Last week I wrote about the inspiring handmade bike design contest held in Portland: the Oregon Manifest Design Challenge. Portland leads the nation in the percentage of people who commute or ride a bike everyday. What is less known is the fact that Portland might be the most progressive public transit city in the US. You almost feel that you are in Europe. It forces some unfavorable comparisons with our transit system in San Francisco.

TriMet, Portland, OR

TriMet, Portland, OR

BART, San Francisco, CA

Pacific Electric Railway, CA

Food Trucks, Portland, OR

Parklet, San Francisco, CA

When you arrive at the airport in Portland you are greeted by the Light Rail, which is part of the TriMet system. It delivers you into the city for about $3.00 – an average price for many European trains. The price is kept low to encourage people not to drive to the airport. BART, San Francisco’s public transportation to the airport, costs about $8.00.

Aside from the cost, productive comparisons can be drawn from the design. Portland’s rail cars are colorful and modern on the interior and exterior, with places to store bikes, ramps to make it easy to enter, and a generally cheerful ambience. The seating is an easy to clean, modern vinyl. Our BART cars have an aging institutional feel, with scary signage. The upholstery is unhygienic to such a degree that it got written up in the New York Times. Apparently help is on the way and San Francisco will be spending $2 Million for a remake.

When you get to Portland’s city center you find more modern streetcars and it feels very much like the trams in Zurich or Amsterdam. It’s easy to get almost anywhere in the city as the transit systems are connected. For most of us in SF, when we arrive downtown from BART, getting home or to work is often complicated, time consuming, or expensive.

Portland is billed as the “first modern streetcar system in the US,” but this may be an exaggeration. There were many modern electric streetcar systems throughout the US in the early 20^th century. These rail lines were torn and replaced by buses and cars – often billed as a conspiracy led by GM. We believe more rails, more bikes, and less cars will beautify our cities and attract healthier lifestyles. That’s why we support efforts to reduce private auto trips along Market Street, one of San Francisco’s major thoroughfares.

Although there are still plenty of cars in downtown Portland, the city has done some clever things to keep them at bay. For example, there is an unsightly central parking lot that has now been surrounded by a perimeter of colorful and friendly food trucks that offer a great selection of affordable ethnic foods. These food trucks lend a vibrant touch to the city and turn an asphalt parking lot into a community asset and destination.

Converting asphalt into food courts is one area where San Francisco holds its own. Our numerous parklets, food trucks, farmers markets, and street vendors are world class and growing in number. An SF based organization, Off the Grid, brings together the eclectic community of local food trucks. SF Pavement to Parks makes it accessible for small businesses to transform the parking spaces outside of their business into mini parks. The best part is that our local government generally supports these efforts. We’d like to see more government-subsidized projects that directly benefit environment and community.

Posted by: sally
On Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Sustainable Transportation, Travel, Urban Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.