I recently took a “city planner’s holiday” to Portland, Ore. — a trip resulting from growing tired of hearing constant references to projects and precedents without having seen them first-hand.
Portland is a left coast city with a metropolitan population of a little more than two million. It’s located right below the border with Washington state, which is an unfortunate obstacle to Oregon’s efforts to maintain its urban growth boundaries.
Anti-sprawl efforts are just one of the countless reasons why Portland is famous in planning circles. Another is an obvious commitment to transit that starts with stepping off an airplane and finding an LRT station built right into the terminal.
Begun eight years after Edmonton’s system, Portland’s LRT network currently boasts four lines and 85 kilometres of track in addition to a central city streetcar.
The low-floor system is predominately street-running, operating in transit lanes in the downtown and medians further out. It would be quite similar to the urban LRT envisioned for the planned west-to-southeast line in Edmonton if it weren’t for one major quirk of history: Small city blocks.
Portland’s famously pedestrian-scaled downtown blocks are 80-metre-a-side squares (compare to downtown Edmonton’s 120 by 230). The frequent, but narrow, one-way street pattern that results is a mixed bag.
Automobile traffic is dramatically calmed since speeding only results in a quick red light, meaning bicycling is easy even in mixed traffic. Transit also benefits somewhat, with frequent streets making it easy to justify bus and LRT lanes on the same road.
I could complain about how one-way streets make transfers difficult, how downtown stops are spaced too frequently at every 250 metres (half the distance between Corona and Bay), or how geometric quirks mean service is limited to a two-car train every 15 minutes.
I could, sitting in my computer chair, marshal all this evidence and come to the conclusion that council’s decision to pursue urban LRT is a mistake.
To do so, however, I would have to ignore that not only can we learn from these easily avoidable mistakes, but that transit has contributed to the dramatic transformation of Portland’s core.
Linked by a new streetcar, the Pearl district — with its townhomes and mid-rise condos fronting an urban wetland — and the South Waterfront’s burgeoning Vancouverism show Portland’s willingness to lead.
And while Edmonton is only now extending its LRT and finding room in its centre for innovative development, so much the better for learning from cities like Portland.
