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 [...]

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 [...]

“This newsstand closed due to overwhelming theft.”
Over last weekend, I attended the We Make The Media conference at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of journalism, both in general, and in the Portland metropolitan region. I have already commented on the experience of attending the [...]

Today — assuming I get this post up before midnight — was the We Make The Media event in Portland. For those who were not following this topic, this was a conference at which the future of Portland’s media scene was the center of discussion. I’ve dabbled as a journalist and a freelance writer off [...]

Government-citizen relations have always had a high degree of tension. It’s inevitable. Citizens feel they lack power to control their lives and perceive the government as monolithic, while government workers feel that citizens are loose canons that can control the process of their work. This mutual misjudgment is the cause of many, many disputes, as [...]

As the CNU Transportation Summit winds down on its last day, I’d like to go over some thoughts I’ve been having about how communications were employed throughout the event. My focus will be heavy on how new media was employed, both good and bad, throughout the conference.
First off, lets start with the trendiest of all [...]

Day three at the CNU Transportation Summit in Portland consisted mostly of discussion of how to refine the Congress’ ideas for a sustainable transportation network. This was the largest of these summits to date, with 180 in attendance.
The Congress’ idea of the network model is an attractive one. It stresses the importance of the “last [...]