Category / Transit Thoughts & Curiosities

by Adron

Portland’s Milwaukee Light Rail Project – Under Construction, Opening in September 2015

First let’s kick this blog entry off with a few pieces of context, such as:

  • What is the Portland Milwaukee Light Rail Line?
  • Where exactly does it go?
  • How much does it cost and what does that cost actually include?

Answers…

“Opening in 2015, the Portland-Milwaukie light rail transit line will travel 7.3 miles between PSU, inner Southeast Portland, Milwaukie and Oak Grove in north Clackamas County.”

The best place to get information about the Portland Milwaukee Light Rail is to check out the project site. I have a few additional thoughts, pieces of information and other such things here in the post however.

Here’s a quick video intro of what the project is, what it connects and a little more information. It’s a short view.

The other key video to watch, which really gets down into where the line runs in detail and also covers the other things that will be built along with the light rail line.

The total cost of the Portland Milwaukee Light Rail (PMLR) Project is $1,490.35 Million[0]. In a follow up entry I’m going to bring up what exactly we’re getting for this huge chunk of cash. I’ll also do a break out of a few of the light rail stops and what those light rail stops mean to the neighborhoods they’ll serve.

After watching this project progress over the years it still leaves me with a number of questions. Many of these will be answered in due time, but it doesn’t stop me from being extremely curious.

  1. What buses will use the bridge instead of routes like the Ross Island Bridge?
  2. When the buses come across the bridge where do they get on or off on the west side? Will they continue on the new light rail part of the infrastructure on their way to the bus mall?  Will they turn off onto other surface streets in the area and travel in and out of south waterfront that way?
  3. Where’s the best house buying options in the area? Which area will increase in value the quickest? Which values may decrease?

More to come in the near future… cheers, Transit Sleuth.

References
[0] Portland-Milwaukee Light Rail Project Preliminary Engineering Report. Located at FTA: http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/OR_Portland_Milwaukie_LRT_complete_profile.pdf and local store: Portland Milwaukee Light Rail

by Adron

On a Positive Note, Take a Route & Have a Beer!

Recently the Willamette Week had a great beer crawl transit + bike + walking routes list put together. Your’s truly made the list! I helped kick off this with the Trimet Route #4! Great list!!

by Adron

A Grand Lodge, A Long Transit Ride, A Great Weekend

Over this last weekend I headed out to Forest Grove to Mcmenamins Grand Lodge. It’s a great place to spend a weekend away from everything, with the bonus of actually being reachable by transit. From downtown, take any MAX that goes to either Beaverton Transit Center or Hillsboro and transfer at either of those places to the #57 Bus that goes to Forest Grobe. I prefer to take the MAX for and wait until the end of the line to transfer. It always makes working on a laptop dramatically easier than riding on a bus, thus my main reason on many trips for taking rail over the bus.

Between the soaking pool, which is a great heated pool that is absolutely wonderful during the winter, I started pondering. I ought to spearhead a website that lays out the locations that are close to stops on the light rail, streetcar, WES and bus corridors in the TriMet Service area. However I’d not want to do this alone. If you’d like to volunteer to help me out (don’t worry, we’re only talking about content and helping to find cool places, you don’t have to code or actually create the website) with this let me know. Just enter the things you could provide and I’ll get in touch ASAP.

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Cheers – Transit Sleuth

by Adron

Is TriMet Failing? Could Transit Improve in Portland? Let me know!

I’m just curious where my readers stand. If you could take a few minutes to fill this out and hit submit I’d greatly appreciate it. Also I made the email address empty, but it is just going to me, I’m not selling any of your information and many of you know me. So don’t be alarmed – it would make it easier for me if you did enter your email.

After a week or two I’ll post all of my answers also. Last thing, if you’re from Seattle, Vancouver WA or wherever feel free to fill this out if you keep up with Portland politics. I know some of you do. 😉

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by Adron

Measuring Things…

Portland

Seattle

Other interesting facts are the distance people travelled (shorter is generally better for a more sustainable environment and activities), the energy consumed or expended per passenger, etc. Some of these are hard to find, some are a little easier. King County and TriMet do a decent job providing this data, mostly. TriMet has a vastly easier website to find data on vs. King County’s, which seems to have been forced to use the “how not to build a website book”. I’m sure some bureaucrat had some say in the misguided approach, but the data is there, ya just gotta dig for it.  🙂