Chris Teso

Teso is the founder and chief executive of Chirpify, a Portland-based tech startup. He lives in Portland.

I ride a bike and a motorcycle, drive a jeep, run many miles weekly and am a pedestrian. I have no transportation bias. I’m here to say we need cars, and Portland should end the war on them.

For reasons I don’t understand, this topic is very emotional for a lot of people, and they express this by demonizing drivers. The debate for me is statistical, not emotional. Driving still makes the most sense for the most people.

Despite the enormous amount of tax dollars spent on planning, building infrastructure, and marketing alternative forms of transportation, the number of cars on Portland roads has increased while the percentage of people choosing an alternative has decreased.

In 2000, residents in TriMet’s service district took 61 rides per capita per year, according to TriMet’s data. Since then, as the population served by TriMet surged nearly 30%, public and private partners invested billions in development and subsidized high-density, mixed-use housing projects in light-rail and other transit corridors. The results? In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, residents in TriMet’s service district took just 56 rides per capita per year, a drop of 8%. Meanwhile, taxpayers continue to fund the bulk of TriMet’s budget, which totals $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2020 – 60% of which comes from payroll taxes and nearly 20% from state and federal sources.

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As in most other cities, Portland transit ridership percentage is declining while the number of registered cars is rising. Bike commuting in Portland has also dropped in recent years, according to census data. The experiment has failed.

However, Metro, the regional government for the tri-county area, Portland’s leaders and the city’s transportation bureau continue to propose a familiar solution to this: levy taxes and make it more painful to drive. Advocates claim the mass transit experiment is failing because we’re actually not spending enough. I’d agree if the data showed incremental progress that was correlated with historical spend, but that’s not the case.

People vote every day for their preference of transportation, and despite the transportation bureau’s war on cars that has drastically reduced speeds, eliminated lanes, and created barriers that increase congestion, people overwhelmingly choose to drive.

It’s time the city recognize the real reasons why people drive – by understanding why they don’t use other modes. Bike advocates say people don’t bike because it’s unsafe. They believe enough safety funding will surely convince everyone to pedal to work. In reality, biking is undeniably safe – there have been two deaths of people biking in both 2017 and 2018. While any death is tragic, biking is demonstrably not dangerous.

For most people, the decision to bike vs drive is more about arriving at your destination dry, not sweating and not having to carry a bag. People also weigh factors including proximity, whether they have to pick up kids or ability to do physical exercise. They say people don’t ride buses or the Max because they’re not ubiquitous enough. But it’s more about privacy, anxiety, safety, reliability, or not knowing who they will sit next to. When local or state government asks for ever more tax money, these psychological nuances are conveniently ignored by the anti-car advocates. But no amount of funding will change these reasons, and they are all perfectly valid for wanting or needing a vehicle.

Some advocates claim they’re waging the war on cars to reduce emissions. It’s a righteous war, but by making traffic worse and commute times longer, they’re actually achieving the opposite. Idling cars create more emissions. Their counterpoint to this is “induced demand” — less congestion would increase the amount of cars and wipe out the gains made by less idling. You can find intelligent arguments on both sides of induced demand, but just as we can’t convince people to stop driving because there is too much traffic, less traffic will not convince more people to drive.

Either way, no matter how painful you make it, the data is clear — you will not change behavior by legislative force. Given this, it’s time to recognize the war on cars is not only a waste of money, but may be worse for the environment and the economy, and adds stress for to the majority of people on a daily basis.

Again, don’t get emo about this. I’m not demonizing bikes, trying to abolish mass transit, or advocating for increased emissions. We can and will reduce emissions with electric and other non-petro based vehicles, and economic incentives for alternative forms of transportation that satisfy the previously discussed psychological nuances. We should focus efforts on incentives instead of spending billions of dollars to cripple the one mode of transportation the overwhelming majority use. It is economic incentives – not economic pain – that drive behavioral change at scale.