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Summer Forecast: Streetcar Crush Loads
Streetcar ridership has followed a relatively consistent cycle of growth. Each summer we see new peaks (the hypothesis is that this is driven by occupancy of new residential units along the alignment), then it drops off a bit in the winter, only to rise again the following summer. New extensions, like the one opened to…
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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…
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Guerilla Streetcar Stop Activity
Taking a ride downtown on Friday I encountered some interesting sights at Streetcar stops in NW Portland. Did others see this? I’m curious if whoever did it covered the whole line. [They didn’t, I checked a few more locations on Saturday.] I love the health/pedestrian activism, and I’d love to thank whoever put out the…
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A Geeky Community Project?
Last Tuesday, in a article titled “Portland, out of order“, the Trib took a swipe at the Streetcar Nextbus system: Maybe the ticker signs at the streetcar stops with their wildly innaccurate arrival times. My experience is that Nextbus is pretty accurate (I regularly check it from my cell phone web browser while getting around…
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Fare Box, Take 2
Here’s the probably-close-to-final iteration of the Streetcar fare box graphics, based on feedback from this blog and the Citizens Advisory Committee. Any last thoughts, now’s the time: