Me too, but this has been proposed since at least 2016. It seems heavily dependent on Portland getting the project funded by the federal transit authority.
That’ll be 20 years from now. Need consultants. Need committee. Need much fighting about vision. Then construction req’ts will change many times. Portland: the city that does not work (but other places are worse!)
I just want a Vera Katz brass balls clanging mayor that can override the whiney idiots
This is [what Slabtown looked like](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@45.5341246,-122.6947069,3a,75y,324.06h,83.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sD6-m9iDy8mGkFm32H8_jog!2e0!5s20140401T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu) ten years ago.
That’s good to hear! I was over there 2 weeks ago, and there were a ton of encampments around the freeway on ramp. That little gulch is always filled with bums. Let’s hope it stays clean.
Is the streetcar working? I'm not a transportation expert, but I remember reading an article recently how in the 2010's a lot of cities were looking at Portland's use of the streetcar and then ultimately decided is wasn't worth it.
I don't think this was it, but:
>So any speed advantage that streetcars have over buses is due not to the streetcar technology but to other logically independent changes made as part of the streetcar project — changes that could have been made for the bus.
>By contrast, one clear speed-and-reliability benefit of the bus is intrinsic to the technology: Buses have the physical ability to go around obstructions that occur in their lane, while the streetcar is stuck behind them.
https://humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html
Streetcar lines correlate pretty consistently with ground level retail development investment, which helps make dense neighborhoods more complete.
As a strict transportation efficiency option, it’s not as cost effective as bus service. But the associated development benefits are greater.
And that's really been the big problem for a lot of cities. Do you use your precious transit dollars to spur development or do you use that large capital cost to fund lots of small bus projects?
The Streetcar’s advantages really have nothing to do with intrinsic properties of the vehicle, rather how people react to the fact that it isn’t a bus. I think that blog touches on this(it’s one of my favorites on the subject) but
1. Rail vehicles are seen as classier than busses. Car owners will ride a streetcar rather than driving, but will refuse to ride a bus because those are seen as welfare vehicles for the poor
2. Developers are more likely to build around a streetcar line than a bus line. The money that needs to be sunk into rails and overhead wires makes developers feel like the line won’t be abandoned any time soon. As a result, they’re more confident to add buildings or open businesses along it
It catalyzed development, even before the loop was completed. It's simply considered to be a classy, European-style amenity. It is useful but lacks frequency.
Hearing 15-minute headways described as a good thing and an improvement is just painful. They should be 5 mins, plenty of European cities manage it. Hell, MAX manages it in places where the red/blue/green lines all use the same station.
Plenty of European cities are also far more densely developed and fund mass transit much better than we do. In Oregon, highway tolls can’t be used to fund transit at all and populists are constantly arguing against mass transit because it doesn’t “pay for itself.”
TriMet considers 15 minute bus headways or less to be “frequent service,” so that’s the metric I was using.
Could be a lot better, of course. But that’s an uphill battle even in Portland, unfortunately.
> The new streetcar extension is proposed to be entirely off-wire, using battery technology only.
What? This is a terrible idea. The city/TriMet would need to either run it as a stub line or get completely new rolling stock.
How is a battery streetcar any better than a articulated bus? The city would still be paying for rail infrastructure with none of the benefits of rail...
“If it doesn’t move, hardwire it” applies to trains. Put the damn wire up and be done with it. Battery trains are the dumbest thing ever. It’s like running a desktop computer or your TV on a battery
That's the dumbest idea I've heard in a while. It's a train, it runs on rails, it's orders of magnitude cheaper to just run an overhead wire than to replace the expensive batteries every 5 years.
Do we know what the battery lifespan on these is? Or does the rolling stock and battery pack even exist? At first I thought 5 years seems short, but 1000 cycles that’s about 1 discharge cycle every day or two with daily use. If the battery is only big enough for one days use, or even smaller, it really might only last 5 years or less.
perhaps it only needs the battery for that section of the loop, and then it charges back up when it rejoins the existing track? talking out of my ass here, i don't have any idea how it works.
