Nice to see the progress after spending all that time sitting in traffic on MLK and Grand over the last few months.

It's the same process that happens with all the new rail lines -- they upgrade the infrastructure under the street first (water, sewer, etc.) before they work on the visible stuff. The underground stuff has to be able to handle the extra weight of trains.

In a city of one thousand fucktard ideas, the streetcar is the fucktardiest.

Maybe we should have just renamed our buses "streetcars," painted some streetcar-y looking shit on the sides of them, hoped no one noticed, and saved a few million dollars. Maybe paint some black lines on the ground to give the illusion that immovable tracks make any sense, compared to the hyper-unpredictability of buses?

We could have used the difference to finance the Commenty Colin Zip Line From Pioneer Square to the Top of the Hawthorne Bridge to the Morrison Bridge.

Don't you mean, "Mono... d'oh!"

The new streetcar has the effect of insulating the "creative class" of this city from having to see people on the 6, which happens to go into NE Portland.

I wonder what ethnic group has traditionally lived in NE Portland, especially on the upper sections of MLK, where the 6 goes but the streetcar most definitely will not go...

@LawyerPepper: Well, it's either that conspiracy theory or the fact that the MAX already goes up there.

@Paul Cone: The streetcar isn't any heaver than a semi-truck, and that it a state highway anyways so there are no weight problems. The problem is that once the streetcar tracks are in it becomes a much better deal to do maintenance, and since we have a 30 year maintenance backlog in this city, (they regularly dig up original water pipes in Portland: Original = Made out of the trees that they cut when they built the city; that is, they are made out of wood,) it is pretty much a given that something will break and need repairing there in the not too distant future. Since they are already going to repave the street, they just go ahead and replace it all before they put the tracks down. It is sad that the only time we do preventative maintenance is when they build rail lines, but not very many people will support a tax increase for replacing things they can't see and aren't completely broken, so this is how it works...

@LawyerPepper: If you look at the 10-20 year plan for the streetcar, they want to run it all the way up MLK to and over to Lombard TC. The only people that "they" seem to have a problem with on the #6 line are the people on Hayden Island. (I worked on the Lombard plan which is more than 20 year out: Gentrification may follow the streetcar, (although it unlikely: Gentrification is more demand limited than supply limited,) but the streetcar lines are designed to serve everyone, from the people on Foster, to the people in NE. They aren't just for the "creative class.")

@tk: MAX is a mile away from MLK so a lot of people ride the #6. The #4 is a 1/3 of a mile from MAX is also pretty popular, mainly because it is hard to cross the freeway.