, “transportation” means walking, bicycling, and transit—and every policy is designed to reduce vehicle miles traveled. Success is defined, not by improving mobility for people who travel, but by ensuring buses, bikes, and trains move freely while drivers sit in manufactured congestion created by lane reductions, road diets, BAT lanes and other similar schemes.
Portland’s transit planning has been guided by the same delusion for half a century: that the personal vehicle can be regulated, nudged, or inconvenienced out of existence. The result is an overbuilt, financially unsustainable transit system and a planning model that has failed by every measurable metric.
Buckle up! This series with Randal O’Toole and John Charles will take you through how Portland got here—and what it will take to restore mobility in a city that has spent decades trying to engineer it away.
Portland’s War on Cars: Part 1
Losing the War on the Automobile
By Randal O’Toole
Editor’s note: This is part 1 in a series “Portland’s War on Cars” from a new Report by the Cascade Policy Institute, The Portland Transportation Disaster: The High Cost of Anti Auto Planning in Portland.
Portland and Metro are losing their war on the automobile. The war began around 1982, when the region’s leaders decided not to build more freeways after the completion of I-205 in the hope that people would drive less if they didn’t have more roads to drive on.
Thanks to the no-more-freeways policy, the amount of time the average Portland-area commuter wastes sitting in traffic has tripled since 1982 and the amount of fuel wasted in congestion has sextupled from 5.7 million gallons to 34.7 million gallons generating 250,000 tons of additional greenhouse gases.
Despite congestion, driving has more than doubled and per capita driving has grown by 16 percent since 1982. In 2024, the Portland area’s share of commuters driving alone to work was the highest it has ever been.
To give people an alternative to driving, Portland built more than 80 miles of rail transit including five light rail lines, three streetcar lines, and a commuter rail line. Despite spending billions on these projects, the number of transit trips taken by the average resident has fallen from 42 in 1982 to 36 in 2024.
Portland is turning traffic lanes on major streets such as Foster Road and 82nd Avenue into exclusive bus lanes. Lanes that once carried up to 1,000 automobiles per hour will be dedicated to—at most—8 buses per hour. There is no evidence that this will increase bus ridership, but it will make auto travel more difficult.
Portland has also installed bike lanes on many streets, sometimes by reducing the number of automobile lanes. This protects bicycle riders from being hit from behind by automobiles, but such accidents are rare. Most bicycle fatalities take place at intersections, where bike lanes disappear. The annual number of bicycle fatalities in the city of Portland has almost tripled since the early 2010s, mostly due to increased accidents at intersections.
Despite growing the bike route system to more than 400 miles, Portland-area cycling peaked in 2014. Since then, the number of Portland-area workers commuting by bicycle fell by more than 40 percent while the number driving alone to work increased by 5 percent.
By fighting a war they can’t win, Portland and Metro are imposing huge costs on the region. Those costs include the time and fuel people waste in congestion, the added greenhouse gases from burning that fuel, and the added costs of transporting goods around the region.
Read the full report, The Portland Transportation Disaster.
All numbers cited in this commentary are from or calculated from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, or Census Bureau data. For more information, see O’Toole’s full report, The Portland Transportation Disaster.
Randal O’Toole is an Adjunct Scholar at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. He is a transportation and land-use policy analyst and the author of several books, including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. He writes from Central Oregon.
Naomi Inman is External Relations Manager at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. As a staff journalist and writer, Naomi helps Cascade make the case for free-market policies through media affairs and publications.
