10 ms·

Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution?

117 points by oftenwrong 8y ago

hopler 8y ago
In defense of Coase, the "flaw" is part of the theorem and discussion in the original paper, and Coase himself wrote extensively about the problem of using his conclusion while ignoring his assumptions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
johnisgood 8y ago
I agree, polluters should compensate at the very least financially. It is sad that it was even allowed to be built right next to a school.
JasonFruit 8y ago
Why are we assuming the commuters are rich? The person who is coaxing their ancient Pinto to carry them to their job at the paint store is just as much a commuter as the executive taking a phone meeting in his BMW. And everyone in the area pays taxes to support the school; it's not just the students and their parents. It seems like an equitable, if roundabout, way of paying for an air filter system for the school.
- cmiles74 8y ago
  From the article: "Peak hour, drive alone commuters from Clark County, Washington have average household incomes of $82,500; and 75 percent of them are white, non-Hispanic. More than two-thirds of Tubman students are people of color; and half the student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals."
  - kbutler 8y ago
    This lacks several points from being conclusive: - it describes only "peak hour, drive alone commuters" without apportioning the fraction of total pollution caused by that group. - How much does evening peak rush-hour pollution affect school-day air quality? (morning peak would probably have a direct effect) - by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution - it could be that the majority of the pollution is caused by lower-income commuters driving older vehicles, but Tesla-driving higher income commuters drive up the average income - it assumes that the money paid for the pollution somehow belongs to the students, when it is apportioned from the tax dollars paid that fund the school district budget. Maybe those dollars already come from the high-income commuters. - it brings in race purely to add to the emotional content of the narrative If you disagree, please describe why you find this narrative rationally compelling.
    - grigjd3 8y ago
      So at least one of your points seems to be a triviality after a basic Google search. 85% of vehicles on the road are single occupancy: www.thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters Your questions may be valid, but assuming there are not answers to those questions probably is not valid. I mean, it would not exactly shock me to learn that peak traffic is representative of most of the day, or that peak traffic is responsible for most of the pollution. It would also not shock me to learn that income distribution by neighborhood doesn't see much variance. I suspect if I looked this stuff up, like I did on single occupancy vehicles, I could cut your points down to nothing.
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        Hmm, not sure this is the best debate strategy: "I destroyed one of your points, and I could foresee myself doing the same with the others if I bothered to answer them. Therefore it's invalid for you to raise these questions." I'd also point out that you didn't actually address any of the questions listed. A general study about American vehicles as a whole being single occupancy doesn't imply much of anything about this particular case, hence "by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution", which you demonstrated with your response, rather than undermined.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - yikes_burger 8y ago
    TIL average household income of ~82K, about ~41k per parent, is "rich"
    - sdfvdzvdv 8y ago
      Agreed, that's a bit "rich" :p However, we mustn't forget that there are families living on 41K combined (two parents @minimum). Or 20K (single mom @minimum). 80K is far from rich. But quite comfortable compared to many, many, Americans.
  - sdfvdzvdv 8y ago
    Wealthier ppl have new cars with stricter emissions. In fact, gasoline cars since port injection have made negligible amounts of particulate emissions (which is the only pollution that matters in this case, CO2 are only globally important). Direct injection might screw everything up soon (their intake valves foul like crazy). The emitters, therefore, are ppl with old cars; tractor trailers; city buses [0]; working class ppl driving, old ill maintained vans and pick ups. Really, the only significant particulate emissions I can think of from rich suburbanites are their gas mowers and blowers. But they're (a) polluting the air around their homes (b) quickly switching to electric. Now, if you want the rich sub-urbanites to pay to relocate the school, that's cool. I'm down. But they're really not the problem. [0] In my mid western city, at least, the buses are diesel powered and not LNG, and they appear to have the particulate filters ripped off. Dunno about Clark County's buses in particular.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- helen___keller 8y ago
  > Why are we assuming the commuters are rich? I don't know the particulars in this case, but in the mid 20th century it was a very common strategy to run main arteries into the city through the poor & ethnic inner city neighborhoods (not to mention tearing those neighborhoods down and destroying their communities for "urban revitalization"), hence the historical assumption of poorer city residents dealing with the noise & pollution of the rich suburban commuters. As time goes on this will become less and less true thanks to America's urban renaissance, but still property values near expressways tend to be much lower due to the noise pollution & air pollution. Interestingly, the most high-profile American expressway failure (in Manhattan) gave rise to one of the most valuable urban regions in America. I personally doubt this is a coincidence.
- zanny 8y ago
  Car ownership is innately expensive. Between regular maintenance, the cost of fuel, insurance, inspections, and the aggregated costs of getting a replacement every ~10-20 years you are easily spending several thousand dollars a year in vehicles even if you try to be optimally frugal about it. Most people are easily over 10k a year in car expenses, especially on some of the ludicrous commutes people on the west coast put up with. If you have never met them consider yourself upper crust, but there exists a substantial population in the US and all other western countries of those who can not afford a car. You often don't see them because it turns out traveling any substantial distance from your often impoverished neighborhood without functional public transit or private car ownership can be quite prohibitive. So even the guy driving the "clunker" car down this highway is still probably in the upper half of wealth in the area, easily, assuming they are actually affording to inspect, license, and insure themselves and their vehicle. A lot of people don't, but its a bit egregious to try to count people breaking the law driving on the road in the first place as contributing to the average wealth of the drivers on said road.
endorphone 8y ago
Passenger cars create a negligible amount of particulate pollution, and are certainly not the cause of the air quality issues encountered here. Transport trucks, in contrast, create a lot of air pollution (both greenhouse gas and particulate), but the story isn't as interesting when the villain are the goods and products that everyone consumes.
- Asooka 8y ago
  The story is pretty clear that the villains are ODOT who built a highway right next to a school.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    If that were the case, the title would have been, "Why do poor school kids have to clean up ODOT’s pollution?" But that wouldn't have gotten as many clicks, as OP stated.
    - foobarchu 8y ago
      The title is poor, yes. The content of the article is pretty clear that ODOT is the problem, though. I don't think the title was claiming that "rich commuters" should pay for it, so much as it was trying to emphasize that the children are in no way responsible for it. The author could have chosen better, though.
  - influx 8y ago
    Likewise in Seattle they built i5 straight though the city cutting it in half.
  - erentz 8y ago
