Over the last year or so — and especially lately — there’s been a lot of rhetoric tossed around over TriMet. Between a bad editorial, a near-miss on a labor action, and lots of Internet drama, I think it’s time for some cooler heads to prevail.

1.) The Oregonian’s editorial against measure 26-119. As of today, I don’t know how I’ll vote on measure 26-119, which would fund $125 million worth of improvements for TriMet’s transit system. Chief among the items that would be bought with the proceeds of this bond measure are numerous busses to replace aging vehicles and improvements for pedestrians, elderly, and handicapped citizens.

I can however tell you that the Oregonian’s editorial against the measure in yesterday’s paper is a load of bunk.

First, the paper states that the bond measure will cost taxpayers “$30 to $43 more in taxes each year.” That’s dead wrong. 26-119 replaces an existing TriMet bond that is expiring. It’s cost will be the same as the old bond. In short, this is a renewal, and its passage will result in the same tax bill as homeowners get now. The editorial board for the paper had to know this was a renewal. I cannot believe they would be so incompetent as to not check the facts on this. So that means they ignored the truth and chose to intentionally portray this as a tax hike rather than a renewal.

Second was this gem:

Approving a bond measure is like buying something with a credit card. It may look appealing, but it multiplies the cost of a purchase by adding interest. That doesn’t seem like a smart way to go.

So if this is correct, the Oregonian just dismissed all funding of public projects via bonds as irresponsible credit-card-like spending. This is an insane notion. Bonding is one of the oldest, most respected, most stable ways of funding the purchase of new equipment or the construction of new projects. This is an intellectually dishonest position, unless of course the paper will now oppose all public bonds from this point forward.

Third, the paper suggests that TriMet should have been setting aside money for these things all along, and that because they haven’t set aside enough in the past, they shouldn’t get any now. This Monday-morning-quarterbacking must make the Oregonian’s editorial board feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it contributes absolutely nothing to solving our problems. The reality is that we start from today, with what we can affect today, and navel gazing with coulda-shoulda-wouldas about the past will not result in one improved stop, one replaced aging bus, or one additional LIFT service for our elderly and disabled citizens.

In short, the Oregonian’s editorial is both dishonest and dead wrong.

2.) Bus vs. rail budget rhetoric. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of noise about how TriMet’s service cuts would not have been made if it hadn’t been building a rail system over the last three decades. A lot of noise is put out there — including by angry bus drivers — that MAX is only built at the expense of the bus network. There’s even transit equity activists out there now, trying to lobby for the agency to increase bus funding at the expense of light rail.

None of this is true and it’s time to knock it off.

Way, way, way back in 1969, an editorial in the now-defunct Oregon Journal noted that there could be no “taxation without transportation.” In this, the founding year of TriMet, there was concern that if the entire tri-county region was to pay to support the new agency, then the entire area needed service. In short, they argued in favor of transit equity, just as organizations like OPAL are doing today.

The irony: the Journal was warning about concentrating only on urban routes. “Already the idea is getting around that Tri-Met is to be operated primarily for the benefit of central Portland,” the editorial notes:

…the heaviest travel both on downtown streets and outlying roads comes during the morning and evening rush hours. Those drivers… are workers who earn their paychecks in Portland and take a large part of them out to the suburbs to spend. Both city and suburb will benefit by a smooth flow of traffic; neither can get along without the other.

What the Journal had recognized even in 1969 was that Tri-Met served two very distinct geographic markets: an urban, less affluent market, and a suburban and more affluent market. Despite the growth of high dollar urban living in Portland, this dynamic is still prevalent. To serve this mix, Tri-Met needed, in the Journal’s words, “truly metropolitan thinking.”

MAX light rail is part of that metropolitan thinking — in fact “MAX” stands for Metropolitan Area eXpress. Light rail is a key cornerstone to uniting diverse transit rider populations in one, cohesive system. Maybe in this era of tight budget constraints we’ve all forgotten that a little.

Just as importantly, light rail is a key cornerstone of our land-use system, our way of dealing with growth, and our very cultural fabric, as I’ve written about before. We as a region are not about to sacrifice our values or our long term goals because of short-term budget stresses. Our wallets are thinner, but what we believe in and stand for has not changed.

