PTrib 011508 RoadWorrier (PDF)

Road worrier
BACK STORY • Construction traffic may be maddening but Ellen Vanderslice’s office keeps
it from being worse
BY TODD MURPHY
The Portland Tribune, Jan 15, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Ellen Vanderslice, exasperated, sounds like the
disappointed mother of a temporarily wayward
14-year-old.
“Those guys were really good yesterday,” she says, as she
sits in her eighth-floor cubicle in the Portland Building
downtown and peers at her computer screen. On the
screen is a live webcam view of West Burnside Street – a
view that includes “those guys,” the contract construction
crew working on sewer lines on Burnside.
On the yesterday Vanderslice is referring to – a normal
weekday last week in seemingly always-under-construction
downtown Portland – “those guys” were “really good”
because they followed the rules.
They made sure that, in spite of their work, they had two
lanes of Burnside Street open in both directions by 3 p.m.,
just before rush hour.

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTOS
Among the myriad construction projects occurring
downtown, a repaving project at West Burnside Street
and Eighth Avenue (top) recently closed two lanes of
traffic. The city is coordinating the street closures and
traffic disruptions, and Ellen Vanderslice (above) is in
charge as leader of the Keep Portland Moving
department within the city’s Office of Transportation.

Today? Well, today, let’s just say that Vanderslice – whose full-time city job it is to care about such
things – is exasperated.
“That was OK earlier in the day,” she says as she looks at her screen at almost 4 p.m. and sees one lane
open on Burnside, the traffic snaking by. “But right this minute … ”
A pause. She understands things don’t always go as planned, she says. “But if your No. 1 thing is you’re
going to have two lanes of traffic open at 3 … ” And her words trail off, maybe a bit like that mother of the
14-year-old again.
“I think we’re going to have a heart-to-heart with the Burnside contractor,” she says.
Vanderslice is not always exasperated, of course. Often, things go well – or relatively well.
But the very presence of Ellen Vanderslice in that eighth-floor cubicle – along with the two or three
other city employees who work with her – serves as a sort of refutation of what probably 90 percent of
Portlanders have been thinking the past couple of years.
Yes, there actually is someone who’s trying to coordinate all of this – the varied work on streets, light
rail, the bridge and utilities, combined with private building construction, that at times has seemed to
completely clog Portland’s downtown arteries, that at times has seemed to turn downtown into a corn
maze for cars.
And no, they’re not going to let every street in downtown Portland shut down at the same time.
And yes, someone is monitoring – and trying to fix – situations like, for example, much of Burnside
being closed at 4:01 p.m. on a weekday.
Keep Portland Moving is the name of the department that Vanderslice heads – a department within
Portland’s Office of Transportation that has existed for almost a decade but that has been bolstered
considerably in the past 15 months or so.
Vanderslice says she’s heard all the jokes.
She hears them every time she tells someone at a party what she does for a living, when she talks about
“keeping Portland moving.”
The frequent response, she says: “ ‘You do what?’ And they laugh and they say, ‘Good luck with that!’ ”
Or they derisively laugh at Portland’s slogan: “The city that works.” Or they tell her about the time it
took them 30 minutes to drive through downtown.

It’s a wonderful problem
The reality, Vanderslice says, is that there has been an unusual amount of construction work

downtown during the past couple of years – with TriMet’s light-rail construction on the former bus mall of Fifth and Sixth
avenues along with Burnside Bridge and utility work and new private high-rises being built.
All that can, and has, caused problems, she acknowledges. “Challenges,” she likes to call them.
But Vanderslice repeats a quote from her boss – city Commissioner Sam Adams, who oversees the transportation office: “‘We
have a problem in downtown Portland that other cities would kill to have.’
“The bare fact is history tells us these things are episodic,” she says. “Building in downtown goes up and down. But the fact
that people are willing to build things in downtown Portland speaks to the fact that there is a future for downtown.”
Some of the clogs in downtown have been caused by contractors needing to close lanes for private construction work – from
the renovation on the Macy’s building to the construction of Ladd Tower, going in on the block bordered by Southwest Broadway
and Park Avenue and Columbia and Jefferson streets.
Other closed-down streets and street lanes have been caused by the light-rail construction – or other work influenced by it,
says Vanderslice and Lewis Wardrip, a city traffic engineer who works with her department.
Replacement of water mains downtown – some more than a century old – that had been contemplated for years had to be
finished before the light-rail lines were finished. That was because regulations would not have allowed the water main work to be
done after the electrified rail lines were operational, Vanderslice says.
Knowing how many of these projects would need to happen almost at the same time, city officials in 2006 added staffing and
funding to the existing Keep Portland Moving department to try to coordinate things.
Vanderslice, a project manager with the transportation office, was hired to lead Keep Portland Moving in November 2006.