    Only the article is incorrect as pointed out in my other comments down voted comments. And this does matter because it changes a lot of the tone and basis of the article. Sure there was some building of some sort there back in their 1962 photo. But that isn’t Harriet Tubman school we are talking about today. The school was only opened in 1982. Built after pressure by community activists who wanted a school in their neighborhood. Further it was actually closed in 2012 and then reopened in 2018. With much written at the time of reopening about the pollution problem. So really the “villain” (if there should be one) would have to be Portland Public Schools that built, closed, then reopened a school next to an existing traffic sewer. In 1980s it is somewhat forgivable mistake, we weren’t as aware then. But in 2018 they knew full damn well the pollution problem. Nobody can deny that. This school shouldn't be there. Is pollution bad? Yes. Was Robert Moses and his cohorts a disaster for urban environments? Yes. Do cities need to be greener and have better transit? Yes. But still, the school simply shouldn’t be there. So the article really falls apart on a number of levels. In this case I think people using the existence of the school to campaign against this freeway project are doing a selfish disservice to the students. I'm generally anti-freeway, very pro-transit, very pro-urban. But let's be clear: the current levels of pollution are unacceptable as is, regardless of widening. The school shouldn't stay where it is even if the freeway doesn't get widened. So the people using it as a prop in their campaign to prevent widening are essentially arguing it is fine to stay where it is. This is sad and IMO a selfish use of this bad situation for the students of this school by the anti-freeway campaigners.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Aren't paying for externalities like these like this exactly why we pay taxes to state government? Why is the school paying for it's own air filtration? This sounds like a problem of ineffective government, not highways and pollution. It's the state's job to use tax money to smooth out these kind of issues in a roughly equitable manner.
nvahalik 8y ago
Unless the commuters are coming from out of state, wouldn't the people driving (being residents) be paying the taxes which would pay for this anyway? I get that it is coming out of the budget of the school, but ultimately the taxpayers _are_ paying for it, albeit in a round-about kind of way.
- gbear605 8y ago
  Schools are mostly funded by the town, not the state
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Well, in Oregon they are poorly funded, because it's a low tax state, but many expensive things like teacher salaries are state funded. This is due to a Supreme Court decision requirement to provide equal education, and it's unclear if they have fully complied, but generally your statement is not correct. In many large states (Texas, California, NY) schools are almost fully state funded. https://crosscut.com/2017/12/oregon-school-funding-education-washington-mccleary-schools https://crosscut.com/2017/12/oregon-school-funding-education... https://education.findlaw.com/curriculum-standards-school-funding/education-finance-and-funding-state-and-local-sources.html https://education.findlaw.com/curriculum-standards-school-fu...
    - ci5er 8y ago
      If Texas schools are state-funded, I'm paying way too high property taxes to live in Westlake! (Austin TX)[0]... [0] Yes that was an exaggerated response - but not by as much as you might think. https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding-how-it-works/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...
- ojbyrne 8y ago
  I don’t entirely agree with your argument, but the article actually says the commuters are coming from a different state.
- astura 8y ago
sealthedeal 8y ago
Because they are pooooooooooooooooooooooooooor This is a terrible title and shouldn’t be at the top of HN
TBurette 8y ago
I didn't know about the Coase Theorem. The link between property right, transaction cost and externalities is not obvious and interesting. We could imagine many tech examples similar to the school and highway : - An ISP provides a connection with poor delay/jitter and it creates problem for software developers (Skype, multiplayer games,...) --> should the ISP compensate the developers or the developers pay the ISP to fix the problem? - A developer is selling created a program that degrades the performance of another program if they are both run simultaneously. Who should pay who to compensate/fix the problem?
- mediumdeviation 8y ago
  Coase Theorem doesn’t say _how_ you should divide up property rights - that’s a normative statement that’s outside the scope of economics - but rather that as long as _any_ property rights are assigned, regardless of which way the assignment goes, the outcome will be economically efficient. Also it assumes transaction costs are negligible, ie in the example in the article, the negotiations between the railway and the farmer can be done cheaply and quickly. This is somewhat like assuming a frictionless plane in physics.
3rdgender 8y ago
"Why is the school district paying for the pollution controls? Why aren’t the 120,000 vehicles that drive past the school every day paying for it?" Don't drivers pay taxes, which also go to the school district - so actually, the vehicle drivers ARE paying for it? Not that I want to justify the situation. But the spin seems wrong. Also, in a twist, the kid's family may only be able to afford living in the school's district because pollution makes it unattractive to live in.
- cmiles74 8y ago
  Everyone's take-away is different, but I find the general argument that the cost of driving is hugely under-priced to be compelling. In my opinion this piece hits on a good example: the overall cost wasn't really appreciated when the highway was built and the department of transportation seems to be trying to ignore the cost even today.
  - mortenjorck 8y ago
    I too find the argument compelling that driving is under-priced, but I'm always leery of any reasoning that stops there, as the next step usually seems to be "well, we need to correct the price," which is only a good solution in a vacuum. As the Macron government in France learned the hard way, underpricing one mode of transport for decades has a profound effect on multiple other markets, and suddenly trying to correct it has a very real human cost. When driving is underpriced, public transport can't compete, and investment in it wanes. Meanwhile, residential development adapts to automotive transport with sprawl. And so a significant part of the population has no fallback if they become priced out of driving. A good policy solution must take the transportation, housing, and labor markets into consideration when pricing in the externalities of driving.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Passenger cars are a rounding error compared to freight trucks when it comes to pollution and road wear. Rather than waste money trying to squeeze more money out of people commuting to work, perhaps we should jack up the taxes on the freight companies. It may be fashionable to blame car culture, but even people without a car benefit greatly from our transportation system.
erentz 8y ago
Schools (and lots of things) shouldn’t be built next to freeways. It appears [1] this school was created in the 1980s long after that freeway existed. It was closed in 2012. Then reopened last year. Perhaps the whole school should be moved (there’s nearby vacant blocks that could accommodate a new school). [1] This is based on very brief search so may be incorrect. Actually this is odd the article shows a picture of the school being their before the freeway. Was that the school then or was that a building repurposed into the school? This is where I got the 80s thing from: https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362/daunting-but-dreamtof-new-port.html https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362...
- droithomme 8y ago
  Given that the school was closed for 6 years during which they undoubtedly did not run the climate control systems, the school most likely has mold problems.
- dtech 8y ago
  You obviously did not read the article, since it says right there that the high school was first, and even provides a photo of the school next to freeway under construction. The article might be wrong, but then you'd react to that.
- mhb 8y ago
  I didn't need to do any search since TFA addresses this point in an unsurprisingly titled section Who was here first?.
  - erentz 8y ago
    It shows a photo. And used that as the basis for the claim. But the article I linked which is long and gives a lot of the story of the school states a number of times it was created in the 1980s. I don’t know if it was repurposed from an old closed building or school or what. Whether it was there first or not seems irrelevant anyway. If we care about the health of the students the whole school should be moved (unless you think we can move the freeway instead).
- 8y ago
pelasaco 8y ago
why are you assuming that the commuters are rich?
Proven 8y ago
1) Those students aren’t paying nothing. Did their parents pay those millions mentioned in TFA? 2) I don’t know about Oregon but gasoline is normally taxed, so the drivers already paid pollution tax. 3) TFA implies that State collects fuel taxes and spends them for other purposes, or does not correctly prioritize this spending. But we can’t know whether this school is under-prioritized. Bottom 50% by income likely pay no tax at all. Virtually all government spending is funded by middle and high class. Those poor students are free-riding.
jankotek 8y ago
I really hate direction american politics (and hacker news to some extend) is going lately. There is a problem with car pollution. That is pretty common and has well known solutions. But this article has zero numbers, zero solutions. It hijacks the problem and weaponizes it into hate and "class struggle". I read similar stuff in communist news-papers 30 years ago.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
harmful_stereo 8y ago
I've often thought one of the only ways we would ever reclaim green space from development would be some kind of silent spring creeping moral nimbyism around highways. If only we could scare people and governments into putting an exclusion zone around highways, for every additional bit of setback distance the effect could be huge. Like the environmental boon that the korean dmz became, or Chernobyl. Ideally bears and caribou would one day have mental maps of the interstate, and forest land could have its transport system restored.
- peteradio 8y ago
  This would be incredible. Have you heard about the massive wildlife overpasses in Canada?
- d4rti 8y ago
  This decreases density further, making greater travel distances.
- zanny 8y ago
  This is approaching the problem backwards. You don't want to spread people further out with token green spaces in between miles of concrete. If for no other reason than those areas are way less effective at being "green space" that green space well separated from human civilization. The kinds of trees you can plant along boulevards or in inner-city parks or along highways are quite limited to a subset that can subsist on poor nutrient quality from the soil and much reduced sunlight availability from the pollution they are meant to "keep at bay". Its the same reason "urban farming" is ridiculous. You end up spending way more in technology to make urban settings livable for plant life than you get back in value from having the plants in the first place. If you want environmental boons like you describe, you want to dramatically expand nature preserves and increase the density of human settlement so we consume less of the livable footprint of the Earth with our societies and pollute the world less all the same. This isn't a problem to hide behind a row of malnourished trees.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
harias 8y ago
Off-topic: Meanwhile Delhi has no plans to do anything about their problem. People don't even wear masks. Air pollution readings are in the red for the majority of the year. Live readings - https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/ https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/
- wil421 8y ago
  My coworker went there last year. When the factories were on he couldn’t see the hotel adjacent to his. When they were shut down it was almost crystal clear with blue sky. Reminded me of a distopian SciFi movie like Bladerunner or Johnny Pneumonic.
- kaybe 8y ago
  On the other hand, other Asian countries are throwing tons of money at the problem. It's not that easy though because you need to take the chemistry into account. Some pollutants react distructively with others, so if you reduce those first you'll get more pollution than before. Oops. (China is in that situation, for example.)
microcolonel 8y ago
> Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution? They don't have to, they aren't going to, and they wouldn't if given the choice.
sct202 8y ago
People who commute from that county in Washington to work in Portland have to pay Oregon state income tax. Income tax makes up the bulk of Oregon's state budget which partially funds their K-12 system : https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances . So the commuters are technically paying for some of the costs, maybe not enough?
calimac 8y ago
The article reads like a was written by a sophomoric journalist with a social justice warrior agenda who does not understand the scientific method applied their racial biases to jump to speculative conclusion. How did this trend to #1?
NoblePublius 8y ago
How about we take all the school’s money, give it to the parents, and let them decide to which school to send their children?
- duxup 8y ago
  The unpredictable nature of school funding would then be a pretty big problem, and the results for students who choose wrong, have the schools in their neighborhood all but defunded / can't afford to commute to a better school would also be bad. It would basically be the existing school funding issues, on steroids.
  - NoblePublius 8y ago
    This seems based on the assumption most parents are too stupid to realize whether or not their kid’s school is good or bad.
- yboris 8y ago
  Simply stop funding schools based on local taxes, fund all schools equally based on federal and state taxes. Many problems solved.
  - kemiller 8y ago
    Oregon and California are already run this way. It sucks. Creates more problems than it solves.
- zanny 8y ago
  Because private industry would not build schools for those students in depressed and poor neighborhoods, even at the guarantee of the general fund of the school that was there, because most schools in the US are operating at a substantial loss to their direct income from school / property tax. Its part of why "bake sales" to fund schools are so common in many depressed and poor areas. Its also why schools are so strongly incentivized to seek funding for sports, sports programs, and sports arenas. If you can build a fancy stadium on a state grant it can bring in supplementary income to keep the power on for general ed. Private enterprise would only be interested in building schools for poor kids only offering public dollars if there were profit to be made from said dollars, which is innately more inefficient than a public school that simply operates at, or better, under cost - especially when that general income is coming from direct local residents.
weyland108 8y ago
Has anyone considered moving the school by 1 mile away from freeway?
ratling 8y ago
Angry at the wrong people. The freeway users are just trying to get to work.
JTbane 8y ago
Driving should be more expensive in the US, full stop. Many like to attack higher gas taxes as 'regressive', but they are fair. The more pollution you create, the more you pay.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  There are also partial fixes to the regressive nature of auto fuel taxes. Credits for low income residents are a simple "fix" (not arguing it's the best approach, just one way to make the tax less regressive). Or, we can increase (re-implement?) the "gas guzzler" tax. Anything that gets <20mpg (or whatever value) pays an extra annual tax. Removes actual consumption from the scheme, but still provides an incentive to buy fuel-efficient vehicles.
tha_nose 8y ago