So let’s face it: we’re building the Orange Line to Milwaukie. And after that? Probably Southwest Portland, Tigard, and Sherwood, and maybe (if it’s ever built) a short stretch over the new Columbia River Crossing into Clark County. As a series of projects stretching over multiple decades, any delay we face creates a ripple forward that affects every project’s timeline.

So do you have to wait another 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes for your bus in order to ensure that the community won’t have to wait another year, five years, or a decade for high quality transit to be built? Yes. And if the people at OPAL really support good transit, then they need to drop their rallying cry of “bus riders unite” and replace it with “transit riders unite.”

Lastly, remember that all those pro-bus libertarians aren’t pro-transit at all. They just know that the only way to sell their opposition to (what they see as) the socialism of light rail is to support the (slightly less odious to them) bus system in opposition to it. This unholy alliance of pro-enviro justice groups and anti-light-rail libertarians has got to stop. Don’t kid yourself. If the latter ever got their way and axed MAX, the busses would be next on the chopping block.

3.) Bus driver / anti bus driver rage. These last few years have been tough for everybody, and nerves are fraying at the edge. A number of incidents have occurred over this time period wherein bus drivers have been involved in accidents, sometimes fatal. With press coverage of these incidents, the riding public has become more alert — perhaps downright paranoid — about their drivers following the transit agency’s rules. Some citizens have appointed themselves honorary TriMet supervisors, recording bus driver behavior on cameras and lodging complaints with TriMet about employees who talk about their work on the web. Two bus drivers who blog about their work ended up in hot water, with at least one of them yanking their TriMet related blog. The agency seems to be disciplining and firing drivers at higher rates than usual, and facing pressure from tight budgets has begun to question paying some of the cushiest medical benefits for transit workers in the nation.

It should come as no surprise that tensions are running a little… high.

The reality is that TriMet drivers have some of the hardest, most thankless jobs in the region. Think about it. When you drive the area’s major arterials, do you feel happy? For many of us, just 15, 20, or 30 minutes on the freeways and highways of the region at the beginning and end of day are enough to make us start yelling at other drivers and wanting to move to the wilds of Montana, never to see another soul again. Now imagine driving in that all day. Fun, huh?

Most bus riders probably know how stressful the job is because most bus riders probably have seen the same things I’ve seen: crazy drivers, accidents waiting to happen, the odd stray bicyclist not paying attention, the pedestrian stepping into a crosswalk against their light. But there are a few bus riders out there who have appointed themselves Captain Safety, their cell phone cameras at the ready.

You’re not helping things.

And to the drivers, forget that annoying, self-righteous moron who is stalking you on the bus hoping to send in their video to TriMet HQ and the local FOX affiliate. He or she is not representative of the rest of us, your riders, who you take care of every day.

As for the drivers themselves, I’m thankful that you didn’t stage a sick-out this morning. A soft strike such as a sickout will only serve to make the commutes of TriMet riders longer, slower, and more painful, and that anger won’t get turned against an agency that is trying to reduce what most perceive as over-inflated benefits packages for drivers. No, that anger will turn towards the drivers who called in sick, and in turn to all drivers. So it was a good strategic move not to call in sick.

But moving forward, we’re all having to deal with reductions to survive these times. Everyone. So by all means, fight for keeping the most benefits you can — that’s in your interest — but accept that they are on the table. Negotiate. Work towards a deal. What we all want — what we all want — is to have a functioning transit system that benefits the most people across the entire region. We all do have common ground to start from.

As the CRC is a multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction, multi-modal, bi-state project, it should come as no surprise that gaining a consensus on the form and funding of the bridge has been a significant challenge. The project has suffered a series of setbacks, culminating in a series of stakeholder revolts. The situation grew so bad that, earlier in the year, the governors of Oregon and Washington convened an Independent Review Panel (IRP) to conduct a review of the project and make recommendations for moving forward. 

Today, that report was released. In it are a number of very interesting criticisms and conclusions, but for now I’d like to focus on one particular aspect that I find absolutely fascinating: the CRC’s public involvement process. The IRP noted “perception that the CRC is not including and/or listening to public and stakeholder opinion and is not performing [required] public outreach….” The IRP further noted that many stakeholders lacked a sense of inclusivity and that as a result “There appears to be a lack of trust and credibility in what the CRC is doing and how it is proceeding.” (The above statements are from page 101 of the report.)

