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Is it a tool or a toy?

Planners envision lines across city; critics say it’s an expensive fantasy

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Jul 17, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (44 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

The streetcar that runs from the South Waterfront area across downtown to the Pearl District doesn’t quite look like streetcars of yesteryear, but some supporters envision lines running throughout the city, much as they did 100 years ago.

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Look at the maps — the city-drawn maps detailing the Portland possibilities for 15 or 20 years into the future — and things look a lot like 1904.

On the maps are streetcar lines running throughout the city, extending like long narrow fingers to its corners. Lines run on some of the same streets where the City & Suburban Railway Co. and the Portland Railway Co. had lines 104 years ago.

Those old lines were before the automobile’s dominance, of course. When people in the distant suburbia of Northeast 22nd Avenue and Halsey Street took a streetcar to work downtown.

The new lines on the Portland maps — which planners have been sharing and discussing with neighborhood residents throughout the city for the past several months — are suggesting a bit of the old world layered over the new.

And they suggest a transportation and development nirvana — or an incredibly wrongheaded boondoggle, depending on whom you talk to.

Streetcar advocates see a potential expansion as transformational, allowing people to more often avoid their pollution- and greenhouse-gas spewing cars, and enjoy reinvigorated neighborhoods.

Streetcar skeptics, or at least skeptics of this possible expansion, see the idea as delusional and incredibly expensive, with no one having any idea how it could be paid for. They also believe it could be unhelpful to the neighborhoods, and injurious to the city’s transportation system.

The lines on the maps represent nothing close to a done deal, of course.

City planners have progressed further in planning for one additional streetcar line. That line would connect to the existing one in Northwest Portland and loop it over the Willamette River and to the city’s inner east side. The city is still awaiting approval on federal funding to help build that.

The much larger network of potential streetcar lines is part of a planning effort the city embarked on last year — to see what new corridors might work for streetcars throughout the city, and to see what Portlanders thought of the idea. Even with widespread support and identified funding, these lines might be 10 or 20 years away.

The reaction so far?

“It kind of runs the gamut,” says Owen Ronchelli, chairman of a citizen group that is helping to guide the city’s conversation with Portlanders about the possibilities. Ronchelli is also program director of the nonprofit Lloyd District Transportation Management Agency, which works to foster alternative transportation in the Lloyd District.

City planners, and many of the people on Ronchelli’s committee, believe that an expanded network of electric-powered streetcars could be good for Portland neighborhoods, for transportation and for the environment, while helping people combat high gasoline prices.

Portland’s current streetcar, the first modern streetcar in the nation, began operating in 2001 and now runs from the Northwest Portland past Portland State University and to the South Waterfront area along the Willamette south of downtown.

It “has largely been seen as a huge success,” says Patrick Sweeney, who is a planner with the Portland Office of Transportation and is leading the city’s planning efforts exploring the streetcar expansion. “It’s been a real boon to the central city.”

Focus on corridors

There’s no reason that boon can’t be expanded to other areas of Portland, Sweeney says. A few of the corridors the city and neighborhood residents are now talking about push the streetcar further into Northwest Portland. But most of the potential corridors are throughout the east side. Among the more than dozen possible routes: on Sandy Boulevard all the way out past 82nd Avenue, along Hawthorne Boulevard to 50th Avenue, and north and south on 82nd and 122nd avenues.

“What these potential streetcar corridors can do is reinforce high quality neighborhoods throughout the city, and connect them to high-quality transit … in a way that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and fosters the kind of mixed-use development that makes vibrant neighborhoods,” Sweeney says.

There are plenty of people throughout Portland neighborhoods who like the idea.

“I think anything to get cars off the road is a good idea,” says Ray Gordon, as he leaves the Ohana Hawaiian Cafe at Northeast 63rd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard with his wife and infant daughter, when asked about a possible Sandy streetcar line. “I think it would be a great idea.”

But skeptics of the expansion idea question whether an expanded streetcar would be everything Sweeney forecasts. Some question whether the current streetcar was worth the price, given its ridership of about 10,000 riders per day weekday.

Others wonder whether advocacy of streetcars is more an attempt to foster development than improve transportation, and whether that’s an appropriate, or worthwhile, focus.

John Fregonese, a local planner who says that focus can be worthwhile in some places, still repeats the half-joking question he hears often: whether the streetcar is “transit-oriented development” or “developer-oriented transit.”

And still others question whether planners understand how inappropriate and inefficient a streetcar line would be on 122nd Avenue, for instance, where people need either their car or a bus with much more flexible routes to get around.

“People talk about these things. They don’t come out here and live them,” says Valerie Curry, president of the Argay Neighborhood Association in outer northeast Portland, which has Northeast 122nd as its western boundary.