"Students attending schools located near and downwind from busy highways had lower rates of academic performance, higher absenteeism and higher rates of disciplinary problems than those attending less polluted schools." Is it because of the pollution or because kids who live near highways come from poorer socio-economic environments? Kids who grow up in poor rural areas nowhere near cars also have performance and behavioral problems. Also, some of the top schools in the NYC metro area are situated near highways or high traffic areas. Why aren't these kids affected as negatively? Could it be many of them come from higher socio-economic situations? Finally, isn't it a bit disingenous to say poor kids pay for it when they don't pay taxes. Also, the article claims these kids receive free lunches, so most likely they parents don't make enough money to pay much in taxes. So the "wealthy" who pay taxes are already paying for the poor kids, their school and their air filtration system are already paying taxes to clean up the pollution. So they already paid, what more do they have to pay for? Ideally, it would be great if every kid had a school in a middle of prisinte woods without any pollution, but then people would complain about the destruction of pristine nature.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Yeah while pollution is no help clearly and lead poisoning is known for bad options it sounds like the mechanism for worse academic performance from power lines - lowered property values and the fact poorer kids tended to live in "undesirable" locations.
- adam-a 8y ago
  The study they link to claims to account for this by tracking the same students between different schools. They also track different schools which are the same distances from a highway but suffer different pollution because of wind patterns. It would have been quite easy for you to click that link and read the abstract.
- yboris 8y ago
  The simplest solution to numerous large problems in the US education system (while politically infeasible) is to fund schools based on student count uniformly, based on federal and state taxes, and not at all based on local township taxes.
slifin 8y ago
TIL if I pay taxes it's ok for me to poison kids going to school
eumenides1 8y ago
MOVE THE SCHOOL. Everything sucks, there is serious injustice, and no foresight to building the highway. Portland still needs the highway and the school. So just use the highway's powers to make room for a school. If you don't have foresight, then at least make things right.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Yes, this is the answer. Moving the interstate is a non-starter. And even if there were political will to do so, the costs would be dramatically higher than just building a new school farther away.
- erentz 8y ago
  This is the only correct answer. Anyone using the school as a prop in a campaign to prevent widening of the highway is essentially arguing it is fine for the school to stay where it is if the highway is not widened. This is simply untrue. The pollution is too high as is. This annoys me because it feels like a very selfish use of this situation by those campaigning against the freeway. They don't care about the students, they're using them for their own interests which are to prevent the widening. The school needs to move regardless of whether the freeway is widened or not. I've tried pointing out elsewhere that the article is incorrect in identifying a building on that location in 1962 as being the school. The school was not opened on that location until 1982. [1] Further is was closed in 2012 then reopened in 2018. [2] In 1980s we may not have known about the pollution problem. But by 2018 when it was reopened there are countless articles about the pollution problem and concerns with the schools location that clearly demonstrate the school district knew of the problem. The only solution can be to move the school. But having invested in reopening it I can see why the school district will be very hard to move on that. [1] https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-prized-by-portlands-black-community-would-see-its-poor-air-quality-worsen-with-a-rose-quarter-highway-expansion/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-prized... [2] https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362/daunting-but-dreamtof-new-port.html https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362...
astura 8y ago
I have two takeaways: 1) Traveling by private automobile has huge negative externalities. 2) Highways are usually built in economically depressed areas.
joemaller1 8y ago
There's reason to doubt freeway traffic is the primary source of pollution at Tubman Middle School. Just across the freeway from the school is a non-trivial amount of industrial activity including: * A Calportland cement facility (2500 ft mi) * A Union Pacific rail yard (4000 ft) * Tyree Oil, a small petroleum distributor (1200 ft) * What looks like a power transfer station (2000 ft) * At least two glass-makers and a ceramics studio (<1000 ft) * A sheet metal fabricator and neon sign manufacturer (1100-1400 ft) This article appears to have originated with a Bike Portland (and No More Freeways) campaign against freeway expansion and for decongestion pricing.
- zanny 8y ago
  Why would you build a school in what sounds to be an industrial zone?
  - brewdad 8y ago
    Cheap land. My district built a high school in an industrial zone at the northern edge of town across a freeway from the rest of the community. When you think about it, it makes sense. It's a warehouse for kids surrounded by warehouses.
keeganjw 8y ago
Why are DOTs still trying to widen highways? There examples after examples that show this doesn't speed up travel times and traffic will suck just as much as before they widened the highway. If we were smart, we'd put that money into public transportation. Portland is a big enough city to support a world class public transit system. Many US cities are, we just choose not too. Portland has an urban population of 1.8 million. Stockholm has only 1.5 million and yet they seem more than capable of funding full subway, bus, and commuter rail systems. Why the fuck can't we? This would do wonders for air quality. And come on, commuters can pay for the air filtration and they should.
- yikes_burger 8y ago
  stockholm is 2x as dense as portland. and portland has funneled billions of taxpayer money into public transportation. taxpayers have been footing the bill: Oregon is the third highest taxed state in the country and portland is a high tax city. and property taxes are set to increase again this year, after last years increase. this is on top of congestion pricing, increases in vehicle registration costs, and gas taxes.
  - keeganjw 8y ago
    Stockholm's core is definitely denser but the population is still there in Portland if the routes were built right. And you're right, Oregon and Portland already do have high taxes. They couldn't fund this themselves. No city does. The federal government would need to provide a lot of funding. In Portland and all around the country. But I just wish the conversation in the US would change. Bold public transportation projects are almost immediate shut down as being unrealistic. It doesn't have to be this way. Nobody talks about the cost and feasibility of highways and roads or the enormous costs of car ownership. We just all default to that and don't question it. Cars are the default, everything is expensive and unrealistic.
    - yikes_burger 8y ago
      ok, you concede that taxes are high at both the local and state level, and your solution is to raise them on everyone, at the federal level? why should the good folks in Hawaii, Texas, Ohio, etc., foot the bill for your shitty transit that no one uses (look up the ridership stats)? public transit gets shutdown not because it's unrealistic--anything is feasible if you throw enough money at it--but precisely because it's a massive waste of taxpayer money. California just learned the hard way, but at least Newsom had the balls to call-it-quits on the idiotic high speed rail project. well at least you'll be able to go from Merced to Bakersfield or whatever it is. how many billions were spent on that again?
kbutler 8y ago
You can actually see purple-air monitors at the school: https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271 https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271 Note that the black-circled spots are monitors inside the building. Here's the report with details of the monitoring equipment and the recommendations. http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/tubman_-_psu_htmsreport_phase1_outdoor_monitoring_final_1530825287922.pdf http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaw...