It is unusual for a public project to engender this broadly held lack of trust. The IRP is not discussing just a few local NIMBYs or a handful of special interests upset at not getting their way. What the IRP is describing here is an outright revolt by people who were involved with shaping the project, including people who had served on one of the numerous CRC working groups, bodies of stakeholders specifically designed to provide input. How did this happen?

The cause, as the IRP sees it, sounds hauntingly familiar. They describe a scenario wherein the working groups were not adeqautely communicated with to learn the outcomes of their input. From page 102:

“…lack of engagement in feedback with each of the groups and major stakeholders, explaining what decisions were made based on their advice, where the project was going, what their role would be in the future; and if necessary when and why the advisory group’s efforts were considered complete, has significantly contributed to the lack of trust and a perception that any information presented is more as a “sales pitch” versus genuine discussion and consideration of the concerns and issues being raised by the public.“

   
The supreme irony of the situation is that, in most cases, the IRP found that the recommendations of these working groups were being listened to and were affecting the outcomes of the project. The result was that the stakeholders were unable to perceive their role in the process as being both valued and necessary. To again quote from the report:  

“…there is a sense of loss of ownership in the project and a fear that whatever input was provided is no longer being considered or even rejected without comment or reason.  This further leads to a feeling, even if not correct, that the CRC was going through the motions and not truly engaged in a meaningful public input. This sense of loss of ownership and fear of rejection is then what leads to the lack of trust and credibility.“

  
Public participation professionals are usually most concerned with ensuring that the input of stakeholders gets communicated adequately and meaningfully up the decision-making chain. What is often forgotten–as with the CRC–is that the communication has to go back down the chain too, or credibility can be needlessly lost. Here, with the CRC, that error may result in the endangering of a very substantial project. The IRP, again, says it best (page 103):  

“If the feelings of lack of trust and credibility continue… the lack of agreement among the sponsors and buy-in from the community could seriously delay the CRC; or in a worst case scenario result in cancellation all together.“

For those who have a passion for public participation, the CRC is worth serious attention, especially from the standpoint of “lessons learned.” Hopefully, moving forward, it will also serve as an example of how to save a project from such shaky ground. Regardless of the outcome, the CRC’s public involvement process should prove interesting and instructive to watch over the coming years.

Over the last two years, as the economy shrank, local transit services here in the Portland region have been taking serious criticism. A number of narratives have emerged. One is that TriMet’s investments in rail expansion have come at the expense of the bus system. Another popular criticism is that TriMet places too much emphasis on changing land use patterns instead of transportation. Most recently, Dave Lister issued a kitchen-sink screed to these effects. The idea of the bus-hating, obsessively social-engineering TriMet has become the predominant narrative.

So far, most of these complaints have remained unanswered. Portland’s leadership on transit, transportation, and land use? MIA.

When this metro area embarked on light rail over twenty years ago, it was a conscious decision. Buses, yeomen transit though they be, were limited in their ability to handle high capacity loads and deliver the so-called “choice rider.” Rail, on the other hand, was more efficient and attracted new riders. But beyond that, yes, there indeed was a land-use component to a transit system with a rail core. Rail offered an opportunity to change how we lived in this region, and dovetailed with our vision of a denser urban area and a firm urban growth boundary protecting natural resources. Today, however, we as a region are letting that vision slip.

Have there been mis-steps along the way? Without doubt. Do we need to re-examine our commitment to other modes (like buses)? Yes. If TriMet is to be a credible voice in the region, it will need to meaningfully commit to greater geographic, economic, and social equity. By-and-large, that means the agency will need to pay more attention to capital investments in the bus system than it has for the last decade.

But in addressing such issues, we cannot let our vision of an expansive, efficient, accessible and highly utilized rail-cored transit system go by the wayside. Rail is one of the most critical components to our way of managing growth, and our vision of where this region is headed in the next half-century. We cannot abandon that vision to the rhetorical manslaughter of those who would see transit only benefit their own narrow needs, or worse yet, to those who see it as only a system of last resort for the elderly, disabled, young, and unemployed. We cannot lose ground to those who would use the rhetoric of bus disinvestment as a stalking horse to hide their opposition to our unique land-use system.

