- Sam Beebe
I spent an hour yesterday morning in the Portland streetcar, rolling from the Pearl District over the river to OMSI, where the new $148 million Eastside Streetcar Loop ends ignobly at a stop bordered by dirt construction lots and the backside of the science museum’s parking lot. This is a big moment, the launching of 3.35 new miles of track linking the inner Eastside to downtown in a major way. But I was glum. The streetcar’s slogan is “Hop on and get carried away!” But I can never get carried away in streetcar-fever. Instead I find myself compiling pro and con lists in my head.
GOOD: It promotes dense development! Rolling past the giant parking lots and empty land along NE MLK and Grand, it’s obvious how much potential the inner eastside has to become much denser. Arguably the main goal of the streetcar is to promote dense development, offering carfree transportation to people living, working, or visiting the central city. An 800-unit apartment building is currently in the works to be built on an entire city block near the Lloyd Center, for example, and the streetcar could be a great way for those residents to commute downtown (though why they wouldn’t take the MAX, which is only a few blocks away, is beyond me).
BAD: Not so good as actual transportation! The streetcar is slow. There’s no two ways about it. The eastside loop will clock in at 32 minutes to get from NW 9th and Lovejoy to OMSI, which is five minutes longer than the trip would take on current public transit, twice as long as it would take to bike (according to Google Maps), and about nine minutes shorter than it would take to walk the same distance. Plus, the trains are only going to arrive once every 18 minutes. It’s a workable system for people who can’t walk or bike or who have the schedule dialed in, but even then, the bus is faster.
GOOD: It cuts car traffic. Because people are snobs who hate buses, the streetcar attracts riders who don’t normally take other transit. The official numbers say the streetcar is going to reduce regional vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by 28 million per year. That’s a lot of carbon cut.
BAD: Its tracks hurt cyclists. Someone needs to do a study already of the environmental and fiscal impact of 70 percent of cyclists crashing on the streetcar tracks. How much do the streetcar tracks discourage biking and scare off new cyclists in the city? I’m sure that impact doesn’t rival the VMT reduced by the streetcar, but the expansion of the streetcar line is arguably not a good thing for people who bike in the city.
GOOD: It’ll help eastside businesses. The streetcar will definitely bring more foot traffic to semi-desolate places like the stretch of Broadway/Weidler north of the Rose Quarter and the SE industrial lands near OMSI. Hopefully the streetcar will bring some tourist dollars to places on East Burnside and along MLK.
BAD: Um… I can’t think of any downside to this. I like Sizzle Pie.
GOOD: The cars are manufactured here in Oregon. That’s pretty sweet.
BAD: We have fewer streetcars because they’re made in America. Manufacturing glitches at the Clackamas factory mean we have only five cars instead of six running on the new line.
GOOD: It’s cheap. The streetcar-only fare is just $1. That makes it the cheapest transit you can take across the river.
BAD: It’s extremely expensive. The loop cost $148.3 million, or nearly $45 million per mile. Just over half of which was paid for by the federal government. State lottery dollars covered another $20 million of the cost and the rest of the pricetag (about $55 million) comes from Portland urban renewal money and a local improvement district property tax on buildings near the new line. On the ride this morning, I asked Portland Streetcar Director Rick Gustafson about the irony of showcasing the new line while TriMet is reducing service and raising fares. “We committed to this in 2008,” he said. “We’re committed to it, we’re obligated to build it. Yes, we have ups and downs in our economy, but long-term it’s going to mean a great benefit to the city. This is going to be here in 100 years.”
So. We’ve paid for it. We’ve built it. Maybe wondering whether the streetcar is a good or bad one is a moot point, since it’s already here. Let’s get out there and enjoy the damn thing like it just cost us $148 million! The loop opens for service on September 22nd.
They’d take the Streetcar because MAX from Lloyd Center to downtown is now $2.50, but Streetcar only costs a dollar.
I think this project will be moderately more successful than the WES. I’m going to bet that it will be less than 2 years before the price is jacked up to the same cost as a Trimet ticket, and around that same time more people will be using the bike path than the street car.
Mirk nailed the point that it’s too slow. I work right outside of a Street Car stop, and I can walk from Burnside to Lovejoy in the same amount of time as the street car. For me, it’s worthless. It might be useful for getting kids in South East to PSU, at least the kids who are too lazy to make the bike ride.
What Mirk didn’t do a great job of is explaining what “Portland urban renewal money” means and where it comes from. This money comes from property taxes, it is not an additional tax, per se. We preformed a trade-off for this street car, as property taxes are otherwise spent on many things, like schools. $50 million is a lot of money to be wasting.
This is possibly the best summary of how I too feel about this (and other) streetcar(s). It’s a darn development tool, and when you look at it that way, as opposed to a practical means of improving transit, I suppose we could have done worse. And what if I need to go to OMSI, but I’m meeting a notoriously tardy friend so I don’t want to hurry? Perfect.
Sadly, this article, which is great, would’ve been lot more helpful BEFORE they put it in.
In practical terms, the streetcar is free to ride, isn’t it? I haven’t taken it in a few years now, but when I lived in NW, no one paid to ride the streetcar – they just walked right on. A few people, like me, had annual passes, but I doubt they made up a significant share of the riders. No one used the ticket machines and there were never any fare inspections. Has that changed?
My own feeling is that the streetcar is about as practical and helpful as having a big doltish rhinoceros lumbering down the middle of the street.
One thing that needs to be clarified is that most of property tax money that is going into the line is from the local BID (business improvement district) along the line. Basically, local businesses devoted a portion of their future property taxes to build it. The idea is that the streetcars are going to increase property values along the line, so that basically it would pay for itself. So it is actually arguable that the streetcar is a relatively revenue neutral piece of infrastructure as far as urban renewal/BID wise since the previous streetcar line worked the same way.
The lottery money probably won’t be repaid directly since there aren’t many video poker machines in the area, that is a loss at a state wide level.
The rest as the article points out is paid by the federal government. More or less the state paid $20 million in lottery revenue for a permanent piece of infrastructure, admittedly not a very efficient piece of infrastructure.
Ultimately, I think taxpayers get a pretty decent deal. It would be very nice to get faster and more frequent service though to make the thing more usable.
Streetcar came about in the wake of the 80’s Central City Plan’s call for a “circulator” between close in neighborhoods. It got rolling in the 90’s with support of neighborhood associations, businesses and the City. The first line was paid for by local businesses via LIDs and City meter money, no URA funds were used. Extensions to Riverplace and SoWa did use URA money. No federal funds were used.
Streetcar was designed to be slow and small so that it fits in with a street with cars, pedestrians and yes, bikes. (Doesn’t Amsterdam have a dozen tram lines fanning out from Central Station and not a few bike riders?). And it has certainly been a catalyst for development, especially in what became the Pearl District. If nothing else, the eastside extension will be worth the effort and money, if something gets built on all those vacant and parking lots along Broadway/Weider, in the Lloyd District and Central Eastside. Investors seem to like it, and like it or not we need private money to build out the city.
It would be interesting to pitch an LID as a way to fund a first class cycle track on Williams/Vancouver between PCC/Cascade and the Rose Quarter. Would New Seasons, Emanuel, the Rose Garden, and local retail there step up? Nothing attracts public money to a project like private sector funding. Myself, I would pitch Streetcar in the same corridor along with better bike facilities. For biker that I am (and have been for 60 years), I am a bit Streetcar fan.
“Big” Streetcar fan, not “Bit.” Actually, my heart is set on an extension up Broadway/Weidler to Hollywood.