117 points by oftenwrong 8y ago

In defense of Coase, the "flaw" is part of the theorem and discussion in the original paper, and Coase himself wrote extensively about the problem of using his conclusion while ignoring his assumptions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

johnisgood 8y ago

I agree, polluters should compensate at the very least financially. It is sad that it was even allowed to be built right next to a school.

JasonFruit 8y ago

Why are we assuming the commuters are rich? The person who is coaxing their ancient Pinto to carry them to their job at the paint store is just as much a commuter as the executive taking a phone meeting in his BMW. And everyone in the area pays taxes to support the school; it's not just the students and their parents. It seems like an equitable, if roundabout, way of paying for an air filter system for the school.

cmiles74 8y ago
From the article: "Peak hour, drive alone commuters from Clark County, Washington have average household incomes of $82,500; and 75 percent of them are white, non-Hispanic. More than two-thirds of Tubman students are people of color; and half the student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals."
- kbutler 8y ago
  This lacks several points from being conclusive: - it describes only "peak hour, drive alone commuters" without apportioning the fraction of total pollution caused by that group. - How much does evening peak rush-hour pollution affect school-day air quality? (morning peak would probably have a direct effect) - by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution - it could be that the majority of the pollution is caused by lower-income commuters driving older vehicles, but Tesla-driving higher income commuters drive up the average income - it assumes that the money paid for the pollution somehow belongs to the students, when it is apportioned from the tax dollars paid that fund the school district budget. Maybe those dollars already come from the high-income commuters. - it brings in race purely to add to the emotional content of the narrative If you disagree, please describe why you find this narrative rationally compelling.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    So at least one of your points seems to be a triviality after a basic Google search. 85% of vehicles on the road are single occupancy: www.thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters Your questions may be valid, but assuming there are not answers to those questions probably is not valid. I mean, it would not exactly shock me to learn that peak traffic is representative of most of the day, or that peak traffic is responsible for most of the pollution. It would also not shock me to learn that income distribution by neighborhood doesn't see much variance. I suspect if I looked this stuff up, like I did on single occupancy vehicles, I could cut your points down to nothing.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      Hmm, not sure this is the best debate strategy: "I destroyed one of your points, and I could foresee myself doing the same with the others if I bothered to answer them. Therefore it's invalid for you to raise these questions." I'd also point out that you didn't actually address any of the questions listed. A general study about American vehicles as a whole being single occupancy doesn't imply much of anything about this particular case, hence "by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution", which you demonstrated with your response, rather than undermined.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- yikes_burger 8y ago
  TIL average household income of ~82K, about ~41k per parent, is "rich"
  - sdfvdzvdv 8y ago
    Agreed, that's a bit "rich" :p However, we mustn't forget that there are families living on 41K combined (two parents @minimum). Or 20K (single mom @minimum). 80K is far from rich. But quite comfortable compared to many, many, Americans.
- sdfvdzvdv 8y ago
  Wealthier ppl have new cars with stricter emissions. In fact, gasoline cars since port injection have made negligible amounts of particulate emissions (which is the only pollution that matters in this case, CO2 are only globally important). Direct injection might screw everything up soon (their intake valves foul like crazy). The emitters, therefore, are ppl with old cars; tractor trailers; city buses [0]; working class ppl driving, old ill maintained vans and pick ups. Really, the only significant particulate emissions I can think of from rich suburbanites are their gas mowers and blowers. But they're (a) polluting the air around their homes (b) quickly switching to electric. Now, if you want the rich sub-urbanites to pay to relocate the school, that's cool. I'm down. But they're really not the problem. [0] In my mid western city, at least, the buses are diesel powered and not LNG, and they appear to have the particulate filters ripped off. Dunno about Clark County's buses in particular.
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helen___keller 8y ago
> Why are we assuming the commuters are rich? I don't know the particulars in this case, but in the mid 20th century it was a very common strategy to run main arteries into the city through the poor & ethnic inner city neighborhoods (not to mention tearing those neighborhoods down and destroying their communities for "urban revitalization"), hence the historical assumption of poorer city residents dealing with the noise & pollution of the rich suburban commuters. As time goes on this will become less and less true thanks to America's urban renaissance, but still property values near expressways tend to be much lower due to the noise pollution & air pollution. Interestingly, the most high-profile American expressway failure (in Manhattan) gave rise to one of the most valuable urban regions in America. I personally doubt this is a coincidence.
zanny 8y ago
Car ownership is innately expensive. Between regular maintenance, the cost of fuel, insurance, inspections, and the aggregated costs of getting a replacement every ~10-20 years you are easily spending several thousand dollars a year in vehicles even if you try to be optimally frugal about it. Most people are easily over 10k a year in car expenses, especially on some of the ludicrous commutes people on the west coast put up with. If you have never met them consider yourself upper crust, but there exists a substantial population in the US and all other western countries of those who can not afford a car. You often don't see them because it turns out traveling any substantial distance from your often impoverished neighborhood without functional public transit or private car ownership can be quite prohibitive. So even the guy driving the "clunker" car down this highway is still probably in the upper half of wealth in the area, easily, assuming they are actually affording to inspect, license, and insure themselves and their vehicle. A lot of people don't, but its a bit egregious to try to count people breaking the law driving on the road in the first place as contributing to the average wealth of the drivers on said road.

endorphone 8y ago

Passenger cars create a negligible amount of particulate pollution, and are certainly not the cause of the air quality issues encountered here. Transport trucks, in contrast, create a lot of air pollution (both greenhouse gas and particulate), but the story isn't as interesting when the villain are the goods and products that everyone consumes.

