Last month the Portland City Council accepted the “Portland Streetcar System Concept Plan,” a 20- to 50-year, long-range planning study that identifies transit corridors in the City of Portland with the highest potential for streetcars. The plan, nearly two years in the making, illustrates one city’s love-love relationship with the streetcar.
The “Portland Streetcar System Concept Plan” (SSCP) is a nearly 100-page report that was compiled by the city’s Bureau of Transportation and partially funded by the Federal Transit Administration. The plan will be used by the city’s Transportation and Planning and Sustainability bureaus, as well as Metro (Portland’s three-county regional government) and TriMet (Portland’s transit provider) to look at “how transit infrastructure investments can work with pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development projects.”
With the SSCP the city is poised to shape how one part of its transportation system accommodates future population growth, which is projected to increase by about 1 million people by 2030, according to the city’s website. The SSCP is coordinated with the city and regional agency land use and transportation planning policies and objectives; it is meant to inform the Portland Plan, a 20- to 30-year comprehensive land use plan for the city’s growth and development that will be refined over the next three years (view Portland Plan community workshops here).
Though the SSCP plots the future growth of Portland’s streetcar system, it also serves as a look into the past; the city’s streetcar system has evolved significantly from the first horse-drawn streetcar line along First Avenue in 1872. The modern streetcar system has been a success—this past summer the streetcar had a daily weekday ridership of 11,605—and is in the process of expanding to new corridors.
History of the Portland Streetcar
Portland has a storied relationship with the streetcar. Between 1890 and 1925 (streetcar service in Portland began in 1872), streetcar lines opened up at least 14 neighborhoods for development, according to the SSCP. The streetcar was used both as transportation and as a tool for organizing development. Before developing new areas, developers extended the streetcar line, enticing people to live in new, outlying neighborhoods.
“From its inception, the modern streetcar strategy drew on the same land use transportation nexus that led to the historic system; among the key goals for streetcar was ‘encouraging infill…and serving as a catalyst for housing development,’” the SSCP notes.
But in the 1920s, streetcars were phased out as people increasingly favored cars and other forms of transit, according to a June 2009 working paper called “The Potential Influence of Modern Streetcar on Portland Neighborhoods.” In 1958 Portland’s last operating streetcar ended service.
The concept of reintroducing modern streetcar service came as a result of Portland’s 1988 Central City Plan. The city initiated a Streetcar Feasibility Study in 1990, received $500,000 from a federal Housing and Urban Development grant two years later, and officially broke ground in 1999. The initial line was constructed at a cost of $55 million.
The effort resulted in the first new streetcar system constructed in the U.S. in more than 50 years, according to the working paper. Service began in 2001, and the initial 2.4-mile streetcar alignment through the Pearl District connected major ridership generators and employment centers: the Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital and Portland State University.
In addition to having one of the first modern streetcar lines, Portland is home to one of the only domestic streetcar manufacturers: United Streetcar LLC, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works Inc. The company recently completed the first modern streetcar manufactured in the country in 58 years.
In a blog post about the car’s unveiling, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood wrote:
“You know, it hasn’t been easy to fund streetcars in this country. But what I saw in Portland today has impressed me. As I told the folks at Oregon Iron Works, I’m committed to seeing that the streetcar program can be funded with federal dollars. A streetcar is a perfect fit for some communities—certainly Portland sees it as a fit for them—and suiting the needs and qualities of the local population is what livable communities are all about.”
The Current Portland Streetcar System
The current Portland streetcar system “functions as a development-oriented circulator through and between downtown districts and neighborhoods,” according to the June 2009 working paper.
The streetcar has been instrumental in generating higher density, mixed-use and pedestrian-oriented development along the route; nearly $3.5 billion in new development has been invested within 2 blocks of the alignment since the line was finalized in 1997, effectively revitalizing neighborhoods that were once in decline. That number represents two-thirds of all development in the Central City during that time, and includes more than 10,000 new housing units and 5.4 million square feet of office, institution, retail and hotel construction.
