Category / Wanderings

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

The Side Door

Barista

Barista, classically amazing coffee.

Today I headed to The Side Door as my second office of the day. After making my postal pick up at the UPS Store and enjoying a good Barista espresso & cappuccino to kick off the day I wanted a different side of the Willamette. I cut through along Yamhill to Naito Parkway and then along the water front and over the Hawthorne Bridge. Once on the other side it was a loop under the bridge and out to Water Avenue up to The Side Door.

At The Side Door I had a great working session before heading back out for an easy commute back to the home office via the Portland Streetcar CL Line. Yup, that’s right, two trips confirmed on the CL Line.

The working session at The Side Door was great too, in that I was able to get a lot of work done, but also got introduced to a lot of rocking doom metal via the rocking staff. Thanks Side Door staff!

…with that, I’m at the home office and it’s all foot traffic for the rest of this day.

by Adron

Middle of the Week Commuting

My lady and I enjoyed a joint commute today. I decided my morning office was going to be Barista. I have to make an early morning pickup at the UPS Store for an important delivery pickup and the Barista Coffee Shop (3rd St Location) is just shy of 2 blocks away.

However before I headed off we both walked into Stumptown at Stark. I locked my bike real quick and we walked inside. With just 7 minutes before the streetcar arrived I decided to stay in line and she headed off to purchase a fare for her commute. I then, upon purchasing our quick breakfast croissants, jumped on my bike for the super long (that’s sarcasm ya’ll) trip about 280 feet to the streetcar stop. I rolled up with 4 minutes before the streetcar arrived. We enjoyed chit chat, our croissants and the morning air.

The streetcar arrived on time per the GPS Tracking estimate and per the schedule. It is always a bit amazing when the transit tracker arrival, schedule arrival and the actual arrival are all the same! Almost like the operations are more precise then they are. Because the thing is, this is America, and we’re pretty lazy about our precision of operations in this country. But that’s just fine for the commutes we’ve built for ourselves.

CL Line (click for full size, beware, it's huge)

CL Line (click for full size, beware, it’s huge)

My lady boarded the CL Line (yup, you read that right, somebody in downtown is actually riding the CL Line!). She heads across the Broadway Bridge and into the offices at the Left Bank Annex. I headed down the Stark Street Buffered Bike Lane and then onto 3rd to pull into Barista Coffee. I think the cross streets are Washington and 3rd. Barista, if you haven’t tried it, is one of the top coffee shops in the world (yeah, I didn’t mistype, world vs. just Portland).

Overall her commute it about 25 minutes, including the 4 minute wait at the streetcar stop. My commute was about 5 minutes, including a stop at a red light. Including the stop at Stumptown Coffee for morning croissant for her and I we maybe added 3-4 minutes. That’s what a commute should be. End of story.

by Adron

Boston, Portland’s Sister City?

Recently I took a trip over to the north east coast with my girl. We had a great trip visiting Conneticut, with our flight in and out of Boston. We used a mix of transit while in Boston to connect from the airport to the intercity bus to Hartford. Where we then bummed a ride with my girl’s folks. Overall it was a great trip, but this is my Transit Sleuth Blog, so enough about all that, let’s talk about hard core transit in Boston and how bad ass Boston is.

I’m generally pretty hard to impress when it comes down to transit. Portland does OK, San Francisco does OK, but the cities that really get me are usually the hard core operators like Chicago, New York or Vancouver, British Columbia. Well, Boston has officially entered those ranks of amazing cities. When it comes to removing that noose of automobile ownership and really getting down to important ideals, livability and effective transit and biking options.

Boston Transit Options

Two lines we took that are built out subway style heavy rail, included the Red and Orange Lines. Both of these lines were clean, are practically spotless by American standards, and amazingly well run. The lines were also smooth, without much jarring, and during rush hour I was still able to easily board and de-train in the inner core of the city.

Boston’s subways are cleaner, seemingly faster, and better rides than other comparable systems in cities like New York (MTA has notorious bumpy subway trains, they’re still not as bumpy and jarring as busses, but for a train they’re ridiculous) or Chicago. They’re also very easy to ride. The signage is good and getting around is simple, even when I wasn’t paying attention. The calls for each stop were clear and easy to hear (by comparison, there’s always room for improvement) which was a pleasant break from the standard mumbling on some systems.

The another rail mode option, as Portlanders, San Franciscans and Seattleites would now know, is light rail. I believe in Boston they refer to these as Streetcars however, but I’m not 100% sure. The Green Line was the main line we rode on, getting from North End to the Northeast College area. These trains were driven like a bat out of hell, jarring a bit in the turns, but fast and extremely efficient with solid ridership. The Green Line even splits into three separate segments as it exits the inner core of the city. This line, as the orange and red, was also technically a subway.

Which speaking of, the Silver Line is a bus line, that is underground that runs directly from the airport. This line is technically BRT the way it is intended to be built. However, Boston just refers to it as part of their subway system. There is a lot of contention about the quality of service of the Silver Line versus real rapid transit lines like the other subway lines, since Bostonians were originally promised a light rail line. It appears, after some research on wikipedia and digging through state records that they botched up the construction estimates and planning during the epic big dig failure.

On any of these lines, albeit during rush hour, we never waited for more than 90 seconds, with most of the trains we transferred from or to we had zero wait time. We literally walked onto the platform and onto the train. A transit rider’s dream transfer!

Next…

I’m aiming to have a part II to this article regarding the biking options and other parts of the MBTA and Boston’s Transit & biking options. Stay tuned!