Asooka 8y ago
The story is pretty clear that the villains are ODOT who built a highway right next to a school.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  If that were the case, the title would have been, "Why do poor school kids have to clean up ODOT’s pollution?" But that wouldn't have gotten as many clicks, as OP stated.
  - foobarchu 8y ago
    The title is poor, yes. The content of the article is pretty clear that ODOT is the problem, though. I don't think the title was claiming that "rich commuters" should pay for it, so much as it was trying to emphasize that the children are in no way responsible for it. The author could have chosen better, though.
- influx 8y ago
  Likewise in Seattle they built i5 straight though the city cutting it in half.
- erentz 8y ago
  Only the article is incorrect as pointed out in my other comments down voted comments. And this does matter because it changes a lot of the tone and basis of the article. Sure there was some building of some sort there back in their 1962 photo. But that isn’t Harriet Tubman school we are talking about today. The school was only opened in 1982. Built after pressure by community activists who wanted a school in their neighborhood. Further it was actually closed in 2012 and then reopened in 2018. With much written at the time of reopening about the pollution problem. So really the “villain” (if there should be one) would have to be Portland Public Schools that built, closed, then reopened a school next to an existing traffic sewer. In 1980s it is somewhat forgivable mistake, we weren’t as aware then. But in 2018 they knew full damn well the pollution problem. Nobody can deny that. This school shouldn't be there. Is pollution bad? Yes. Was Robert Moses and his cohorts a disaster for urban environments? Yes. Do cities need to be greener and have better transit? Yes. But still, the school simply shouldn’t be there. So the article really falls apart on a number of levels. In this case I think people using the existence of the school to campaign against this freeway project are doing a selfish disservice to the students. I'm generally anti-freeway, very pro-transit, very pro-urban. But let's be clear: the current levels of pollution are unacceptable as is, regardless of widening. The school shouldn't stay where it is even if the freeway doesn't get widened. So the people using it as a prop in their campaign to prevent widening are essentially arguing it is fine to stay where it is. This is sad and IMO a selfish use of this bad situation for the students of this school by the anti-freeway campaigners.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Aren't paying for externalities like these like this exactly why we pay taxes to state government? Why is the school paying for it's own air filtration? This sounds like a problem of ineffective government, not highways and pollution. It's the state's job to use tax money to smooth out these kind of issues in a roughly equitable manner.

nvahalik 8y ago

Unless the commuters are coming from out of state, wouldn't the people driving (being residents) be paying the taxes which would pay for this anyway? I get that it is coming out of the budget of the school, but ultimately the taxpayers _are_ paying for it, albeit in a round-about kind of way.

gbear605 8y ago
Schools are mostly funded by the town, not the state
- kurthr 8y ago
  Well, in Oregon they are poorly funded, because it's a low tax state, but many expensive things like teacher salaries are state funded. This is due to a Supreme Court decision requirement to provide equal education, and it's unclear if they have fully complied, but generally your statement is not correct. In many large states (Texas, California, NY) schools are almost fully state funded. https://crosscut.com/2017/12/oregon-school-funding-education-washington-mccleary-schools https://crosscut.com/2017/12/oregon-school-funding-education... https://education.findlaw.com/curriculum-standards-school-funding/education-finance-and-funding-state-and-local-sources.html https://education.findlaw.com/curriculum-standards-school-fu...
  - ci5er 8y ago
    If Texas schools are state-funded, I'm paying way too high property taxes to live in Westlake! (Austin TX)[0]... [0] Yes that was an exaggerated response - but not by as much as you might think. https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding-how-it-works/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...
ojbyrne 8y ago
I don’t entirely agree with your argument, but the article actually says the commuters are coming from a different state.
astura 8y ago

sealthedeal 8y ago

Because they are pooooooooooooooooooooooooooor This is a terrible title and shouldn’t be at the top of HN

TBurette 8y ago

I didn't know about the Coase Theorem. The link between property right, transaction cost and externalities is not obvious and interesting. We could imagine many tech examples similar to the school and highway : - An ISP provides a connection with poor delay/jitter and it creates problem for software developers (Skype, multiplayer games,...) --> should the ISP compensate the developers or the developers pay the ISP to fix the problem? - A developer is selling created a program that degrades the performance of another program if they are both run simultaneously. Who should pay who to compensate/fix the problem?

mediumdeviation 8y ago
Coase Theorem doesn’t say _how_ you should divide up property rights - that’s a normative statement that’s outside the scope of economics - but rather that as long as _any_ property rights are assigned, regardless of which way the assignment goes, the outcome will be economically efficient. Also it assumes transaction costs are negligible, ie in the example in the article, the negotiations between the railway and the farmer can be done cheaply and quickly. This is somewhat like assuming a frictionless plane in physics.

3rdgender 8y ago

"Why is the school district paying for the pollution controls? Why aren’t the 120,000 vehicles that drive past the school every day paying for it?" Don't drivers pay taxes, which also go to the school district - so actually, the vehicle drivers ARE paying for it? Not that I want to justify the situation. But the spin seems wrong. Also, in a twist, the kid's family may only be able to afford living in the school's district because pollution makes it unattractive to live in.

cmiles74 8y ago
Everyone's take-away is different, but I find the general argument that the cost of driving is hugely under-priced to be compelling. In my opinion this piece hits on a good example: the overall cost wasn't really appreciated when the highway was built and the department of transportation seems to be trying to ignore the cost even today.
- mortenjorck 8y ago
  I too find the argument compelling that driving is under-priced, but I'm always leery of any reasoning that stops there, as the next step usually seems to be "well, we need to correct the price," which is only a good solution in a vacuum. As the Macron government in France learned the hard way, underpricing one mode of transport for decades has a profound effect on multiple other markets, and suddenly trying to correct it has a very real human cost. When driving is underpriced, public transport can't compete, and investment in it wanes. Meanwhile, residential development adapts to automotive transport with sprawl. And so a significant part of the population has no fallback if they become priced out of driving. A good policy solution must take the transportation, housing, and labor markets into consideration when pricing in the externalities of driving.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Passenger cars are a rounding error compared to freight trucks when it comes to pollution and road wear. Rather than waste money trying to squeeze more money out of people commuting to work, perhaps we should jack up the taxes on the freight companies. It may be fashionable to blame car culture, but even people without a car benefit greatly from our transportation system.

erentz 8y ago

Schools (and lots of things) shouldn’t be built next to freeways. It appears [1] this school was created in the 1980s long after that freeway existed. It was closed in 2012. Then reopened last year. Perhaps the whole school should be moved (there’s nearby vacant blocks that could accommodate a new school). [1] This is based on very brief search so may be incorrect. Actually this is odd the article shows a picture of the school being their before the freeway. Was that the school then or was that a building repurposed into the school? This is where I got the 80s thing from: https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362/daunting-but-dreamtof-new-port.html https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362...

droithomme 8y ago
Given that the school was closed for 6 years during which they undoubtedly did not run the climate control systems, the school most likely has mold problems.
dtech 8y ago
You obviously did not read the article, since it says right there that the high school was first, and even provides a photo of the school next to freeway under construction. The article might be wrong, but then you'd react to that.
mhb 8y ago
I didn't need to do any search since TFA addresses this point in an unsurprisingly titled section Who was here first?.
- erentz 8y ago
  It shows a photo. And used that as the basis for the claim. But the article I linked which is long and gives a lot of the story of the school states a number of times it was created in the 1980s. I don’t know if it was repurposed from an old closed building or school or what. Whether it was there first or not seems irrelevant anyway. If we care about the health of the students the whole school should be moved (unless you think we can move the freeway instead).
8y ago

pelasaco 8y ago

why are you assuming that the commuters are rich?