It is time for those who support the long-term vision of a denser, more livable metropolitan area to step up and provide some leadership on this issue. Say something. Do something! This cause is worth defending, and that that defense is apparently left up to relatively junior people such as me is shameful.

Transportation politics — especially bike and transit politics — can be fascinating stuff, especially to a transportation geek such as myself, but for most people it’s just all so much hot air. At the end of a day, to an average commuter, biker, walker, etcetera, does it really matter that so-and-so said such-and-such to so-and-so at such-and-such meeting? Does it matter to the average citizen what Fred Hansen (or now Neil McFarlane), David Bragdon, or Sam Adams has said? Doesn’t this all miss the point that, for most, transportation is about getting around, not about being a blood-sport to watch while eating popcorn?

Thinking about mostly non-auto transportation this way — as a consumer issue not a political one — is something that Michael Andersen thinks is an important but rarely undertaken endeavor. So after almost a year of toying with the idea, Andersen quit his job as a journalist at The Columbian this spring to concentrate on launching a new “10-minute newsmagazine” dedicated to the “bus, bikes, and low-car life.” Called Portland Afoot , the magazine put out its first issue this month.

Quitting a solid day job to stake it all on an untried niche publication? Some might question Andersen’s sanity, and when prompted he freely admits that they may be right. “I’m definitely crazy. But there aren’t enough crazy people in this business any more to come up with the ideas that’ll keep it alive. And I’ll be working like a dog all year to prove this crazy idea can work.”

Crazy perhaps, but Andersen has a method to his madness. In Andersen’s view, there is an increasing market in cities such as Portland for niche publications. “Regular newspapers are optimized for the 1950s distribution, with a very little [amount] of everything,” he explains. At the time, people weren’t paying for the news, they were paying for the aggregation of it in one place. The Internet has largely supplanted that role, meaning that the media have to concentrate more on producing valuable content people are actually willing to pay directly for.

Thus was born Portland Afoot, and Andersen isn’t kidding when he says it’s a “10-minute newsmagazine.” The publication feels like a small, high-quality newsletter, but unlike most of that breed it is not a haphazard collection of causes and events struggling for your attention. Instead, it’s a very graphically pleasing and efficient pub with more practical approaches to stories. A news brief about whether or not MAX will get to Clark County via the planned Columbia River Crossing, for example, includes a (thankfully shortened!) link at the end to additional information on the Portland Afoot web site about the related upcoming Metro president race. The primary feature for the inaugural issue is a ranking of TriMet’s bus lines for on-time performance, number of chair lifts, number of stops (a characteristic Andersen labels as “most hectic”), and so forth. In short, the magazine is a gem for those dependent on the non-auto transportation system, or those who are just plain transportation geeks. Subscriptions to the magazine are $14 for a year — thats about a buck per issue — and are well worth it.

Some may ask why Andersen is producing a paper publication in the age of the iPad. Andersen lists a number of reasons, including the ease of reading a paper publication, making the publication available to an audience that is both “rich and poor, young and old,” and the fact that paper publications are still a hallmark of credibility. There’s also a less tangible, more emotional appeal to a paper publication: pleasure. Says Andersen, “Getting a magazine in the mail makes me think somebody likes me. Getting an email newsletter makes me think I have something to do.”

Andersen has many ambitious plans, including filling out the Portland Afoot web site (which is a wiki) with more detailed, slightly “more wonky” content. The next issue is currently in the works, and will include an interview with famous bus driver and blogger Dan Christensen and an article on the best and worst places to sit on a MAX train. Andersen is working on stories that he hopes to break as well, noting that originating stories that matter is important to the publication.

To learn more about Portland Afoot, visit their web site, or subscribe here.

Over the last year or so, there’s been a lot of attention given to the future of High Speed Rail in the United States. Would it work? Would we really get HSR, or would it be something short of it, something that is often labeled as HrSR, or Higher Speed Rail? Is it the next Interstate Highway System, or is it the next boondoggle? The debate goes on.

