Quote:
Originally Posted by milomilo
Sorry if the Portland comment sounded as more of a poke at streetcars - I honestly am interested if they are successful in Portland. It's hard to filter articles.
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If you want to rapidly gentrify an area a huge infrastructure investment helps. Hard to delineate between the effect of a street car, and the accompanying streetscape improvements though (opinion generally informed by literature I don't care to spend time looking up right now!). In the USA these go together as you need the streetcar to get federal funds for the entire project, and congress put funds earmarked specifically for Streetcars, so if you weren't attempting to build one you were potentially leaving money on the table.
We basically did this without a streetcar in the East Village and Bridgeland.
I could see the case to do this kind of infrastructure on the Bowness-Forestlawn BRT route as it would likely have a huge impact on redevelopment for the entire corridor. Would be expensive though for little travel time gain over buses with similar programming.