Proven 8y ago

1) Those students aren’t paying nothing. Did their parents pay those millions mentioned in TFA? 2) I don’t know about Oregon but gasoline is normally taxed, so the drivers already paid pollution tax. 3) TFA implies that State collects fuel taxes and spends them for other purposes, or does not correctly prioritize this spending. But we can’t know whether this school is under-prioritized. Bottom 50% by income likely pay no tax at all. Virtually all government spending is funded by middle and high class. Those poor students are free-riding.

jankotek 8y ago

I really hate direction american politics (and hacker news to some extend) is going lately. There is a problem with car pollution. That is pretty common and has well known solutions. But this article has zero numbers, zero solutions. It hijacks the problem and weaponizes it into hate and "class struggle". I read similar stuff in communist news-papers 30 years ago.

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harmful_stereo 8y ago

I've often thought one of the only ways we would ever reclaim green space from development would be some kind of silent spring creeping moral nimbyism around highways. If only we could scare people and governments into putting an exclusion zone around highways, for every additional bit of setback distance the effect could be huge. Like the environmental boon that the korean dmz became, or Chernobyl. Ideally bears and caribou would one day have mental maps of the interstate, and forest land could have its transport system restored.

peteradio 8y ago
This would be incredible. Have you heard about the massive wildlife overpasses in Canada?
d4rti 8y ago
This decreases density further, making greater travel distances.
zanny 8y ago
This is approaching the problem backwards. You don't want to spread people further out with token green spaces in between miles of concrete. If for no other reason than those areas are way less effective at being "green space" that green space well separated from human civilization. The kinds of trees you can plant along boulevards or in inner-city parks or along highways are quite limited to a subset that can subsist on poor nutrient quality from the soil and much reduced sunlight availability from the pollution they are meant to "keep at bay". Its the same reason "urban farming" is ridiculous. You end up spending way more in technology to make urban settings livable for plant life than you get back in value from having the plants in the first place. If you want environmental boons like you describe, you want to dramatically expand nature preserves and increase the density of human settlement so we consume less of the livable footprint of the Earth with our societies and pollute the world less all the same. This isn't a problem to hide behind a row of malnourished trees.

deleted 8y ago

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harias 8y ago

Off-topic: Meanwhile Delhi has no plans to do anything about their problem. People don't even wear masks. Air pollution readings are in the red for the majority of the year. Live readings - https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/ https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/

wil421 8y ago
My coworker went there last year. When the factories were on he couldn’t see the hotel adjacent to his. When they were shut down it was almost crystal clear with blue sky. Reminded me of a distopian SciFi movie like Bladerunner or Johnny Pneumonic.
kaybe 8y ago
On the other hand, other Asian countries are throwing tons of money at the problem. It's not that easy though because you need to take the chemistry into account. Some pollutants react distructively with others, so if you reduce those first you'll get more pollution than before. Oops. (China is in that situation, for example.)

microcolonel 8y ago

> Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution? They don't have to, they aren't going to, and they wouldn't if given the choice.

sct202 8y ago

People who commute from that county in Washington to work in Portland have to pay Oregon state income tax. Income tax makes up the bulk of Oregon's state budget which partially funds their K-12 system : https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_state_budget_and_finances . So the commuters are technically paying for some of the costs, maybe not enough?

calimac 8y ago

The article reads like a was written by a sophomoric journalist with a social justice warrior agenda who does not understand the scientific method applied their racial biases to jump to speculative conclusion. How did this trend to #1?

NoblePublius 8y ago

How about we take all the school’s money, give it to the parents, and let them decide to which school to send their children?

duxup 8y ago
The unpredictable nature of school funding would then be a pretty big problem, and the results for students who choose wrong, have the schools in their neighborhood all but defunded / can't afford to commute to a better school would also be bad. It would basically be the existing school funding issues, on steroids.
- NoblePublius 8y ago
  This seems based on the assumption most parents are too stupid to realize whether or not their kid’s school is good or bad.
yboris 8y ago
Simply stop funding schools based on local taxes, fund all schools equally based on federal and state taxes. Many problems solved.
- kemiller 8y ago
  Oregon and California are already run this way. It sucks. Creates more problems than it solves.
zanny 8y ago
Because private industry would not build schools for those students in depressed and poor neighborhoods, even at the guarantee of the general fund of the school that was there, because most schools in the US are operating at a substantial loss to their direct income from school / property tax. Its part of why "bake sales" to fund schools are so common in many depressed and poor areas. Its also why schools are so strongly incentivized to seek funding for sports, sports programs, and sports arenas. If you can build a fancy stadium on a state grant it can bring in supplementary income to keep the power on for general ed. Private enterprise would only be interested in building schools for poor kids only offering public dollars if there were profit to be made from said dollars, which is innately more inefficient than a public school that simply operates at, or better, under cost - especially when that general income is coming from direct local residents.

weyland108 8y ago

Has anyone considered moving the school by 1 mile away from freeway?

ratling 8y ago

Angry at the wrong people. The freeway users are just trying to get to work.

JTbane 8y ago

Driving should be more expensive in the US, full stop. Many like to attack higher gas taxes as 'regressive', but they are fair. The more pollution you create, the more you pay.

alistairSH 8y ago
There are also partial fixes to the regressive nature of auto fuel taxes. Credits for low income residents are a simple "fix" (not arguing it's the best approach, just one way to make the tax less regressive). Or, we can increase (re-implement?) the "gas guzzler" tax. Anything that gets <20mpg (or whatever value) pays an extra annual tax. Removes actual consumption from the scheme, but still provides an incentive to buy fuel-efficient vehicles.

tha_nose 8y ago

"Students attending schools located near and downwind from busy highways had lower rates of academic performance, higher absenteeism and higher rates of disciplinary problems than those attending less polluted schools." Is it because of the pollution or because kids who live near highways come from poorer socio-economic environments? Kids who grow up in poor rural areas nowhere near cars also have performance and behavioral problems. Also, some of the top schools in the NYC metro area are situated near highways or high traffic areas. Why aren't these kids affected as negatively? Could it be many of them come from higher socio-economic situations? Finally, isn't it a bit disingenous to say poor kids pay for it when they don't pay taxes. Also, the article claims these kids receive free lunches, so most likely they parents don't make enough money to pay much in taxes. So the "wealthy" who pay taxes are already paying for the poor kids, their school and their air filtration system are already paying taxes to clean up the pollution. So they already paid, what more do they have to pay for? Ideally, it would be great if every kid had a school in a middle of prisinte woods without any pollution, but then people would complain about the destruction of pristine nature.

