Myles Smith: Highways vs Smiling Hill Farm
Population growth is going to come, and we need to be proactive to make a place in which we want to live
Every month PelotonLabs founder Liz Trice interviews a community member for The West End News. This month, Liz caught up with Myles Smith, the volunteer facilitator for Mainers for Smarter Transportation, a group opposing the proposed Gorham Connector Highway.
What is Mainers for Smarter Transportation?
M4ST is a group of people and organizations committed to safer streets and transportation options for everyone. In this case, building new highways is not smart. We formed a few weeks ago as an offshoot of an advocacy group working for a statewide complete streets policy. When the highway expansion appeared in the news, it contradicted our goals so starkly that a number of us organized to work on it.
How did you get into this?
My wife and I both grew up in rural parts of the Portland suburbs and resolved to raise our kids where they could walk and bike to friends, school, playgrounds, and activities. So, we live in Oakdale, near USM. It’s not perfect – Brighton and Forest Avenues hem us in. They’re built to get cars from suburbs and beyond to downtown Portland as quickly as possible and don’t prioritize the people who live here. I can’t let my nine-year-old daughter cross those avenues, and we have to avoid them in order to bike to school. This made me want to work on improving the state of local streets. I quickly realized that state policy dictates the safety of local streets, and I then fell in with the advocacy coalition.
How do coalitions get built to make real change?
It’s important to have a set of values that you stand for, and that people can sign on to. You also have to be flexible enough to know there’s no one right answer, no perfect solution, and you’re not going to get everything you want. I’m not an expert in any one topic. My job is to facilitate a solution out of the group’s wisdom.
Why do you oppose the Gorham connector?
I oppose it because it is an expensive, ineffectual, permanent scar on our environment and urban fabric. It makes sense that traffic would be a challenge in Gorham because Greater Portland is growing without a plan. For decades now, many people have been moving out of Portland and the urban core to rural areas because Portland’s not affordable. Those folks have to drive all the time because it’s the only viable option. This highway expansion would reinforce this cycle and ultimately just invite more traffic.
What are possible solutions to the traffic in Gorham that wouldn’t require degrading the Red Brook trout and Smiling Hill Farm?
At the public meeting in Gorham, dozens of people who live on the supposedly congested local roads said that conditions have improved since the pandemic. Many offered low-cost, low-impact solutions including better uses of roundabouts, smart traffic lights, connecting the street grid, trails, and expanding the bus service to replace some people having to drive. So many good ideas! I get excited thinking that we could work with these communities to really implement all these good ideas and see how far we can get. This highway is a fifty-year mistake. I suspect that if we build it, we’ll regret it almost as soon as it’s finished.
How do you get people from different perspectives to work together?
We have to listen first. We can’t come in telling people what our solution is. Long term, we need to acknowledge that traffic is a symptom of a larger problem. Then we can start to work on its causes. Why is traffic only getting worse? Why can I only drive to get anywhere? And why is housing so expensive? Portlanders don’t want more cars speeding through our neighborhoods. But we also need to make it easier to build housing so fewer people would need to commute. We have a systemic problem that has grown up over the decades and will continue to get worse if we don’t break the cycle.
The growth is going to come, and we need to be proactive. If we don’t, I don’t think we’ll be happy with the results: sprawl, wide roads, and strip malls and houses built over farms for as far as the eye can see. I don’t want that – we can do better.
How can people who care about these issues get involved?
Get in touch with one of these great organizations working on this issue:
Mainers for Smarter Transportation
Protect Smiling Hill Farm Facebook Group
Urbanist Coalition of Portland
