This Week in the Mercury
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Transportation Portland Suburb Will Vote on Public Transit Ban
Posted by Sarah Mirk on Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 1:29 PM
Suburban whacko alert!
BikePortland reports that an anti-tax group in the little city of Damascus, just 20 miles SE of Portland, introduced a local ballot measure to ban public transit.
To "insure that the City of Damascus is open as much as possible to the free flow of vehicular traffic and citizen travel within the city" Measure 3-350 would ban the city from providing "monopoly status" to public transit providers and also ban any public light rail in the city.
Maybe the backers have been subscribing to Crime Rail news?
The group pushing the measure, Ask Damascus, is a back-to-the-Constitution collection of folks whose logo managed to combine an eagle, an American flag, the Oregon flag, a photo from a public meeting and, yes, a man in a suit protesting property law.
- Eagles don't take light rail, bitches!
So, yeah, they're whackjobs. But, as BikePortland's Jonathan Maus points out, they can be effective whackjobs. Two years ago they successfully passed a ballot measure referring all new local tax increases to a citywide vote. Passing the absurd anti-transit measure, according to Maus's interview with the Damascus city manager, could take just 800 or 900 votes.
Damascus city hall is in a strip mall. Its post office is in a coffee shop, also in a strip mall. When you have that kind of urban planning, I can see how many people would not recognize the value of public transit.
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Much better for a roomful of 25-year-old planners at Metro, none of whom have ever been east of 82nd Ave, to dictate what these misguided yokels need.
"Portland: The City That Is Better Than You"
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Guess my transit-minded criminal gang and I will just have to take our thuggery to Happy Valley. You won this round, Damascus! That is, unless we carpool. Or become an Equestrian Gang.
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Surely these poor and under-educated rural residents just need a seminar on food carts and transit-oriented development from earnest Portland younsters in order to turn their backward-ass holler around.
Surely, what's right for the South Waterfront will work just as well in Damascus right?
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If the residents of Damascus want to vote on South-Waterfront-style development policies, they should try proposing that as an initiative. But instead they're voting on whether to ban public transit from public roads.
It may be within their right to do so, but it's also within the rights of onlookers to mock the proposal.
It's your right, too, of course, to mock the mockers, but could you at least stick to what it is that people are arguing about?
I've followed Portland metro-area politics and development policies for years (informally), and I don't recall anybody proposing turning Damascus into some kind of South Waterfront clone.
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