In the meanwhile, however, we mustn’t forget the importance of the good old conventional train. You know, the type that Amtrak operates on a daily basis. For many communities in the vast portions of the West, they provide basic alternative transportation. Case-in-point: Amtrak’s Empire Builder. Running between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. When discussed, long-distance trains such as the ‘Builder often get compared to flights between similar points. The comparison, however, is inadequate. While that 757 flies its 5.5 hour flight between Seatac and O’Hare, the ‘Builder is providing basic transportation to dozens of communities across thousands of miles of the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest. The ‘Builder, then, is less a direction connection between Chicago and Seattle or Portland, than a vast, long-distance form of public transit.

And this in and of itself makes it typical of the agency’s services. Although described as an “intercity” railroad, Amtrak is in fact a transit agency write large. In 2007, the agency reported 5,784 million passenger miles. This makes it the second largest transit provider in the nation, behind New York’s subway system (at 11,500 million passenger miles) and above New Jersey Transit (3,380 million passenger miles). (See the APTA fact book 2009, page 35.) To put it in a more local context, in 2007 Amtrak provided 13.8 times the amount of passenger miles as Portland’s TriMet.

So as we debate the future of HSR in this country, let’s not forget that there remains a critical role for the old-fashioned intercity long-distance train. Many portions of rural America are depending on them.

One convention I have bristled against lately is the notion of property assembly. The thinking goes that underperforming areas often need to be physically remade, by tearing down older structures and replacing them with newer, more useful ones. The land necessary to do this, however, is not always in the right size and configuration of parcels. An urban renewal agency can help assembled these parcels into more developable configurations, thus speeding redevelopment and revitalization. Or so the convention goes.

But is this always the case? Or more pointedly, is it or will it be the predominate case of the 21st Century? I have my doubts. About a year ago, when the recession was no more than a housing bubble crisis, I attended a mini conference in Portland on the future of retail development, held by the International Council of Shopping Centers . One of the speakers was architect Kevin Cavenaugh , developer of numerous small retail buildings, including the famous Rocket Building on East Burnside . He advocated a totally different kind of development, one that concentrated on small parcels, low overhead, and building right up to the property lines. It was a scale of development utterly foreign to the normal PDC models of bulldozers and tax abatements. It also was one in line with thousands of years of organic urban growth. It was, if-you-will, human scale developing.

It is with no small irony, then, that the Cavenaugh point-of-view seems to be one that the PDC itself is more and more open to. Look no further than the Burnside Bridgehead project for the latest example of this. In late March, the PDC announced a new strategy for the multi-block development at the east foot of the Burnside Bridge : carve it up into small parcels and sell it off to different developers. That’s right, subdividing parcels. The PDC had just turned property assembly on its head, creating “property disassembly” as a development tool.

For some time it has been my contention that the rules of development have irrevocably changed. We are not going to wake up one day and find our economy back in 2006, with all the same rules in place. Credit is tighter, and financiers are more risk averse. Big development is now seen as less sound than diversified development. The currency of the 21st Century’s development may no longer be the size or price of land, but rather the culture, transportation access and mode diversity, and distance from residential areas. Property assembly, simply put, may be little more than an outdated tool, something to be filed away with the three platinum Visa cards and low interest no-money-down mortgages.

But what about rural America? If we are a more urban, is it at the expense of the small town? The slow retraction of the industrial Midwest has spread to the small agriculture economy, and the family run farm or ranch is in danger of failure, and small towns are more likely to be known for their meth problems and their population drains.

There might, however, be hope for small town America through improved transit and rail transportation. In California, the nation’s first true High Speed Rail project is getting underway, and Blueprint America followed Visalia mayor Jesus Gamboa as he attempted to convince the California High Speed Rail Authority to place a stop in his town. “We want access to the rest of California, and I think that High Speed Rail will give us that access.”

Gamboa stresses this notion of access as critical to the future of rural communities such as his own. “This is what rural America is all about, and this is what often times is left out of the policy making process by the decision makers…. It’s all about access. Rural America needs access to the urban centers just as much as anybody else does.”

We have been here before, with almost every major new transportation system. When the railroad was new to the American West, cities often lived or died based on whether they got rail service. Now, in the first decades of the 21st Century, we may be back in the same situation. The future of rural communities may lay in their connections to healthy urban megaregions, and the services and markets they control.

As for Visalia? Gamboa’s efforts, as the video shows, were not successful. The CAHSRA chose to place a stop at Hanford, 15 miles away. Gamboa has not given up, however, and is now busy planning a bus system to connect Visalia to the rail system.