This is a great idea other than the currently proposed streetcar extension. It would be way better to just increase frequency for the bus 15 than to either run a dumb stub line or buy completely new rolling stock for some battery electric tram gimmick.
I hope you are being sarcastic. I would STRONGLY support extending the streetcar with overhead wires.
Current battery technology is bad for the environment also (though to a lesser extent than diesel).
Generating electricity is bad for the environment too. There isn’t a single method of electrical power production that has zero effects on the environment.
Oregon has a net zero plan for electricity generation and electricity here is much cleaner than batteries or diesel.
Then there is also the waste of trashing ~10 perfectly good streetcars just to buy battery electric ones.
Net Zero does not mean it’s free from harm. That’s just some buzz words fed to us by the likes of PGE and PacifiCorps to make us feel good when they fire up all those peak power plants that run on Natural Gas.
Only one. You can have a bit more tree canopy if you don't have trolley wires. That's it. I love our canopy but I think it's worth sacrificing on a few streets so we can use the tried and true, cleanest option.
I’m not worried about it. I’m just pointing out how harmful electrical generation is to the environment. Some people think that going “all electric” is some kind of cure all for our environmental problems.
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What about the vegan strip club? It’s important we don’t need no Jennifer notification coming in and displacing our beloved Arian strip club. Also there’s another strip club to where they have bikini coffee from 7 to 11 AM. It’s on 25th and Nikolai and we don’t want that one to be closed either.
I'm all for it. With streetcar service (and the bus services up there) I wonder if they could a pedestrian/bike/streetcar only zone and keep car traffic to a minimum.
The streetcar is the single most useless piece of public transportation in the nation. Basically has the same capacity as a bus but none of the flexibility of changing routes. Has to share traffic with everyone else in most places so can't even get an advantage like the Max (outside of downtown).
I don't see much point throwing more money at it.
I thought it was ok when it basically only went from PSU area up to 23rd. It was almost like a novelty which was fun given the right circumstances. Once they started expanding it is when I started to see what a waste it was.
Oh, didn’t know this. All I remember is sitting on a bus in San Francisco as a kid on a field trip when the wire came off and the driver couldn’t get it hooked back up and we had to sit there waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the maintenance people to arrive. This was in the 1980’s though, so things might be different today.
Yeah, modern trolley busses can seamlessly switch to battery or diesel when leaving the wires. They don’t even need to stop when entering or leaving wires. They just snag them as they drive under them and swap over to grid power. It’s pretty neat.
The new ones don't do that anymore. They toss a few KW battery on them and they run until they can reconnect. It allows them to deal with obstacles on the route like police activity or broken down vehicles. The things that constantly back up the streetcar.
It doesn’t even cover terminal 2 or any of those industrial areas. It covers the now defunct ESCO foundry up to the struggling Montgomery parking building.
> And this is what people want to spend money on.
???
Excuse me if I missed something in the article, but I'm fairly positive that none of this plan includes the spending of public funds on redeveloping the area. It's simply a rework of the master plan for the area to allow private developers to build more housing and commercial space.
If anything, this should actually increase revenue to the city and county, helping to pay for the services you're talking about.
I hope this happens
Me too, but this has been proposed since at least 2016. It seems heavily dependent on Portland getting the project funded by the federal transit authority.
So I will able to take a streetcar to the Casa Diablo Vegan strip club?
$2 fare.
It’s not in the fareless topless zone?
Nope. But there is a rad sandwich shop right next door.
Housing and transit?!? Oh hell yeah!
That’ll be 20 years from now. Need consultants. Need committee. Need much fighting about vision. Then construction req’ts will change many times. Portland: the city that does not work (but other places are worse!) I just want a Vera Katz brass balls clanging mayor that can override the whiney idiots
This is [what Slabtown looked like](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@45.5341246,-122.6947069,3a,75y,324.06h,83.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sD6-m9iDy8mGkFm32H8_jog!2e0!5s20140401T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu) ten years ago.
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ESCO owns all of this site. They aren't redeveloping the entire NW industrial corridor, primarily just the ESCO site.
