Public Testimony: Oppose Expansion of Highway 217
Public Testimony: Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation (JPACT) Meeting
Good morning,
My name is Danielle Maillard and I am testifying as a member of Sunrise PDX. I am 23 years old. In this climate, being 23 means that my first thought whenever I see that a high school facebook friend is pregnant tends to be “what kind of world is that child inheriting?” Because when my grandparents were born, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million. When parents were born,it was 310 parts per million. When I was born it was 360. This year, it has reached 415ppm.
If we go on with business as usual, that baby, who was born to a facebook friend last week, will grow up in a landscape we cannot begin to comprehend. In that baby’s lifetime, rainforests will turn to deserts. We will not have glacial ice caps in the summer and once-frozen soils will release unreal amounts of methane...all of this drastically increasing the speed of climate change.
So WHY would we participate in projects that only help these events thrive? In this region, where 40% of our own carbon emissions are from transportation, why on earth would adding lanes to freeways be on the table when we know this only increases congestion, and therefore emissions.
I am here to testify to speak out against the expansion of Highway 217. While the technical amendment to add more traffic demand technology is worth supporting, approval of the MTIP consent agenda is an implicit support of the idea we should continue to widen freeways despite literally having wildfires at our region’s doorstep.
According to the Let’s Get Moving measure, in 2018 an average of 1000 new residents per month moved into the greater Portland region. By expanding freeways, we are incentivizing folks to bring their cars and play a part in contributing to the proliferation of climate change.
In my time left, I’m going to bring it back to this facebook friend’s new baby. If this baby somehow makes it to 60, they will see an unreal food crisis and a planet that is 4 degrees warmer. They will be lucky to have a home, let alone a car to use on the freeway.
If you think the housing crisis is bad now, building this type of infrastructure and thus perpetuating climate change will only make it worse. Even well-meaning folks are so quick to dismiss this issue and fall into this logical fallacy that people who don’t have homes are the big problem in Portland. People who are actively exploiting the city’s resources are commenting on the aesthetically unpleasing sight of homeless camps...yet, if we do not fix the climate crisis with the resources we are privileged enough to use, we will all be subject to this reality that we are so quick to ignore. Homeless camps are not what makes a city “dangerous” or “harmful” - but freeway expansions really do, and they need to stop being on the agenda. We need to invest in things that matter, and things that uplift our most vulnerable community members, because only then will we begin to envision an equitable and sustainable future.
Please reconsider expansion of Highway 217 and commit to stopping freeway expansion. We at Sunrise will be here until you do.