Thursday, December 20, 2012

Who decided that luxury demands pollution and waste?


Luxury: indulge yourself.      Sacrifice: save the planet.



There are two aspects to the transition to a clean-energy economy. First, we need to clean up the way we make energy. Second, we need to use less of it.


People usually assume that if it's good for the planet, it's going to mean a sacrifice for us. But pollution and waste do not always enrich our lives. There's no inherent luxury in a drafty home or an hour-long commute in heavy traffic. If we get smarter about how we make and use energy, we can save time and money and live more convenient, enjoyable lives.


1. Change the way we produce and distribute energy. 


We need to transition from coal-fired power plants to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. The technology has already been worked out, the costs are coming down as the industry expands, and renewable energy plants are already attracting lots of private capital. Most importantly, they are less expensive than new coal or nuclear plants, and they don't pollute. 


We need to build a smart grid to distribute the energy we produce efficiently, and to bring power from the most effective production sites to the places that need it most.


2. Use energy more efficiently.


There's no reason the average American needs to use twice as much energy as the average European and still have a lower standard of living. Modernization is not about sacrificing to save the planet, it's about getting more for less. Most of the things we need to do to stop wasting so much energy will in fact make our lives more comfortable and convenient, and they'll save us all a lot of money in the long run. 


The most important way to save energy is to transition from suburban sprawl to walkable urbanism. The largest unmet demand in real estate today is for homes in walkable urban neighborhoods, and we have a generation of young people who have no intention of starting and ending each day sitting alone in a car, stuck in traffic with nothing to do. The next generation is ready for electric cars, but they're not ready for the cost of maintaining and expanding the system of roads, let alone the congestion or the hours of wasted time getting from here to there. They want to be able to connect with friends on the train home from work, walk two blocks to an apartment with a doorman and a view, stop on the corner for groceries, and walk to dinner and a movie in the neighborhood.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

The Joy and Heartbreak of Flexibility


Exit the #11


I heard Forrest Claypool speak at City Club this week, and he did a good job of explaining the difficult and ultimately successful task of reprioritizing, getting labor concessions, and making service cuts to balance the CTA’s budget. One of those cuts was the #11 bus through Lincoln Park, and it’s making a lot of people angry. Still, on the whole, it’s an impressive achievement.

Seventy years ago, transit agencies decided buses are better than streetcars because the routes can be added, discontinued, or redrawn at any time. Buses are flexible. That’s a big advantage for a transit agency that’s trying to balance its budget in the face of changing demographic trends like urban divestment, suburban sprawl, white flight, and so forth. It’s not the CTA’s job to make the city a better place to live, to help it attract people from the suburbs, or outcompete other cities. The CTA is just supposed to take people where they want to go.

If cancelling the #11 bus means a steep decline in foot traffic on Lincoln Avenue, and businesses fail up and down the street, that’s not the CTA’s fault. If you’re too young or too old to drive, or just too sensible to spend $12,000 a year on a car (the average in Chicago), you’ll have to walk to the L—but that’s not the CTA’s fault. And if Lincoln Avenue becomes a place to drive through instead of a place to live, and that spoils the quality of life and causes property values in the neighborhood to decline, that’s not the CTA’s fault either.

I know Forrest Claypool cares about repopulating the vacated parts of our city and making Chicago easier to get around in. I know he wants to grow the economy and reduce traffic congestion. I know he cares about helping Chicagoans reduce their household debt, waste less on driving, and invest more in real estate or their kids’ education. I know he wants us to be able to take transit to work so we don’t have to spend two or three hours of every workday working to pay for the car that got us there. I know he wants to fix all that. He just needs more tools in the toolbox.


Enter the Streetcar


Cities all over the United States are either building or planning modern streetcar lines. For the most part, they’re not transit projects—other cities don’t have the kind of population density and transit ridership we do in Chicago to make their streetcars cost-effective as transit systems. Instead, American streetcars are usually business and property development initiatives. Everywhere they go in, they increase property values and boost local business. They spark economic growth and urban revitalization.

Why? Because the public commitment to building streetcar infrastructure—to putting tracks in the street—mitigates the risk for developers and investors. It ensures that the location will retain its value regardless of gas prices and recessions. It’s a promise of lasting convenience and walkability for businesses and homeowners alike. That spurs and channels growth all along the streetcar line.

