News Roundup

Plans moving forward on eastside streetcar

Thursday, May 11, 2006
By Wade Nkrumah
The Oregonian

The city’s keen on extending the streetcar from downtown across the Willamette River and looping through the inner eastside. Neighbors and businesses see the benefits of it, too. Now it’s a matter of settling on a route — working out the funding will come later — and riders could be hopping an eastside streetcar in three or four years.

The current vision: A north-south extension eventually connecting near the ends of the existing six-mile round-trip westside line.

Susan Pearce is one of many eager to see the streetcar roll on the eastside.

“The big picture is that loop,” says Pearce, a board member for Hosford-Abernethy Neighborhood Development.

The streetcar route has been studied for years. The Eastside Project Advisory Committee, 24 businesses and neighborhood residents, dove into the question in February 2003. Likewise, officialdom weighed route options. Meeting and mulling things over for the past year: the city’s Transit Alternatives Analysis Steering Committee, Multnomah County, the Oregon Department of Transportation, the Portland Streetcar Inc., TriMet and Metro. This summer Metro will take all the recommendations to select a route this summer.

Pearce, who also served three years on the business/residents committee, favors tracks running south on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and north on Grand Avenue.

“The streetcar tends to provide some traffic calming, as witnessed in Northwest,” Pearce says. “Putting the streetcar on MLK and Grand calms both of these streets.”

Among other things, the streetcar could make river access easier from residential-heavy areas east of Grand and King. Pearce also hopes the streetcar would slow traffic and prompt changes or traffic-related projects to make the streets friendlier and safer, particularly for pedestrians. King and Grand are wide one-way streets in opposite directions. The section of both streets where the streetcar is proposed, between the Broadway Bridge and near the Hawthorne Bridge, cuts through the heart of Central Eastside Industrial District and the western edge of Buckman, Hosford-Abernethy and Kerns neighborhoods.

Mike Bolliger, president of Bolliger & Sons, Inc., and a board member of Central Eastside Industrial Council, also prefers the Grant/King route. He says zoning on Grand and King suits the type of development he feels the streetcar spawned in the Pearl District and the West End.

“What they have is mixed-use residential, office and retail,” Bolliger says, which is ideal for the eastside commercial corridor. Plus, he says, the streetcar could reinvigorate interest in long-delayed traffic-related projects on King such as additional traffic signals and redesigned ramps for the Hawthorne and Morrison bridges.

“One of the reasons we’re pushing for the streetcar is not so much as a transportation piece as for a development tool,” he says. “Economically, the thing that makes sense is the redevelopment potential. The streetcar could be a huge tool if it does over here what it did on the westside.”

Construction is targeted to start as soon as late 2007. And the estimated price? Into the Lloyd District area alone, $99 million; the full loop, $200 million. The project will depend heavily on the feds for funding.