August 2007 Archives

Everytime I see street construction in Portland and they scrape down to the old streetcar tracks I get jealous of "Ye Olde Portland." Thankfully the rail in Portland is stretching out farther and farther!

Sam Adams has a plan. If it is approved by City Council, construction on the eastside streetcar would start next year and be up and running by 2011. The line will run from NW Portland, over the Broadway Bridge to the Lloyd District, and then on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Grand Avenue to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. (Oregonian)

I made a map of the current streetcar in blue and the proposal in red:

Mass transit projects like this get me really excited. The ability to easily move around the city without a car works to "shrink the city" by reducing the time and energy it takes to get around. The other day for example I was driving out though Gresham and I thought, "Man, with the MAX line out here, you really aren't too far from Portland."

The eastside streetcar helps reattach the close-in eastside to the rest of the city, and if I'm still living in Northwest in 2011 then I'll have a straight shot from my neighborhood to the CEID. Future awesome indeed!

As PDX PIPELINE put it, "Less Junk in the Trunk: Is Portland Success Due to Size?" The question comes up because the CEOs for Cities blog wrote about a breakfast between PSU Prof. Ethan Seltzer, Stan Curtis, Joe Cortright, and Wilf Pinfold where the idea of Portland's success was because the smaller size leads to people bridging boundaries (the good side of how everyone knows everyone).

"Again, the issue of sustainability is key, however: operating on a small scale means that an organization (or a city) is likely nimble and entrepreneurial, but it can also mean that it's fragmented and fragile." -Portland: City of the Small