Businesses don’t mind boom
For the most part, downtown business leaders say, the coordination has worked pretty well.
“We think they’ve managed the construction process very well, considering the large scope of work that’s being done,” said
Megan Doern, a spokeswoman for the Portland Business Alliance, which advocates for downtown.
Stephen Pirkl, chairman of the Downtown Retail Council, has been the owner of Stephen Vincent Jewelers at Southwest First
Avenue and Jefferson Street for two years and has worked downtown for the past four.
“I think everybody has stepped up every single step of the way,” he says. “It’s been getting better all the time.”

‘Sticky’ streets
Right now, however – on this weekday afternoon – downtown Portland is covered with yellow sticky notes.
It’s the downtown Portland shown on an oversize map that rests on the other side of Vanderslice’s cubicle wall.
On top of the map – with the location of major construction projects outlined in red marker – are dozens of sticky notes, with
handwritten descriptions and dates of shorter-term utility, road or construction projects.
“We did have them computerized,” Jeri Jenkins, who works in Vanderslice’s office, says of the project notes. “But quite
frankly, the sticky notes work better.”
Contractors are required to obtain permits from the transportation office to close down streets, or close lanes of traffic. That
means Vanderslice’s office can delay certain contractors, or limit them or require them to work at night, depending on the other
projects happening at the time.
Full closures of the Burnside Bridge have been delayed because of other work downtown. A city sewer project on Burnside was
delayed to ensure it was done at the same time as the bridge work.
Streetscape work on Third and Fourth avenues in Chinatown was coordinated to begin after city sewer work at Couch Street
and Eighth Avenue was finished.
“There’s always this balancing going on,” Vanderslice says.

‘No’ is not a possible answer
While her office can delay projects, Vanderslice says, the city does not turn down building projects simply because of other
construction in downtown Portland.
“If you think about it, it seems highly unlikely we would ever do that,” she says. “We’re already battling the perception that the
city is difficult to do business in, that it’s not friendly to business and it’s hard to get a building permit compared to other
jurisdictions.
“The idea that we would ever say to a developer, you can’t develop right now because things are just too busy here – it doesn’t
make sense,” she says.
Which can lead – and has led, during the last two years – to a downtown traffic system that often is near its breaking point,
Vanderslice and Wardrip say.
And it’s a system that then can break with the slightest additional problem.
Wardrip, for instance, talks about the time that traffic was backed up onto the Hawthorne Bridge because of a group of
picketers at Southwest Fifth Avenue and Jefferson Street.
Vanderslice remembers the humongous traffic jam that happened because of a two-car crash at Southwest First Avenue and

Madison Street, when responders had difficulty prying the two cars apart from each other.
“The system is so full, any little incident can cause a jam,” Wardrip says.
They both talk, wincing, about the Week That Was, which began July 23. The Burnside Bridge had been scheduled to be closed
for three weeks beginning then, but that changed because of problems with a jacking system that bridge contractors were
planning to use.
When some lanes on the bridge remained open, a contractor on an east-west street downtown believed he no longer needed to
keep all lanes on that street open. Meanwhile, Wardrip actually walked from Burnside to Market Street, and saw that the city had
allowed too many streets or street lanes eastbound to be closed.
All of it meant gridlock as bad as the city saw last year.
“That was sort of our low point,” Vanderslice says.

Fine idea nixed
Cooperation from construction contractors is key, Vanderslice says. And, once in a while, it’s a problem, she says, because of
the administrative difficulties of levying punishment on contractors for not cooperating.
On its own projects, the city can recover from its contractor damages if they don’t adhere to the traffic control plan – “but we
just don’t really invoke that very often,” Vanderslice says.
While her office investigated whether the city should have a schedule of fines for contractors on private jobs, she and others
determined it would be difficult to police, and probably not bring about results that can be accomplished through a more
collaborative relationship with the contractors.
So Vanderslice and Wardrip and others in their office watch the cameras, and make phone calls, and sometimes walk out to
the sites themselves, to cajole.
Most of the time, Vanderslice says, it works.
Meanwhile, Vanderslice and others in her office help to staff the Keep Portland Moving hot line – 503-865-6683 (MOVE) –
where people can learn about partial street closures and lodge complaints about downtown traffic.
That traffic continually will get better as major construction projects finish, Vanderslice says.
The light rail project is “actually over the hump, on the worst impacts to downtown.” The water main project is finished. The
Burnside Bridge work is finishing.
“The light is there at the end of the tunnel,” she says.
toddmurphy@portlandtribune.com
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