In addition, the developments along the streetcar route use more of the allowed floor-area-ratio (FAR) than developments that aren’t near the streetcar—developments adjacent to streetcar have used more than 90 percent of their potential FAR, compared to just more than 40 percent for developments not near the streetcar.
These developments, which are usually mixed-use buildings with ground-floor retail, are a resurgence of what historians and architects are calling “streetcar architecture,” according to an article in The Oregonian:
“The first heyday of streetcar architecture was 1900 to 1925. ‘The classic size was two and three stories,’ [Carl Abbott, a Portland State University planning and urban studies professor,] says. ‘Now we're getting five and six stories, if you look at what's happening on North Mississippi and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It's the same, but it's also different. It's higher density than we had 75 or 100 years ago.’”
Portland’s streetcar system also has created several environmental benefits for the city. A case study, which was part of the report “Reinventing Transit: American Communities Finding Smarter, Cleaner, Faster Transportation Solutions” from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, found that the city’s streetcar is estimated to have prevented 70 million miles of vehicle travel annually. Paired with light rail and bus, streetcar is one reason the city’s auto use (measured in VMT per capita) declined 6 percent since 1990, compared to the average for U.S. cities which has grown by 10 percent, the report found.
The SSCP points to several key strategies that helped the line’s initial success: coordinated land use and transit neighborhood investment strategy, the right mix of zoning designations, public-private partnerships, availability of local funding sources, market timing, and citizens and city officials who championed the effort.
About the SSCP
Given the city’s success with the streetcar, it’s fitting that some of the strongest potential streetcar corridors the SSCP identifies are historic corridors. “Because the original land use patterns that evolved around streetcars still prevail in many former streetcar neighborhoods, the mix of land uses in these areas would likely support the reintroduction of a modern streetcar line,” the working paper notes. Corridors that are evaluated and compared in the SSCP were selected for development potential, operational feasibility, transit connectivity and community support.
The project team, along with Portland Mayor Sam Adams, identified six goals for the project (three for the overall system and three for streetcar corridors). A successful streetcar system will help the city implement its peak oil and sustainability strategies; provide an organizing structure and catalyst for the city’s future growth along streetcar corridors; and integrate streetcar corridors into the city’s existing neighborhoods. A successful streetcar corridor will be a viable transit option with adequate ridership; have (re)development potential; and demonstrate community support.
The SSCP is the result of what Adams called a “very grass-roots approach to planning” at a Sept. 9 city council meeting.
Before it was formally adopted by the city council, the SSCP had a complicated feedback loop (view a graphic here). The plan was worked on by the streetcar system plan project team (which includes transportation planning, land use planning, urban design, transit planning, civil engineering and sustainable infrastructure professionals), the development-oriented transit team (which includes the Portland Office of Transportation Planning, the Bureau of Planning, the Portland Development Commission, TriMet, Metro and the Oregon Department of Transportation) and the system advisory committee (which includes community leaders, local businesses, neighbors and local organizations), as well as district working groups. This past summer, the public review draft plan was open to comment for a month-and-a-half.
Despite the nearly two years of planning that went into the document and the multiple rounds of public involvement, several concerns remain about the SSCP. “What the report doesn't spell out is which corridor would be next in line for a streetcar, exactly where the tracks would go and how the city would pay for them,” notes a recent article from The Oregonian. Critics are also concerned that the expanded streetcar will duplicate bus service, that some far-flung neighborhoods will be left out, and that the streetcar could have adverse effects on the identities of those neighborhoods that are included.
Other concerns center around the timing of the SSCP and the city’s land use policy. The approval of the SSCP comes years before the city will finalize the Portland Plan. At an August meeting of the Portland Planning Commission—when the council’s approval of the SSCP was still pending—commissioner Jill Sherman noted, “It’s a struggle to see how the commission can recommend approval of the proposed corridors without decisions regarding accompanying land use.”
With the Portland City Council’s recent approval of the SSCP, it’s clear streetcar has staying power in Portland. Can Seattle—which recently approved a second line for the city—replicate Portland’s success?