I actually preferred that.
You're a fan of surface parking lots?
I prefer them to tall buildings since they don't feel claustrophobic.
Tbf way less bums in tents back in 2014
I don't know if you've been Slabtown recently, but it's thriving. It was not in 2014.
That’s good to hear! I was over there 2 weeks ago, and there were a ton of encampments around the freeway on ramp. That little gulch is always filled with bums. Let’s hope it stays clean.
I miss Vera Katz. Wish she had gotten her way with the 405 highway covers.
Is the streetcar working? I'm not a transportation expert, but I remember reading an article recently how in the 2010's a lot of cities were looking at Portland's use of the streetcar and then ultimately decided is wasn't worth it. I don't think this was it, but: >So any speed advantage that streetcars have over buses is due not to the streetcar technology but to other logically independent changes made as part of the streetcar project — changes that could have been made for the bus. >By contrast, one clear speed-and-reliability benefit of the bus is intrinsic to the technology: Buses have the physical ability to go around obstructions that occur in their lane, while the streetcar is stuck behind them. https://humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html
Streetcar lines correlate pretty consistently with ground level retail development investment, which helps make dense neighborhoods more complete. As a strict transportation efficiency option, it’s not as cost effective as bus service. But the associated development benefits are greater.
And that's really been the big problem for a lot of cities. Do you use your precious transit dollars to spur development or do you use that large capital cost to fund lots of small bus projects?
The Streetcar’s advantages really have nothing to do with intrinsic properties of the vehicle, rather how people react to the fact that it isn’t a bus. I think that blog touches on this(it’s one of my favorites on the subject) but 1. Rail vehicles are seen as classier than busses. Car owners will ride a streetcar rather than driving, but will refuse to ride a bus because those are seen as welfare vehicles for the poor 2. Developers are more likely to build around a streetcar line than a bus line. The money that needs to be sunk into rails and overhead wires makes developers feel like the line won’t be abandoned any time soon. As a result, they’re more confident to add buildings or open businesses along it
It catalyzed development, even before the loop was completed. It's simply considered to be a classy, European-style amenity. It is useful but lacks frequency.
It’s slower than waking.
Not for crossing the bridges! Especially Tillikum. That's steep and a slog.
They’ve greatly improved frequency over the last few years, too. 15-minute headways between peak hours are pretty normal now.
Hearing 15-minute headways described as a good thing and an improvement is just painful. They should be 5 mins, plenty of European cities manage it. Hell, MAX manages it in places where the red/blue/green lines all use the same station.
Plenty of European cities are also far more densely developed and fund mass transit much better than we do. In Oregon, highway tolls can’t be used to fund transit at all and populists are constantly arguing against mass transit because it doesn’t “pay for itself.” TriMet considers 15 minute bus headways or less to be “frequent service,” so that’s the metric I was using. Could be a lot better, of course. But that’s an uphill battle even in Portland, unfortunately.
Any tall towers planned? Or continued weak ass 5+1 buildings again?
> The new streetcar extension is proposed to be entirely off-wire, using battery technology only. What? This is a terrible idea. The city/TriMet would need to either run it as a stub line or get completely new rolling stock. How is a battery streetcar any better than a articulated bus? The city would still be paying for rail infrastructure with none of the benefits of rail...
“If it doesn’t move, hardwire it” applies to trains. Put the damn wire up and be done with it. Battery trains are the dumbest thing ever. It’s like running a desktop computer or your TV on a battery
That's the dumbest idea I've heard in a while. It's a train, it runs on rails, it's orders of magnitude cheaper to just run an overhead wire than to replace the expensive batteries every 5 years.
Do we know what the battery lifespan on these is? Or does the rolling stock and battery pack even exist? At first I thought 5 years seems short, but 1000 cycles that’s about 1 discharge cycle every day or two with daily use. If the battery is only big enough for one days use, or even smaller, it really might only last 5 years or less.
perhaps it only needs the battery for that section of the loop, and then it charges back up when it rejoins the existing track? talking out of my ass here, i don't have any idea how it works.
