Portland Transport

Author: Chris Smith

  • Academic Research on the Portland Streetcar

    It’s not every day that you get to read a master’s these about your favorite transportation project. So I settled down over the weekend with a cold beverage and all 210 pages of University of Calgary student Tom Gardiner’s thesis: Understanding Perceptions of the Portland Streetcar System. Even better, Tom’s thesis focuses in on my…

  • Traffic Enforcement in the Netherlands

    We had the opportunity to spend about two hours with Chief Smoorenburg during our visit to Amsterdam (the chief’s HQ was outside Utrecht, a one hour train ride, 30 minute tram ride and 20 minute walk from Amsterdam). The Chief is responsible for traffic enforcement for the county surrounding Utrecht.

  • Housekeeping

    A couple of changes on the site to note. First, we’ve upgraded to Movable Type version 3.2. The biggest impact should be coping with comment and trackback spam. This should not be very visible to users, as we have been policing it diligently, but it will be less effort now for us to stay on…

  • Licht aan! (Get Lit!)

    Sometimes the parallels are just eerie. In the Netherlands a major safety campaign was under way to get cyclists to have proper lights. They even had cops handing out lights. Sound familiar? The difference I noticed with a lot of ‘programs’ like this in the Netherlands is that they get a lot of promotion -…

  • Another Round (Table) in the Burnside Battle

    Commissioner Adams held a “Round Table” discussion with the stakeholder group and Mayor Potter today. The new element in the mix was the Bureau of Planning assessment of the project.