Category: Light Rail

  • Regional High Capacity Transit System Plan

    Since the Regional Transportation Plan is fully underway, and grabs most of the headlines, I thought everyone should also know about what Metro is doing with regard to high capacity rail planning. First of all, we in Portland owe much to the dedicated and visionary leaders and planners in the 1970’s and 1980’s for the…

  • Dispatches from the Yellow Line (Updated)

    Important Note: This article has been updated with improved information. The original version of this article, posted May 24, 2007, used schedule times from the #5 bus from Spring, 2004, which was during the time period in which the Yellow Line was being constructed, and therefore slowed bus travel times along Interstate Ave. This revised…

  • Suburb to Suburb

    Jim Mayer has a stark piece in Sunday’s O about the difficulty of moving between suburbs on transit (with accompanying map [PDF, 2.5M] and analysis of potential solutions). There’s no denying the problem, but how do we make the economics work for relatively lower-density/ridership routes (or are there high-ridership potential routes)? I was struck by…

  • Rethinking Fareless Square

    A heated debate broke out on a Streetcar capacity thread. So let’s elevate the discussion to its own thread. Is the original purpose fareless square was designed to meet in 1974 still relevant? Should it be modified, eliminated?

  • What Makes Good Transit?

    An interesting new paper from VTPI: “Valuing Transit Service Quality Improvements: Considering Comfort and Convenience In Transport Project Evaluation” (that’s a mouthfull). Basically the idea is to look at what the amenities (or lack thereof) are that make a transit trip seem longer or shorter (as a proxy for more or less attractive compared to…