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Portland Asks: Should Corporations Pay for Transit?

Portland Asks: Should Corporations Pay for Transit?

Oct 8, 2020

By Kea Wilson

Read More: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/...y-for-transit/

Quote:

The greater Portland area is poised to pass a ballot measure that could radically increase pedestrian infrastructure and transit access for communities of color, but opposition from the region’s biggest corporations, and even some urbanists, is threatening the transformational initiative.

- Because Oregon bars cities and counties from charging their own sales tax, Portland and its neighbors have had difficulty finding politically tenable ways to pay for light rail expansion, sidewalks, bike lanes, or even to simply modernize asphalt roads. Voters have approved local funding for the metro’s light rail network, MAX, just once in the past 30 years and communities of color and low-income people have largely fallen through the cracks. — “People think Portland is so progressive, but most of the sustainable infrastructure we have is located in a very small area of the Portland downtown where the majority of people do not live,” said Vivian Satterfield, a community organizer and director of strategic partnerships at the nonprofit Verde. “It’s really a seven-mile segment that most people don’t interact with all that often and I work in a neighborhood where 40 percent of the roads are unpaved.”

- Get Moving 2020, which would levy a payroll tax on employers with more than 25 workers to raise an estimated $5.2 billion for a slate of targeted transportation improvements (see graphic above). The plan is the fruit of two years of public engagement, which Josh Cohen of the Center for Transportation Excellence calls “an unprecedented level of inclusion and accessibility” especially for a region with a well-documented history of racist exclusion. — “Even before [our Black Lives Matter uprisings put us in the news,] this measure was fundamentally about correcting our patterns of underinvestment in communities of color,” said Satterfield. “Especially on the edges of town, where, like in a lot of cities, our lowest-wage earners tend to live due to fundamentally linked patterns of gentrification.” — Only 9 percent of all Portland-area businesses would be charged the payroll tax, but many of those companies, including deep-pocketed corporations like Nike, Intel, and The Standard, a national insurance company, are funding an opposition campaign, Stop the Metro Wage Tax.

- Critics of Get Moving 2020 say that the measure may have originally intended to center the sustainable transportation needs of non-white communities, but the pork barrel simply picked up too many auto projects as it rolled through communities whose support was needed to pass the initiative. — “Metro paved the measure’s way to the ballot by giving every part of the region an earmark for a pet project,” wrote G.B. Arrington, former director of long-range planning at TriMet, the region’s transit authority. “New suburban highway capacity in Clackamas County, bridge replacement in Multnomah County, quicker access to Port of Portland airport parking garages. … Pursuing political business as usual is a sure-fire recipe for making Portland more like sprawling auto-oriented Houston than the Portland we have long worked and aspired to be.” — Of course, like many U.S. cities, those “sprawling” areas are where many of Portland’s non-white residents have been forced to live as Portland has gentrified.

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https://i.imgur.com/zaOnDb9.png

why not? it used to work on the regular in the states in the street car days. works in japan now. go for it.

The people who should pay for anything, and I mean everything, are the people actually using it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by electricron (Post 9072147)

The people who should pay for anything, and I mean everything, are the people actually using it!

In that case we should start abandoning highways and roads in the suburban/rural areas because it's the people in the cities subsidizing and paying for them.

Yeah sure. A corporate tax to pay for social services like transit, police and schools?

I'm all for it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by austin242 (Post 9082851)

In that case we should start abandoning highways and roads in the suburban/rural areas because it's the people in the cities subsidizing and paying for them.

Most country roads in most of the rural areas are dirt or gravel roads. They are paved with local money. The paved highways in rural areas were not built for them as much as they were built for truckers or the trucking industry, who happen to be the means to get your food to your local supermarket.
Bon Appetit!

Never-the-less, Portland is not rural. It is a large city. There are plenty of transit riders who could afford paying higher fares.
Portland Max Adult light rail fares are:
$2.50 Ride for 2½ hours
$5 in a day with a Day Pass
$100 in a calendar month with a Month Pass

Honored Citizen (Youths, Seniors, Low Income)
$1.25 Ride for 2½ hours
$2.50 in a day with a Day Pass
$28 in a calendar month with a Month Pass

Meanwhile, in transit heaven of London, UK Underground transit fares are:
Zones Travelled Single Journey Ticket - Oyster / Contactless Payment Card~
Adult Child - Peak Off Peak
Zone 1 £4.90 £2.40 £2.40 £2.40
Zone 1 & 2 £4.90 £2.40 £2.90 £2.40
Zone 1 to 3 £4.90 £2.40 £3.30 £2.80
Zone 1 to 4 £5.90 £2.90 £3.90 £2.80
Zone 1 to 5 £5.90 £2.90 £4.70 £3.10
Zone 1 to 6 £6.00 £3.00 £5.10 £3.10
Zone 2 to 6 £5.90 £2.90 £2.80 £1.50

Just about everyone uses an Oyster Card because the fares could be up to half priced with them.
There are no Day Passes or Month Passes. They use zones with higher fares per number of zones crossed.
The highest potential fare with the card is £5.10, the equivalent of $6.66 at present exchange rates.
A round trip would be $13.32 per day. For a 20 workday month, that would be $266.40

$266 a month in London compared to $28 or $100 in Portland. And you wonder why America has such poor transit services nationally?

^ lol, ok so is it $266/mo or $133/mo if you get half-priced? anyway, so also among that nonsense, no most country roads are not dirt. you need to get out of texas once in a blue moon. also, you are promoting a very texas view that usa is rural and city. the fact is outside of texas suburbia is what rules the land. thus quite an overwhelming lot of highly subsidized highways and roads vs transit. and in the very spayshul case of texas, ridiculous, needlessly expensive mile high flyover highway exchanges and the like, all subsidized by uncle sam.