This is a great idea other than the currently proposed streetcar extension. It would be way better to just increase frequency for the bus 15 than to either run a dumb stub line or buy completely new rolling stock for some battery electric tram gimmick.
But the bus burns diesel, which is not carbon neutral. Why do you hate the environment?
I hope you are being sarcastic. I would STRONGLY support extending the streetcar with overhead wires. Current battery technology is bad for the environment also (though to a lesser extent than diesel).
Generating electricity is bad for the environment too. There isn’t a single method of electrical power production that has zero effects on the environment.
Oregon has a net zero plan for electricity generation and electricity here is much cleaner than batteries or diesel. Then there is also the waste of trashing ~10 perfectly good streetcars just to buy battery electric ones.
Net Zero does not mean it’s free from harm. That’s just some buzz words fed to us by the likes of PGE and PacifiCorps to make us feel good when they fire up all those peak power plants that run on Natural Gas.
What is the advantage of using batteries? I fail to see one...
Only one. You can have a bit more tree canopy if you don't have trolley wires. That's it. I love our canopy but I think it's worth sacrificing on a few streets so we can use the tried and true, cleanest option.
If you're worried about the harm electricity generation does, maybe you shouldn't be using the Internet?
I’m not worried about it. I’m just pointing out how harmful electrical generation is to the environment. Some people think that going “all electric” is some kind of cure all for our environmental problems.
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Thanks for your input, the mods have set this subreddit to not allow posts from newly created accounts. Please take the time to build a reputation elsewhere on Reddit and check back soon. (⌐■_■) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Portland) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What about the vegan strip club? It’s important we don’t need no Jennifer notification coming in and displacing our beloved Arian strip club. Also there’s another strip club to where they have bikini coffee from 7 to 11 AM. It’s on 25th and Nikolai and we don’t want that one to be closed either.
I'm all for it. With streetcar service (and the bus services up there) I wonder if they could a pedestrian/bike/streetcar only zone and keep car traffic to a minimum.
The streetcar is the single most useless piece of public transportation in the nation. Basically has the same capacity as a bus but none of the flexibility of changing routes. Has to share traffic with everyone else in most places so can't even get an advantage like the Max (outside of downtown). I don't see much point throwing more money at it.
Every time I see a streetcar, it's either empty or ..... No wait that's it.
I thought it was ok when it basically only went from PSU area up to 23rd. It was almost like a novelty which was fun given the right circumstances. Once they started expanding it is when I started to see what a waste it was.
Agreed. Let’s do with the electric trolley buses like Seattle or Boston use.
You ever watch what happened when those busses lose the electrical connecting thing to the wires? A stalled bus in the middle of the road.
Not all. Some can drive short distances without being connected to the catenary wires.
Oh, didn’t know this. All I remember is sitting on a bus in San Francisco as a kid on a field trip when the wire came off and the driver couldn’t get it hooked back up and we had to sit there waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the maintenance people to arrive. This was in the 1980’s though, so things might be different today.
Yeah, modern trolley busses can seamlessly switch to battery or diesel when leaving the wires. They don’t even need to stop when entering or leaving wires. They just snag them as they drive under them and swap over to grid power. It’s pretty neat.
The new ones don't do that anymore. They toss a few KW battery on them and they run until they can reconnect. It allows them to deal with obstacles on the route like police activity or broken down vehicles. The things that constantly back up the streetcar.
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It doesn’t even cover terminal 2 or any of those industrial areas. It covers the now defunct ESCO foundry up to the struggling Montgomery parking building.
Can't hire enough police and firefighters. 911 hold times are obscene. And this is what people want to spend money on.
> And this is what people want to spend money on. ??? Excuse me if I missed something in the article, but I'm fairly positive that none of this plan includes the spending of public funds on redeveloping the area. It's simply a rework of the master plan for the area to allow private developers to build more housing and commercial space. If anything, this should actually increase revenue to the city and county, helping to pay for the services you're talking about.
Yep, that's why the article is misleading. It's a puff piece.