Portland Traffic

Yesterday’s Colloquium was presented by Robert Bertini of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. It focused on transportation and how it has shaped the development and land use in Portland. The gist of the talk was that transportation was key in locating Portland as a major city and that each new mode of transportation tends to follow routes created by previous modes.

The slide show that accompanied the talk had some great historical photographs and maps from the last century. One of the slides was a map of streetcar routes from the early 1900s which included an Alberta line. Most of these older routes were buried under the street network as cars became more popular.

There was brief discussion about the future of transportation especially as it relates to traffic jams in Portland and the looming sense that we can’t build ourselves out of the congestion we’re seeing today, which is why Portland has focused on other modes of transportation and other alternatives for coping with growth.

I was tempted to ask about the Segway because I remember people saying that it would change the way cities were built and such. While I do agree it’s a brilliant piece of technology (controlled falling … like walking) it just hasn’t caught on. In fact, it appears that bicycle ridership has instead boomed. And why not? The cost of a bicycle is much less and the I’ve only seen one “Segway” rider and it was a kid riding a knock-off that had four wheels getting passed by droves of cyclists in the bike lane on Vancouver Ave.

I’m really curious about transportation. Right now I’m contributing to the jam on most days and I’d like to do something about that.