Saturday, May 5, 2007
Resting in Portland
Tuesday we had a nice, relaxing day in Portland running errands. Man, what a cool city! We were staying in pretty much the middle of downtown, and all the trains within downtown are free! We cruised around some, I got a backpack, Becca went to the ENORMOUS book store: Powell’s Books, I got a new cell phone to replace the one that found its way into the washing machine (BTW, that means I lost all my contacts, so please give me a call so that I will have your number again…) and we had a nice dinner on the Willamette River watching the dragon boats practice.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Now that Im done with school and catching up on the blogs, I thought I would add a little planning footnote to your Portland Experience. The trolleys that you rode for free are a really big success story in the transportation planning world. The trolleys use this innovative, prefab, thin slab track system which means they dont have to dig up much of the street to install them, and can do a full block within a matter of weeks. This means that the businesses didnt suffer much during construction, so they gave full support for the project - which is usually not the case. Also, the double track system links five neighborhoods over 2.4 miles and spurred the redevelopment of 70 acres of brownfield sites - mostly in the formlerly blighted, industrial River District. The whole project only took five years to finance and build, and only cost $1.4 billion of private and public investment - which isnt much considering BART costs at least $200 million per mile, and thats without stations or trains!
Post a Comment