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From:Ron-Janet Bevirt <br />To:INERFELD Rob;TAYLOR Becky;*Eugene Mayor, City Council, and City Manager <br />Subject:Proposed TSP 2035 <br />Date:Friday, February 24, 2017 3:14:21 PM <br />2/24/17 <br />Dear City Transportation Planning Staff, County Commissioners, Mayor, City <br />Councilors & City Manager, <br />Envision Eugene and TSP 2035 are big picture plans for the future. Here’s Eugene, <br />pretty nice place to live, we’ve got mostly clean air and plenty of water. One problem, <br />common to many cities, is that the size and layout of the streets, which were created in <br />the past, are no longer quite right-sized and configured for present and projected future <br />needs. How do we accommodate more people trying to use inadequately sized and laid <br />out streets? We have a nice mid-sized city, but growing. Growth does seem inevitable <br />and maybe seeking growth is desirable. Back in time, our best thinking was “let’s <br />preserve our precious farm and forest land, so draw an urban growth boundary and <br />limit the extent of city spread.” Now the big push is to grow upward, because we’re <br />supposedly filling the contained urban growth boundary (UGB) space, yet we have a 50 <br />year land reserve. Now, our idea is: we’ll build more high-rises along transportation <br />corridors. The proposed solution to how all those extra people living in those high-rises <br />will move around is that they will ride in busses and on bicycles, because we’re going to <br />have too many people to be in cars. It is possible to imagine some delightful future, in <br />which most people ride public transit and bicycles, but we are still some distance from <br />that point so let’s not create problems for automobile traffic, based on such a fantasy <br />belief. <br />Let’s zoom toward a macro view, Portland is booming. They’re building taller buildings <br />everywhere possible, moving density into their residential neighborhoods. Seattle is <br />booming and growing, cramming in more people. San Francisco, the Bay Area, Silicon <br />Valley cities are growing as fast as possible. There is an ongoing fight in those cities <br />between jam in versus fight against more density. In Copenhagen they’ve gotten 85 <br />percent of the population riding bicycles. In Beijing and other big cities the air is killing <br />people. In Manhattan they are jamming in more and more high-rises. Depending on <br />your point of view, living in a “mosh pit” is either “vibrant” or “hellish”. <br />In big cities, the movement of people on streets is a problem. There is the competition <br />among private cars, Uber/taxis, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians. In many cities they have <br />underground mass-transit. So what we see in the macro view is, somehow a given place is <br />desirable. There is apparently sufficient existing work, and work being created there, <br />that more and more people are flocking there; housing is expensive because people are <br />arriving faster than new housing is being created. Demand for something in short supply <br />leads to ever-increasing prices. Rents are unaffordable and traffic is congested. <br />Meanwhile, back in Eugene we are thinking about the future with Envision Eugene and <br />TSP 2035. Developers appear ready to build high-rise housing. They freely state that <br />they are building “high-end” i.e. expensive housing. They are confident that investing <br /> <br />