TriMet’s WES Commuter Rail broke convention… and just plain broke a lot too.

First, in February, Portland’s TriMet opened up its first commuter rail operation, WES. This line runs 14.7 miles from Beaverton Transit Center (where a transfer can be made to MAX light rail) south to Wilsonville. Three intermediate stops allow riders to access the Nimbus/Washington Square area and central Tigard and Tualatin.

The project opened in February, late by about three months, and slightly over budget. The equipment — Colorado Railcar “Aero” Diesel-Multiple-Units — have been buggy and error prone since the beginning. Mired in political controversies (especially from loud critics of TriMet’s rail transit projects), WES has had low ridership so far.

In time, the line may become a key core of a larger Portland-Salem commuter operation, or it may convert into proper High-Capacity Transit with all-day, every-day service at frequent intervals. Or, it may languish as a testament to Washington County’s inflated self-image, a transit equivalent of Beaverton’s Round development.

Pros: Comfy and fast; great connections with Salem busses; WiFi on board.

Cons: Constant equipment failures; mixed ridership and high fixed costs; no fare transfers for Salem busses.

Seattle finally stuck its tow in the light rail water, but will there be more?

While Portland’s TriMet was busy making a commuter operation that looked as much like light rail as possible, Seattle’s Sound Transit was busy making a light rail system — Central Link — that looked very much like Vancouver’s SkyTrain heavy rail system. The result was a 13.9 mile line through Seattle’s downtown transit tunnel and then south to Tukwila, opened in July, with a short extension (1.7 miles) to the SeaTac airport that opened in December. The line uses extensive viaducts and tunneling, and includes a station in a tunnel much like Portland’s MAX light rail.

With such a short segment, Central Link has a long way to go before it develops sufficient critical mass to become a major part of the Seattle transit universe. Indeed, it is the expansions to the system that are currently the center of debate. An extension eastward through Bellevue has generated controversy regarding what bridge on which to cross Lake Washington and where and how to route through downtown Bellevue. Meanwhile, there is discussion of extensions wholly within the city of Seattle, and some interesting debate about the role of streetcars in augmenting the system.

Pros: Feels fast, a few nice stations, train length not limited by system design to two car sets.

Cons: Fare system less than ideal; still only one line not a full system, odd, isolated feel to route in SoDo.

Vancouver, B.C. added a sleek new SkyTrain line.

Just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver opened a new SkyTrain route — the “Canada Line” — from the YVR airport to downtown in August. This route also has a short branch to the suburb of Richmond, bringing the system mileage to 11.8. Totally separate from the existing SkyTrain heavy rail system, the Canada Line is half underground, half elevated, and very rapid. Equipment for the line is incompatible with the older SkyTrain segments, but the system is integrated into TransLink and uses the same fares and transfers.

Given that this is a relatively new line, it’s hard to say if it will spur lots of tower-block development like the older SkyTrain stations have. Like most totally grade separated lines, the stations constrict train size.

Pros: Bigger, sleeker, more comfortable cars; connections to YVR airport and the Richmond suburbs; Fast and convenient.

Cons: Equipment is incompatible with the rest of the network; stations limit train length.

Portland gets a new downtown light rail alignment and a new spoke to the transit wheel.

The last major opening in the Pacific Northwest was again in Portland, with a two stage addition to the MAX light rail network; 1.8 miles of new downtown alignment on the old bus mall, and 6.5 miles of new line from Gateway Transit Center to Clackamas Town Center Mall.

The alignment on the mall in downtown, sharing the roadway with busses, was a significant cause of worry for me. I remember the old bus mall and the completely undisciplined insanity of the busses there, and could not imagine that exisitng with MAX going through it. The new design, however, injects a significant amount of formality into the mall and works breathtakingly well. In a city that seems more interested in finding the latest negative to gripe about, it is a virtually unsung triumph.

The Gateway to Clackamas TC alignment, although looking much like a roller coaster at first glance, operates quickly and smoothly, and introduces a swift connection between outer southeast and downtown that did not exist prior.

Pros: Downtown segment operates smoothly; fewer downtown station stops; feels fast; great Park & Ride facilities.

Cons: Limited transit-oriented development potential; slight delays at Gateway and Steel Bridge.

