Article on the Portland Tram in NY Times

Thanks to Arthur for sending this over.

City That Loves Mass Transit Looks to the Sky for More

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: January 29, 2007 in the New York Times

PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 28 — The view from the new silver spheres strung across the sky here will not always be as stunning as it was on this sunbeam weekend: Mount Hood regal in the late light, Mount St. Helens a mystery in the distance, the downtown skyline sharp but self-effacing, smart enough to know its place amid mightier peaks.

Yet even if the opening of the city’s newest and most exotic form of public transportation — the $57 million Portland Aerial Tram — had been met with the more customary drizzle and drear of winter here, the ride would still have been a thrill.

“We’re running at full speed,” said Art Pearce, the project manager for the Portland Office of Transportation, as one of the tram’s two 78-passenger cabins neared the 197-foot tower that supports the 7,000-foot cable tugging the tram along at up to 22 miles per hour. “So there’s going to be a bit of a swing.”

Sure enough, as each cabin cleared the tower that helps lift it along its 3,300-foot route from the banks of the Willamette River up to the campus of the Oregon Health and Science University on top of Marquam Hill, it rocked forward, giving riders up front a sudden and strong sense of just how close they were to the traffic rushing below on Interstate 5.

“Whoa!” passengers whooped in unison each time. Then they laughed.

Portland, after all, loves to ride.

So enamored with public transportation is this city of 560,000 (the population of the metropolitan region is almost two million) that it is laced with electric streetcars, light rail and buses. TriMet, the regionwide system that unites most of the various modes, boasts that it has more riders than public transit systems in bigger cities like Seattle, Denver and Miami. It says ridership over the last decade has risen faster than both the population and the average number of miles people drive. More than one-fourth of afternoon commuters on some major routes out of Portland use light rail.

Still, some critics have called the tram a folly. As its construction budget soared from early projections of $15 million to nearly four times as much as that, disputes between the city and the university arose amid calls to rethink the whole idea. The fare announced last week — $4 round-trip unless riders are visiting the hospital, work there or have a transit pass — is more than twice initial estimates.

Some residents beneath the tram route are not pleased to have people floating past their back decks and bathroom windows. The tram cabins have few handholds, and at the open-air waiting platform on Marquam Hill, only modest barriers protect passengers from foul weather and a steep drop. Mr. Pearce said such concerns would be addressed.

For all the fuss, however, the tram is accompanied by no shortage of optimism. Some say it will give eminently livable Portland an aesthetic exclamation point it lacks, something like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Space Needle in Seattle.

More tangibly, the tram is supposed to help develop former industrial land along the Willamette long hemmed in by highways. It is meant to be a critical link between the university and the South Waterfront, now home to condominium projects and the university’s Center for Health and Healing.

The tram makes the trip from the main university campus in less than 5 minutes, while driving can take 15 minutes or longer. Though the tram opened to the public this weekend, doctors and hospital staff members have been using it since late last year to travel between the main campus on the hill and clinics and a gym at the waterfront, where the university hopes one day to move its medical schools.

The city managed the construction and owns the tram, but the university is paying all but $8.5 million of the building costs and is contracting with the manufacturer, the Swiss firm Dopplemayr, to operate it. Dopplemayr hired cabin attendants after posting the jobs last fall on Monster.com.

The only other “commuter tram” in this country, officials here say, is the Roosevelt Island Tramway in New York City, the one that got stuck last April and required a daring rescue by firefighters. Portland tram officials say they have multiple backup motors to avoid such a fate.

Small plaques in each cabin note that one is named Walt, for Walt Reynolds, the first African-American to graduate from medical school at the university. The other is named Jean, for Jean Richardson, the first woman to earn a civil engineering degree in Oregon. Both are now in their 80s and rode the tram for the first time last week. The alternative newspaper Willamette Week, dutifully jaded, noted the political correctness of the choices, and suggested that the politician who pushed the idea should have gone instead with “Pan” and “Dering.”

But few riders seemed jaded this weekend.

Kaitlyn Ni Donovan, 37, and Jonathan Drews, 38, rode a scooter to the tram on Saturday. The couple, both musicians, stood at the front of one cabin as it descended, with snow-clad Mount Hood at sunset.

“It’s so futuristic for a city that’s so green,” Ms. Ni Donovan said. “I’d like it even more if it was 20 times slower and they served cocktails.”