Somewhere along the way, evil was assigned to the automobile. Cars belched smoke and created smog, guzzled gasoline, tore up expensive roads, hogged valuable road and yard space, warmed the Earth and alone made possible the concentric rings of prosperity sucking life from any city: the suburbs.

Funny, people love cars. That may be why data released last week by researchers at

showed as much. But don't tell that to Metro's elected councilors.

they openly worried the public narrative arising from the data would spoil an urban planning party that contains the use of automobiles and promotes mass transit, bicycling and walking.

Separately, it's probably wise to avoid celebrating cars with City of Portland planners. Their 2035 blueprint for the central city willfully fosters downtown congestion while promoting alternative transportation. Though cars should somehow be accommodated in Portland's expanding downtown, the space to absorb them along with more people and more housing and more businesses won't expand. Perhaps garages will?

The region suffers gridlock of another kind: the belief that cars will somehow go away. They won't.

suggests automobile use hereabouts hasn't changed significantly since 1994. About 87 percent of all trips in the Portland metropolitan region, including Vancouver and its suburbs, were made by car in 1994. Yet the number of those trips that were made in a car since has decreased less than 4 percent -- that as hundreds of millions of dollars were dedicated to TriMet's light rail and bus lines, the Portland streetcar, and bike boulevards and bike lanes everywhere.

This is not to say mass transit and bicycling aren't working. They are. And Portland rightly enjoys its reputation as a vibrant city that avoided death by highway-assisted flight to the suburbs. The new Metro data shows commuters in the region notching a full 9 percent decline in their use of cars, even if they accounted for only 25 percent of the universe of trips counted.

But unknown and unaccounted for in the new survey, conducted at a cost of $1 million, are the influences of high gasoline prices, a greater number of people and cars in the region and an unemployment-inducing recession that for some put car ownership and driving out of financial reach. So driving and alternative ridership -- whether downtown or in the car-centric suburbs -- collude in ways yet to be understood.

That said, it's plain that most people will not give up their cars if they face roughly equivalent transportation choices as measured in trip time, cost and safety. It is unrealistic to think otherwise, just as it would be unrealistic for inner Southeast Portland apartment buildings to go up without designing in provisions for on-site or nearby car parking. Moreover, it is especially unrealistic to write the car off as new technologies promise a conversion to fuels other than gasoline and a world in which GPS-guided systems turn drivers into passengers.

We'll say it outright: Planning in this city and this region is a happy headache. It must braid together housing expansion, land use designations and all modes of transportation as well as mammoth undertakings such as the $3 billion-plus

-- all while taking into account the sometimes conflicting objectives of multiple political jurisdictions.

But one thing runs through it all. The Metro data, however incomplete in its preliminary release last week, makes it clear: The automobile is here to stay.

Let's plan on it.