Overall, a total of 50.4 miles of new rail transit were added in the Pacific Northwest during 2009. 2010? Here in Portland, two transit projects should get underway during the year, the Portland Streetcar’s eastside project, and the MAX extension to Milwaukie. Otherwise, it should prove a far quieter year in terms of construction, but also a time of important debates about new additions to the transit maps.

Richmond is ethnically diverse, suburban, and… walkable?!?

Richmond sits at the end of the new SkyTrain Canada Line. It’s mostly suburban sprawl, but there are also some newer towers in the area. I wonder how and why these towers were even built? Was it natural market forces, or was it from a government incentive? Regardless, if it weren’t for these towers, the town would look like nothing more than an average North American suburb. Oh, except for the SkyTrain, which runs like a backbone through the area, parallel to the Number 3 Road. It is actually amazing how unobtrusive this is, given its elevated nature. It doesn’t feel overbearing in the way that other more traditional elevated railways do.

This area, by conventional standards, is not pedestrian friendly, and yet the place feels more walkable than downtown Vancouver does. Perhaps it is scale — the buildings are shorter and feels more human sized, despite the massive car parking lots and the wide boulevards with their fast traffic. In addition, the place is bustling, busy, and awash with visual richness. Everywhere are signs in Chinese as well as English, even on big national bank chains like Scotia Bank and the Bank of Montreal. Many businesses have signs only in Chinese and no English at all, simultaneously intimidating and fascinating.

I think that the reason for its feel of greater walkability, however, lies in the blocks. In Richmond, most of the blocks of land are occupied by low density strip-mall type development. This means the blocks, thanks to parking lots and driveways, are permeable, allowing the pedestrian to cut through them. Instead, these lots and alleys became unofficial pedestrian ways and undeclared streets. Downtown, by contrast, fills up blocks completely with large multistory structures, leaving only an occasional, uninviting dark alley.

Surrey: There be cranes here!

Another burgeoning edge city is Surrey. It is evident simply at a glance that Surrey is nowhere near as important as downtown, but it does have some rather tall towers, which is no small achievement, and they appear very newly planted on their hilltop nest. It is in every way a young city, with a “Brasilia” feel of having just been air-dropped in. Empty grass fields and acres of low density suburban sprawl mark the community’s youth. Terri Evans, from the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, mentioned that the area will soon be bigger than Vancouver itself. I laughed at this, more out of ironic enjoyment than anything, but Terri took the laugh for a scoff, and rejoindered with “it’s true!” I can’t help but think that a Vancouver urbanist, marking up a map of the metro area, might label Surrey with the words “there be cranes here,” and shudder in despair.

North Vancouver: seen one betowered suburb, seen them all?

The last suburb I’ll note is North Vancouver, hunkering down on the hillsides north of the Burrard, the last bastion of urbanization before the Coast Range’s wilds begin. The community can be reached via SeaBus, a high speed ferry that sails between the town and downtown’s Waterfront Station at regular intervals all day long.

Despite a beautiful setting, North Van was no more or less distinctive than any other suburb of area I had seen. As impressive as the towers in a suburb are, it was hardly unique; Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby, and North Vancouver all had towers also. The town was mostly eighties concrete bunker blocks, vaguely second-rate shopping malls, the bland sameness of the condo towers, and relatively few and not very well maintained older storefronts. Once you’ve seen one mixed-use betowered Vancouver suburb, you’ve seen them all.

Downtown Vancouver’s Manhattan-like north shore looms through the rain spotted windows of Seabus.

The view back at the city center on the return trip via SeaBus was not bad at all, with the north shore of downtown looming on the Burrard Peninsula with an imposing, Manhattan-like feel of multiple layers, with its waterfront terminals for shipping, ferries, and cruise ships. It has a little more than a taste of Seattle’s waterfront presence on the water, and like Seattle it had almost no pleasure waterfront. The resemblance is strong enough that I can see why Douglas Coupland said that the Vancouver looks at Seattle as a model of what it could have become had it openly embraced the freeway and the expressway.

