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PO Box 86208, Portland, OR 97286
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What is wrong with the Hawthorne for pedestrian use, and adding tri-met?
What is wrong with the Marquam?
Why can't the new Sellwood be used for this purpose?
Why can't these bridges be added to for the purposes above?
What is wrong with the current steel bridge crossing, then heading south on MLK/Grand?
Are pedestrians/bikers unhappy with Hawthorne? Is there some sort of bottleneck I'm unfamiliar with?
Why do we *need* another bridge in a town overflowing with them?
What would Vera Katz possibly do with her life without these opportunities to obligate local governments to huge new expenditures?
You see, this new bridge is necessary because it goes through the South Waterfront which is the boondoggle to end all Portland boondoggles. When one huge expensive project blows up in your face, you need to add more and more expensive projects in the hopes that it somehow justifies your last expensive screw up.
So Vera and Sam plan out South Waterfront with huge public expenditures, mostly through Urban Renewal. Then to justify it, they need to layer on the other expensive crap. You get the tram going 400% overbudget, now we "need" to bring the MAX through there on a new bridge. It's all self-justifying.
Marquam: Can't have light rail on the freeway. Building additional capacity into the existing bridge (i.e., the lower cross-bar on the piers) would cost a lot and would inhibit river traffic.
Hawthorne: It's a drawbridge. Trimet doesn't want to and should not be building drawbridges into the system. Steel is a drawbridge too, but the upper deck rarely opens. The Hawthorne opens multiple times every day.
Sellwood: Structurally unsound. Building a new bridge with light rail would be more expensive than the proposed bridge (either the new Sellwood or the new light rail bridge)
Steel: Pushing against capacity. Once the green line opens it will pretty much be at capacity.
I guess the marquam is out of the question.
The Hawthorne used to carry rail. Seems like a natural location, even given the river traffic. I work near the hawthorne and it isn't unreasonably raising and lowering. 750 buses a day handle it fine.
Whatever bridge they place across would also need to take into account river traffic. The land elevation in South waterfront is quite low.
Sellwood seems to me like a great future thinking location for light rail.
The green line confuses me still. I never understood why that line is being built to go through old-town/SW 4th/5th and duplicate what the buses already do much better. Just extend it out from gateway Transit Center? The massive waste of street space just for a train downtown on 4th and 5th is amazing.
Putting Tri-met access point across one of Portland's oldest bridges seems short-sighted as well. The bridge just feels like it is going to crack every time I ride it, and especially in a very earthquake prone area like the PNW.
Ah, well. I like Public Transit, I shouldn't be complaining. Just seems liek there are a lot more priorities, like 99W getting light rail. I was in traffic for 40 minutes last week coming back from the coast in mid-day heading IN to the city. That is not the Portland I signed up for.
Spoiler: There's an even more expensive design that they didn't pick!
The bridge itself is not to bad, but the west end approaches resemble a parking lot for three hours in the morning and another three hours at night.
TriMet is planning on moving the #9, 17 and 19 lines onto the new bridge. This will greatly reduce the time it takes to get from PSU to inner Southeast Portland. Some riders will see their commute times cut in half.
http://riverfrontforpeople.org/