Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

I spoke to a friend who wanted to know if I was going to ride on Portland’s trolley, then blog about it. Geez, I told him, I don’t blog about trolleys, that’s what Steve Farley’s blog is for.

I rode the trolley and the MAX, which are both part of the Portland area’s TriMet (Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon, so romantic) transit system. The MAX is a network of trains that run from the suburbs to central Portland (labeled on all maps ominously as “FARELESS SQUARE”). The trains were clean and run frequently. Although it crosses the roads, it doesn’t seem to tie up traffic for very long (the three car trains seem to clear intersections in less than a minute). According to my friend that lives there, the only deaths from train accidents have been a few suicides, and there was one accident involving a train and a fire engine.

Each stop of the MAX has two or three kiosks where one can get passes to ride the trains. The kiosks are suprisingly free of graffiti. I think this may be more because of community attitudes rather than maintenance. I observed one kiosk at Pioneer Square with a wee bit of vandalism on it. A homeless couple looked at it and the woman said, “See, that’s the sort of thing that gives us homeless a bad name.” It seemed that the stops I went to always had one kiosk that was out of order.

There are not folks “taking tickets” when you board the MAX, and apparently there are only employees to check passengers for passes during peak times. I have a feeling that locals know this and may not always buy passes. There are lower fare passes available for students and senior citizens (”honored citizens” as they put it), and many downtown businesses give monthly passes as a job perk.

I also rode the trolley, which is free, as well as the bus (which is free within downtown). The trolleys are manufactured in the Czech Republic. What, we don’t know how to make trolleys anymore?

Portland is a very different town than Tucson is, the downtown is much higher density, for example, but the MAX system serves suburbs that are just as spread out and low density as we are here. Still, Portland isn’t Boston or New York. Transit detractors always claim that such a system works well in larger, higher density eastern cities, but could never work in the west. Although the downtown was larger and higher density, the rest of the city was lower density and resembled the sort of thing that you would see in other Western cities like Phoenix and Tucson. I could see why the system would not be as extensive here, but it be done with proper planning.

Before I left, I heard that the argument over a train system in Scottsdale had heated up, with the realtors angrily weighing in giving two bogus arguments: that the system would not cut down traffic and that the line is not moveable the way a bus line is. A traffic engineer would tell you that an alternative transit system would not have to actually cut traffic by much, just enough so that the roads are below peak capacity. It would be hard to believe that the system would not cut down traffic at all, somebody would be riding it, right? Yes, they are right, a train route could not be moved to reflect growth in the community. The same could be said of a freeway, of course. I think what they are mad about is that the community would actually have to plan growth, long term even, if there was a train system. Heaven forbid.

NB - One of the points of pride for the operators of TriMet is that public art is incorporated into the system. We already have a 1% set aside for public art in freeway budgets (which is one of the things that keeps me employed), so we could easily apply that precedent to any transit system here.