Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz keeps using Portland, Oregon as the best example of a New Urbanist success story. The Mayor wants to copy what Portland has created and this gushing admiration is evident is little things like the fact that he mentions Portland nine times on the webpage devoted to Urban Rail Materials by Mayor Cieslewicz. In contrast the name of our own fair city is appears only seven times.
So when Portland admits it made major conclusion altering mistakes in their published proclamations, it should concern Mayor Dave and his merry band New Urbanist socialists. Hat Tip to: Coyote Blog via Reasononline for getting the word out that the Portland success story is a work of fiction. Kudos to the Cascade Policy Institute for asking to see the data the City claimed supported their conclusions.
Portland's Compliance with Kyoto: The Birth of an Urban Myth: (Doc) In early June, Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) released a report announcing that 2004 emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) within Multnomah County (MC) were lower than the emissions from 1990. This is the same benchmark for CO2 reduction sought in the Kyoto Protocol, and according to the report’s authors, is an achievement “likely unequalled in any other major U.S. city.”The problem, like so many of the problems with environmental science, is that there was a major flaw in the computer model used to produce the results supporting the conclusions. In response to the inquiry, the City of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) admitted miscalculations existed.
This caught the attention of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who published a piece on July 3rd, exalting Portland as “America’s environmental laboratory” … As it turns out, … the big reductions in CO2 never actually occurred.
In response to a series of data requests about the report, Michael Armstrong of the OSD stated, “You’ll note that the total emissions for 2004 in the ‘Time Series Report’ differ from that in the Progress Report. In assembling the materials for your request, I noticed an error in one of the inputs to the Clean Air and Climate Protection Software, which has been corrected in the print outs enclosed.”What went wrong? Portland based their claim on the fact that gasoline sales in Multnomah County were up only 1% since 1990, while the number of registered vehicles increased. The New Urbanist socialists reported these facts established that transportation emissions of carbon dioxide had decreased, therefore, their policies were a success.
This error underestimated the 2004 CO2 emissions by 74,561 tons, just enough to put the reading below 1990 levels. Moreover, there are serious methodological flaws in the report, all of which suggest that CO2 emissions have actually been growing in Portland, as in most other major cities.
The problem is that the model did not take into account that people were buying their gasoline outside of the county because it was cheaper! Over the same time period, gasoline sales in neighboring Washington County went up 37% and many of those people drove right back into Portland to live and work. What the New Urbanist brand of Municipal Socialism demonstrated was that their policies can drive business out of the city.
In terms of per-person daily VMT, there was actually a larger increase on the Oregon side of the Columbia River (where three light rail lines have been built) than for the region as a whole. Between 1990 and 2003, per-person daily VMT for the Portland-Vancouver region rose by 3.2 percent, while it rose by 3.7 percent in the Portland area alone. Clearly, relying on MC fuel sales records has caused the OSD to underestimate this increase in driving.VMT = Vehicle Miles Traveled and Portland’s ideological obsession with light rail and a false theory of dangerous climate change actually increased driving by driving the search for gas out of the area. Mayor Cieslewicz, Joel Rogers and their New Urbanist socialists should pay attention to the expensive lessons from the Portland experiment, but I doubt they will.
