"Your entire transit authority should be fired, along with your city engineers"

Funny, the people who got us into this mess are long retired. Portland's infrastructure was built in a bubble - very little room to expand, very little room to stuff more into. Your transit authority and city engineers now are trying to figure out how to accommodate the influx of road traffic on streets that simply have no room.

That catch of it all is, embracing alternative modes of transportation still = people on the road. A larger number of people riding bicycles has to be accounted for. I don't agree with cycle lanes growing out of proportion - but I can admit that when a large percentage of people decide to ride instead of drive, it still presents traffic and safety issues. Same story for mass transit. More people riding = less people in cars, but it also = more big ass buses on the street that can hardly navigate some lanes let alone some turns in particular neighborhoods. I think about the buses in St Johns, on Alberta, Mississippi, among others, and it's hard for me not to think that if those people were driving traffic would probably go quicker. I've sat behind a bus for 15 minutes because it couldn't make a damn turn. Hows that for helping traffic.

Of course then you have the "save the world" people. Point is, figure out what your damn priority is and accept it. If you want less cars on the road, you're going to have more dumb asses riding bikes in traffic and buses that are too wide for our streets that can't be expanded. It's the fact of life for us now.

Ride a bike, it would have taken you 40 minutes, tops.

And the only thing the City wants to do about it is LOWER SPEED LIMITS!!! Which means they have no ideas what so ever to fix the worst traffic in the country,

It also doesn't help that everyone wants to go somewhere at the same time. Increasing traffic issues tends to be a product of a declining blue collar infrastructure and an increasing white-collar economy. Everyone who says they remember when traffic was better also were driving when our port was 50% more active and the ship yards were booming. Half of the cities employees were already at work when people hit the roads now.