Such Great Heights
Portland's New Tram Could Be Just What Portland Needs to Grow Up
BY AMY JENNIGES for the Portland Mercury
"This is huge for Portland," says Bobby Scarbrough, standing on the lower aerial tram platform in the South Waterfront District, and gesturing at the shiny silver bubble of a car gliding down the hill toward us.
Scarbrough is the tram "concierge"--he greets passengers at the station, answers tourists' questions, and has already witnessed first hand the impact it could have on the city. It opens to the public this weekend, but already "people love it," he says, beaming.
Indeed, as Scarbrough describes what the sunrise looks like from mid-air ("there's nothing more beautiful"), two women-- possibly tourists, already making a pilgrimage to the tram--coo over how the curvy car "looks like a little character." They take turns posing for pictures in front of it.
The twin cars will have to endure plenty of flashbulbs this weekend: It only took two hours for every free ride slot--5,000 of them--to book up. The tram, Portland's newest mode of transportation, is certainly popular, and it'll definitely give visitors another stop on their tour of our city.
The tram's project manager, Art Pearce from the Portland Office of Transportation, arrives to escort me on the tram. He rattles off the mechanics and statistics of the system as we wait for the next car to arrive. It's a "bi-cable reversible aerial tram," with one car at each end of a 7,000-foot-long loop of "haul rope." When one car goes up the hill, the other descends, suspended from two cables as it floats over the Lair Hill neighborhood, clears the 197-foot tower next to the Ross Island Bridge, and docks at the lower station.
We step in, and I grab one of the poles in the open car, bracing for a jolt as we leave the station. It doesn't happen, and before I know it, we've popped up out of the station, and are smoothly climbing the hill. It's a 3,300-foot, four-minute ride, Pearce tells me (we're not at full speed). Once we dock at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) on top of Marquam Hill, we'll have climbed over 500 feet. It's a lot of large numbers to digest.
And the tram is actually bigger than all of that. It's not just a pricey--$55 million, at last count--way to get from point A to point B. The tram is symbolic of Portland's future--a potential inspiration, one that could lead to bigger and bolder architecture, citizens more comfortable with urban growth, and a figurative spot on the map for Portland as a city. And it's got the best view, as a bonus. At night, Scarbrough told me, it's magical.
Read the rest at The Portland Mercury.
Have you guys been to the Armory yet? It's amazing. Tim DuRoche gave me a tour and I took some pictures, but next time you are walking by you need to stop in and check out the lobby and the interactive history installations. The history of the Armory is something I've heard about mostly through people that grew up in Portland and involves both roller derby and professional wrestling before it was part of the Weinhardt brewery.
From the lobby you can see that they hollowed the old building out and then it seems they just built a new modern structure inside the fortress. There is this modern glass and concrete structure living like a hermit crab inside the shell of the Portland history.
Deep underground there is the smaller blackbox theater. It feels like you're entering the lair for some portland super villain.
Adding to the feel of some secret hideout is the hallways with neat lights.
And my favorite place is the Green Room located in the turret.
Lots more photos on Flickr. And of course more photos on the PCS site.
Man, that new MAX car looks like it comes from the future! By now you have probably encountered or heard about the changes to the bus mall as the two year construction begins. As you would probably imagine, I'm excited about this!
My first PFA was about TriMet and their future plans. That was over a year ago and the 2009 date seemed so far away. Here we are today and they are starting the construction! And it's a lot more than just adding a MAX to the street, the improvements include "refurbished streets and sidewalks, new transit shelters, better lighting and eye-catching public art."
Much like the streetcar helped the Pearl blossom the new MAX line, AKA The Green Line, will spur development downtown along what is now a pretty dingy couple of streets. The new shelters will have an open design and glass roofs and all the MAX stops will have TriMet Ticket machines.
This will give us a total of four MAX lines, with the existing yellow line and the new green line following the streets of the bus mall and the red and blue lines remaining on the existing MAX tracks downtown. When including the streetcar in the mix you get what I like the call the "Ugly H" of downtown rails. (see this map)
The project is scheduled to be completed in September, 2009, along with the completed "commuter rail" project which take the Green Line out to the Gateway Transit Center on NE 99th and then run south along I-205 (see this map).
Oregon's minimum wage increased by 30 cents to $7.80 per hour, meaning that a full time yearly wage would be $16,224. We're in second place, but that's not very much money. It's better than the unchanging federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, which is an annual income of $10,712 and only about $140 a month from being below the poverty line.
The federal minimum wage hasn't changed since 1997, which should shame every single congressman of the last ten years. Oregon's minimum wage is updated annually based on inflation.
