Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Urban Decision Making For Transportation Investments: Portland's Light Rail Transit System, Sheldon Edner, G. B. Arrington Jr.

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Investment decisions for large transportation projects are complex, multifaceted phenomena. Generally requiring many years to bring to fruition, such decisions are often reduced at crucial junctures to raw political deals or technical data analysis on limited items. Throughout the range of alternatives considered, analyses completed and policy-making sessions which contribute to such investments, the imagery of a rational, sequential and wholistic decision making process and substance dominates. Recent debate concerning both the desirability of certain transit investments and the extent to which inappropriate intrusion into the decision making province of state and local government have occurred have highlighted at least …