Nasrudith 8y ago
Yeah while pollution is no help clearly and lead poisoning is known for bad options it sounds like the mechanism for worse academic performance from power lines - lowered property values and the fact poorer kids tended to live in "undesirable" locations.
adam-a 8y ago
The study they link to claims to account for this by tracking the same students between different schools. They also track different schools which are the same distances from a highway but suffer different pollution because of wind patterns. It would have been quite easy for you to click that link and read the abstract.
yboris 8y ago
The simplest solution to numerous large problems in the US education system (while politically infeasible) is to fund schools based on student count uniformly, based on federal and state taxes, and not at all based on local township taxes.

slifin 8y ago

TIL if I pay taxes it's ok for me to poison kids going to school

eumenides1 8y ago

MOVE THE SCHOOL. Everything sucks, there is serious injustice, and no foresight to building the highway. Portland still needs the highway and the school. So just use the highway's powers to make room for a school. If you don't have foresight, then at least make things right.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Yes, this is the answer. Moving the interstate is a non-starter. And even if there were political will to do so, the costs would be dramatically higher than just building a new school farther away.
erentz 8y ago
This is the only correct answer. Anyone using the school as a prop in a campaign to prevent widening of the highway is essentially arguing it is fine for the school to stay where it is if the highway is not widened. This is simply untrue. The pollution is too high as is. This annoys me because it feels like a very selfish use of this situation by those campaigning against the freeway. They don't care about the students, they're using them for their own interests which are to prevent the widening. The school needs to move regardless of whether the freeway is widened or not. I've tried pointing out elsewhere that the article is incorrect in identifying a building on that location in 1962 as being the school. The school was not opened on that location until 1982. [1] Further is was closed in 2012 then reopened in 2018. [2] In 1980s we may not have known about the pollution problem. But by 2018 when it was reopened there are countless articles about the pollution problem and concerns with the schools location that clearly demonstrate the school district knew of the problem. The only solution can be to move the school. But having invested in reopening it I can see why the school district will be very hard to move on that. [1] https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-prized-by-portlands-black-community-would-see-its-poor-air-quality-worsen-with-a-rose-quarter-highway-expansion/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/07/04/a-middle-school-prized... [2] https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362/daunting-but-dreamtof-new-port.html https://expo.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/08/c7c3d773398362...

astura 8y ago

I have two takeaways: 1) Traveling by private automobile has huge negative externalities. 2) Highways are usually built in economically depressed areas.

joemaller1 8y ago

There's reason to doubt freeway traffic is the primary source of pollution at Tubman Middle School. Just across the freeway from the school is a non-trivial amount of industrial activity including: * A Calportland cement facility (2500 ft mi) * A Union Pacific rail yard (4000 ft) * Tyree Oil, a small petroleum distributor (1200 ft) * What looks like a power transfer station (2000 ft) * At least two glass-makers and a ceramics studio (<1000 ft) * A sheet metal fabricator and neon sign manufacturer (1100-1400 ft) This article appears to have originated with a Bike Portland (and No More Freeways) campaign against freeway expansion and for decongestion pricing.

zanny 8y ago
Why would you build a school in what sounds to be an industrial zone?
- brewdad 8y ago
  Cheap land. My district built a high school in an industrial zone at the northern edge of town across a freeway from the rest of the community. When you think about it, it makes sense. It's a warehouse for kids surrounded by warehouses.

keeganjw 8y ago

Why are DOTs still trying to widen highways? There examples after examples that show this doesn't speed up travel times and traffic will suck just as much as before they widened the highway. If we were smart, we'd put that money into public transportation. Portland is a big enough city to support a world class public transit system. Many US cities are, we just choose not too. Portland has an urban population of 1.8 million. Stockholm has only 1.5 million and yet they seem more than capable of funding full subway, bus, and commuter rail systems. Why the fuck can't we? This would do wonders for air quality. And come on, commuters can pay for the air filtration and they should.

yikes_burger 8y ago
stockholm is 2x as dense as portland. and portland has funneled billions of taxpayer money into public transportation. taxpayers have been footing the bill: Oregon is the third highest taxed state in the country and portland is a high tax city. and property taxes are set to increase again this year, after last years increase. this is on top of congestion pricing, increases in vehicle registration costs, and gas taxes.
- keeganjw 8y ago
  Stockholm's core is definitely denser but the population is still there in Portland if the routes were built right. And you're right, Oregon and Portland already do have high taxes. They couldn't fund this themselves. No city does. The federal government would need to provide a lot of funding. In Portland and all around the country. But I just wish the conversation in the US would change. Bold public transportation projects are almost immediate shut down as being unrealistic. It doesn't have to be this way. Nobody talks about the cost and feasibility of highways and roads or the enormous costs of car ownership. We just all default to that and don't question it. Cars are the default, everything is expensive and unrealistic.
  - yikes_burger 8y ago
    ok, you concede that taxes are high at both the local and state level, and your solution is to raise them on everyone, at the federal level? why should the good folks in Hawaii, Texas, Ohio, etc., foot the bill for your shitty transit that no one uses (look up the ridership stats)? public transit gets shutdown not because it's unrealistic--anything is feasible if you throw enough money at it--but precisely because it's a massive waste of taxpayer money. California just learned the hard way, but at least Newsom had the balls to call-it-quits on the idiotic high speed rail project. well at least you'll be able to go from Merced to Bakersfield or whatever it is. how many billions were spent on that again?

kbutler 8y ago

You can actually see purple-air monitors at the school: https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271 https://www.purpleair.com/map?#15.8/45.538164/-122.667271 Note that the black-circled spots are monitors inside the building. Here's the report with details of the monitoring equipment and the recommendations. http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/tubman_-_psu_htmsreport_phase1_outdoor_monitoring_final_1530825287922.pdf http://opb-imgserve-production.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaw...