The Portland Timbers have spent the past two years working with neighborhood representatives and the city to ensure that traffic congestion and parking demands around Providence Park won’t be amplified on game days following the completion of their $85 million expansion project this summer.

But some neighbors around the stadium remain concerned that the 4,000 additional seats, which will bring capacity up to 25,000, will lead to increased traffic and a lack of parking after the stadium reopens in June.

Ahead of the reopening, a city oversight committee was tasked with making updates to the Good Neighbor Agreement and Comprehensive Transportation Management Plan, which lay out measures to ensure that game days aren’t causing undue strain on the surrounding neighborhoods.

The oversight committee, which includes representatives from the Timbers, the City of Portland, the Goose Hollow Foothills League and the Northwest District Association, recently voted to send its updated transportation plan and neighbor agreement to the Portland City Council for review. The council will decide whether to approve the updated plans on April 17.

“We all want the experience of coming and going from the stadium to be smooth for us, for our fans, for the neighbors,” Timbers President of Business Mike Golub said. “Our interests are aligned with the interests of the neighborhoods. We think the plan that we’re ready to enact really does an excellent job at improving on what was already a really good situation here.”

The updated transportation plan estimates that 55 percent of fans will take cars to the stadium this year to look for either off-street or on-street parking. Based on that assumption, the plan estimates that there will be an additional 1,120 cars heading to Providence Park on game days, as compared to previous years. In addition, it estimates that fans will utilize an additional 110 ride-hailing vehicles to attend games, which could affect traffic congestion.

Whereas the previous transportation plan included 12 measures to help alleviate congestion and parking demands on game days, the new plan has 21 measures. Among the key measures are: providing a third additional MAX train in each direction after games, promoting the use of and providing discounts to underutilized SmartPark garages downtown, enhancing game-day enforcement of on-street parking, designating new ride-hailing zones and creating a one-stop shop of travel information on the Timbers website.

But the Northwest District Association, which covers the neighborhood north of Providence Park, continues to have significant concerns about the updated transportation plan.

Ron Walters, the association’s representative on the committee, did not vote to send the plans through to the city. He said that the current plan lacks sufficient implementation details, clearly defined metrics and accountability measures. A committee of stakeholders appointed by Portland’s transportation commissioner voiced similar complaints in a letter to the oversight committee.

“Parking in the neighborhood is tough on non-game days,” Walters said. “Game days, it’s much, much worse, to the point where neighbors have to completely modify their behavior. They have to go get parking four hours before the match. This notion that there’s now going to be 1,200 additional cars is really problematic. They don’t have any strong argument for where those people are going to park.”

Unlike other downtown stadiums, Providence Park doesn’t have its own dedicated parking lot, meaning that fans must park elsewhere. The stated goal of the transportation plan is to “accommodate the transportation needs of additional fans without increasing demand for on-street parking or increasing traffic congestion in neighborhoods near the stadium.”

While the Timbers can be fined for violating specific agreements in the transportation plan or neighbor agreement, Walters said the transportation plan is lacking clear metrics to evaluate the proposed measures and doesn’t have enough built-in accountability to ensure that the proposals will be implemented in a timely fashion and re-evaluated if they are unsuccessful.

For example, the success of the ride-hailing portion of the plan will be measured by looking at the percentage of fans who use ride-hailing. Instead, Walters said that the metric should be looking at how ride-hailing is affecting traffic congestion and that there should be a clear process in place if specific goals aren’t met. The oversight committee is required to meet just once a year following the reopening of the stadium, but Walters would like to see those meetings occur more frequently as well.

Jerry Powell, the oversight committee representative from Goose Hollow, agreed that more accountability could be built into the transportation plan, but still voted to send the agreement on for city approval.

“I certainly appreciate the concerns that NWDA has,” Powell said. “I disagree in terms of pushing it forward, simply because my neighborhood doesn’t want to see the work that’s gone into this go to waste. I think we got as much as we’re going to get, and I don’t want to see the season start without these plans in place. It goes back to accountability. We lose the ability to demand accountability if there’s nothing to be accountable to.”

Ken Puckett, Timbers senior vice president of operations, said fans have consistently pointed to the ease of going to and from games in surveys and that the club hasn’t received much blowback from the neighborhoods in the past.

Puckett also said that the current transportation plan, like the previous one, will be a living document that can be updated as needed in the coming years.

“We want our fans to have a good experience coming to our games and leaving our games, so we’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen,” Puckett said. “Some of these 21 measures that are in this new plan might not work and they might need to be tweaked and they might need to be changed, and we’re open to doing that.”

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com

503-853-3761 | @jamiebgoldberg

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