Looking at the view of downtown, I found it hard to believe that the suburbs like Surrey, despite their growth, would ever supplant the Burrard Peninsula. Surrey and Richmond both have no waterfront, no majestic mountains, no cluster of infrastructure. Transportaiton links helped to stimulate denser growth, but those same linkes continue to foster their relative place in the geographic food chain. Richmond and Surrey are and remain end termini of SkyTrain lines, while North Van, although more central, is isolated from most of the region by the Burrard Inlet. None of these suburbs enjoy the status of multi-modal regional hub as downtown Vancouver does. Transportation is arguably the most important reason that a point remains the locus of a given geographic scope, and Vancouver is the heart of the transportation network. When all roads lead to Rome, Rome remains a capitol. Place advantage remains king, and downtown remains central, literally.

Is Richmond a glance into the future of Portland suburbs such as Beaverton?

Still, the growth of Vancouver’s edge cities should give one pause. Soak in the visual play of high rises soaring behind a stripmall and a Best Buy in a significantly ethnic suburb. Is this Richmond, B.C., or is this the future of, say, Beaverton, Oregon, or Portland’s Southeast 82nd Avenue? Of course, Portland will never hold the political prominence in the U.S. that Vancouver has in Canada. That said, Beaverton — like Richmond — is a significant suburb whose ethnic diversity is growing rapidly. Over the last decade, Beaverton has become the home to more and more small businesses catering to Japanese, Korean, and other Asian and Latin ethnic communities, a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Beaverton has ambitions as well, as evidenced by projects such as The Round, the recent proposals for mid and high rise towers on the old Westgate Theater property, and an attempt to secure a stadium for the soon homeless Portland Beavers AAA baseball team. Rapid transit, high rise towers, acres of parking, strip malls of ethnic small businesses. This is the vision of Richmond, B.C. today. Might it also be the vision of Portland’s suburbs in the next few decades?

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 in America. We are the so-called “most European city” in the United States, and the New York Times seems to have a crush on us. As a result, this region almost never looks up or admires other North American cities — we’re more likely to fall in love with Barcelona or Amsterdam.

Except, of course, for Vancouver, British Columbia.

From the perspective of passive-aggressive, grasping Portland, Vancouver is a true international city. It is a beacon of modernism and sophistication, one rarely talked about critically here in the states; we can resent or grudgingly admire Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but we can do noting of the sort with Vancouver. Instead we are confined to a quiet awe, as if we were not worthy. Vancouver can be spoken of in the same breath with cities like Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, or Singapore. For all that it wishes to be on the international stage, Portland can only ever pretend to belong to this club.

There are similarities between the two cities. Portland is the warmest and sunniest urban area of the Pacific Northwest, where the idea of perpetual rain is more a myth perpetrated in the tradition of the late Governor Tom McCall’s growth policy of “visit, but don’t stay.” Vancouver, meanwhile, is the only temperate metropolis in a country covered by snow for almost half the year. Both both cities share a history of rejecting freeways. Both have a history of tearing down and then reconstructing high capacity transit. Both have a past that is vaguely hippy, and a present that remains significantly influenced by alternative forms of culture. Even today both cities represent a rejection of mainstream urban norms.

In many ways, Portland, looking to the north, sees its future in Vancouver, B.C.. The downtown core of Vancouver is one of the densest in North America. The suburbs are growing up with residential towers being a common element. The transit system is fully grade separated and runs on rapid schedules.

But is Vancouver, truly, a picture of Portland’s future? There are some key differences any urban enthusiast, public official, or city planner need to be aware of:

Perhaps its not that surprising that Vancouver is simply a different city than Portland. No two cities are exactly alike, and perhaps no city should ever be held up to be emulated, so much as learned from. The initial lessons that I would draw from Vancouver is that

1.) metropolitan areas reflect their downtowns, regardless of jurisdictional boundaries,
2.) increasing density of suburbs has cultural implications that can exacerbate political and social divisions, and
3.) transit development is not enough to intelligently manage growth, even in the relative absence of freeway networks.

Overall, Vancouver is a rich and interesting city. There is no way it can be summed up in this short post, and there are many observations and ideas I brought back from my visit that I think have some bearing on how we live and grow in Portland. Most of all, I came back with a far more realistic picture of this often idolized city, one that is far less idealized but also far more human and real. I encourage any urban admirer of the city to visit, but if you do, do as I did, and spend at least as much time out in the suburbs and outskirts along the SkyTrain line as in the downtown. Cities do not reveal themselves in their shopping districts or their downtown towers, but in their commonplace neighborhoods, both urban and suburban.