Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanlife
You are right, apples to oranges, but I will definitely say the Rennes subway like is a great find and would love something like that here, especially if the stations are designed by Norman Foster's firm.
But you are right, there is other things at play, Rennes is not a grid city, thus making it harder to have an effective ROW street lines running through the city.
I think Portland has a long way to go before the trains are at capacity, plus it would be just as easy increasing the number of runs than the number of segments to each train. If Portland ever gets a subway line, it would probably be more for users that are at the further ends of the metro.
I think trimet is trying to go in the direction of having more access to the train system rather than having a single core line like cities like SF. We have LRT running on two different lines, we have the streetcar on its own line, possibly having the streetcar running up and down 3rd and 4th (I remember that being talked about at one point.)
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oh geez, they're not even remotely comparable, portland and rennes.
look at google maps; the distance from one end of the portland metro to another is around 30 miles, the urban area of rennes is about FOUR miles across at its widest. just to get from downtown to burlingame is probably three miles, THEN you might be able to come to the surface and keep building for another TEN miles at least. with rennes, you build four miles of subway and you've already crossed the entire city.
then look at the density of the area you're crossing - there's no comparison; this part of portland is probably less dense than parts of detroit.
finally, americans, even portlanders in aggregate, look at transit with suspicion and support it only grudgingly, whereas in many parts of europe, france probably included, it's widely supported and seen as a positive thing ("yay, we get a metro station" vs. "oh shit, the bus, criminals!!1!").
you could *maybe* compare us to edmonton or vancouver, but, having just been in canada a couple weeks ago, even that's stretching it; canadian cities seem to be by default far more urban and thus conducive to transit.
this isn't to say that i don't want transit here - i do - and i even think building this line in a tunnel makes a lot of sense, due to topography and the lack of alternative routes, but trying to compare us to cities that are totally different doesn't advance the cause.