Textual Criticism

[July 2nd, 2008]

Portland Commissioner Sam Adams won’t cook you breakfast, but he wants to make your mornings a little easier.

Adams—the City Council’s resident techno-geek, with his iPod, his blog and his buzzing cellie—hopes to send up-to-date traffic alerts, specific to your city driving route, to your cell phone by text message. Last week, the Council OK’d a $400,000 grant application from the Portland Office of Transportation, which Adams oversees, to the state transportation department to develop just such a system.

The text alerts would be more specific than the helicopter-view traffic reports already blaring over the radio every few minutes—though, initially, they would be limited to the downtown area, including the bridges and highways leading into it.

One possible downside: Isn’t texting-while-driving a little, umm...dangerous?

“I did have the same concern myself,” says Ellen Vanderslice, the PDOT manager overseeing the project. But the plan’s specifics calmed her.

“You don’t text, you just get a text, and they’re very brief,” Vanderslice says.

The system, as imagined, would let folks go online and sign up for free to receive traffic information along a specific travel route. Then, they’d get texted with traffic alerts within a set timeframe—say, the pre-commute hours of 6-7 am and 4-5 pm.

“Ideally, you alert folks before they get on the road,” Adams says. “It doesn’t do us any good if they get an alert in the car sitting in a traffic jam.”

State Rep. Greg Macpherson (D-Lake Oswego), the chief sponsor of a 2007 bill that banned cell phone use in Oregon by drivers younger than 18, isn’t terribly concerned about the potential of Adams’ idea to further distract drivers. But state Rep. Jackie Dingfelder, (D-Portland) who cosponsored the bill, is more cautious.

“It’s not a bad idea as far as getting information to folks, as long as it doesn’t create an additional distraction,” Dingfelder says. “It depends on how people are going to respond to it.”

Hopefully, not by checking text messages from behind the wheel. As of July 1, when stricter new laws took effect in Washington and California, Oregon became the only state on the West Coast that permits adult drivers to use their cell phones without a hands-free headset.

Adams’ proposal would be covered by $395,000 from the state transportation department, and cost the city about $12,500 in staff time.

He says the alerts, similar to systems in New York and Illinois, will help reduce traffic congestion by making the most of traffic data already collected by the state.

“I don’t have the money to do congestion, much less maintenance and safety,” says Adams, the mayor-elect.

(True enough. He might not decide to put his $464 million “safe, sound and green streets” proposal on the November ballot, depending on the results of a public opinion poll to be conducted next week. And any 14-cent-per-gallon increase in the state gas tax, which gets shared with the city, could be consumed by the proposed $4.2 billion Columbia River Crossing project.)

The city enlisted Eponic Corp., a local software company, to help develop the grant proposal. Eponic President John Gilman, who donated $250 to Adams’ mayoral campaign, says he and a colleague came up with the concept while driving to work, then pitched it to Adams and a “Keep Portland Moving” committee that was looking for ways to smooth downtown traffic snags.

State transportation officials will approve or deny the grant in October.