Looking back at 2009, public transit had a big year throughout the region. With a trip north to Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. late in the year, I was able to experience every rail transit line that opened in 2009. Here’s a review of those systems, in chronological order, with a few highlights.

TriMet’s WES Commuter Rail [...]

One of the most remarkable sights of the Vancouver, B.C. area is not the high-rise downtown or the dramatic mountain scenery surrounding the Burrard Inlet, but the presence of high rise towers in the suburbs. An all-day tour of the city via SkyTrain — the region’s largely elevated heavy rail transit system — gives one [...]

Is Vancouver a picture of the urban future, and/or Portland’s long lost twin? Perhaps neither.
Living in Portland, Oregon, I sometimes get a bit jaded about our region. Thanks to a strong tradition of urban planning, a large transit system, and comparatively robust growth management laws, Portland has become a kind of poster child for urbanization [...]

Vancouver, B.C.: dense, diverse, and highly urban. Photo from Dan Haneckow’s Flickr stream.
Just a quick heads up that this week I will be in Vancouver, British Columbia. My goal is to see a little bit of this city, which as has been noted elsewhere is not entirely dissimilar from the Portland metropolitan region. In addition [...]

Attendance at the IAP2 Cascade Chapter workshop on hostile public meetings was exceptionally high, with over one hundred public participation practitioners in the audience for the afternoon event.
Last Thursday, the Cascade Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) hosted its Public Meetings SOS workshop at the Kennedy School in Portland. The event exceeding [...]

Earlier this week I had to be in Salem for most of the day, so I took a trip via WES and SMART/Cherriots to the capitol. Although I have never made this trip before, I had heard through the grapevine that there were people making this commute every day. Atop this, there have been numerous [...]