For the CTA, the big advantage of the bus is flexibility. But you don’t want flexibility if you just signed a fifteen-year lease. You don’t want flexibility if you just bought a big apartment, thinking you could afford it because you weren’t going to have to own, maintain, insure, fuel, and park a car. You don’t want flexibility if you’re thinking of investing in a new mixed-use transit-oriented development. The homeowner doesn’t want flexibility, the developer doesn’t want flexibility, and the banker doesn’t want flexibility. Everybody engaged in building up a neighborhood, in making it more vibrant and convenient and fun to live in, wants reliability. Predictability. Commitment. 

The streetcar is not just about taking people where they want to go, it’s about building strong, enduring neighborhoods. 

Monday, July 9, 2012

Streetcars make safer streets

Barcelona



  
Modern streetcars are long, light-rail trains operating at safe speeds on neighborhood streets. They can travel as fast as commuter trains through open countryside to connect outlying suburbs with the city. But in town they slow to 20 or 30 mph—like cars and buses except they’re not stuck in traffic. Because they move predictably along a path clearly marked before them by the rails in the street, a streetcar moving 30 mph is much less dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists than a bus moving 30 mph—not to mention a taxi or an SUV with a mom on the phone and kids in the back. At slower speeds streetcars can mix safely with crowds of people on pedestrian shopping streets.

Dusseldorf

No need to climb stairs to a platform: you can shop while you wait for the train, and board right from the sidewalk. People roll on and off the low-floor vehicles quickly and easily through multiple doors. With electric power they accelerate and brake smoothly, and they don’t pollute the air with diesel fumes. They reduce traffic congestion, boost local business, increase property values, and they’re cheaper to operate than buses. Plus they’re cool.


Orleans

Friday, June 15, 2012

BRT or streetcar? The choice is about more than just the transit system

There's a lot of debate in transit circles about whether to invest in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or modern streetcars. For high-capacity systems in big cities, BRT costs less to install, but streetcars cost less to operate (the longer trains carry more people per driver and the drivers are 75% of the operating cost). As a result, so far BRT has been more popular in the developing world, where capital is scarce and labor is cheap; wealthier industrialized countries with union wages have preferred the higher up-front costs of a rail system that saves money over the long run.

Bus Rapid Transit in Bogotá, Colombia and modern streetcar in Strasbourg, France.




  
But the choice is not just between two different transit systems.


Buses and streetcars have very different impacts on the streets in which they operate. Our choice has profound implications for the character of the street--for how attractive it is to people to shop or go out to dinner there, to invest in property or start a business or raise a family there. 


There's a big difference between a line of diesel buses and a long electric streetcar. 


I'm excited that the city of Chicago is investing in upgrading to faster bus service on Western and Ashland: buses that are now stuck in car traffic are going to get a lane of their own. Someday maybe they’ll upgrade further to the "gold standard" of Bus Rapid Transit by investing (a lot) in special buses with multiple doors, raised curbs for level boarding, and big stations for pre-payment. Maybe someday they’ll even spring for hybrid electric buses, which cost three times as much but don’t foul the air as badly as the old-fashioned diesel buses we’ve got today.


The Bus Rapid Transit "gold standard," and what it looks like when it really works.




I hope this really works and a lot of people switch from driving and taxis to riding the bus. If it does really work, this could evolve into a pretty high capacity transit system. If it really works, those buses will be lined up end to end like in Curitiba or Bogotá or Brisbane. That’s fine with me, because I’m not planning on strolling around to shop on Western Avenue, or riding my bike there, or having dinner there at a sidewalk café.

I can’t imagine ever doing any of those things next to a line of buses.

When we upgrade to a high-capacity transit system on the shopping street in my neighborhood, I hope we go with electric streetcars: clean, quiet, and safe.

Good place for BRT.

Good place for streetcars.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

This is not the suburbs

Does this look like the suburbs?













Clark Street. From Daley Plaza at the heart of the Chicago Loop, it heads north along the Gold Coast and ambles through Lincoln Park and Lakeview on the way to Wrigley Field. 

This is not the suburbs.

The Clark Street corridor is a walkable urban neighborhood that we’ve been treating like sprawling suburbia—like a place to drive through rather than a place to live.

The largest unmet demand in American real estate is for walkable urbanism—neighborhoods close to downtown with high-quality (rail) transit service and lots of amenities within walking distance of home. There is plenty of demand for a few such neighborhoods in Chicago, too.

There are too many people living in the Clark Street corridor for it to be efficiently served by a transportation infrastructure that prioritizes through traffic and parking over transit and biking on every single street. What works in the more sprawling, auto-dependent neighborhoods to the west doesn’t work near the lakefront. There’s no reason we should continue to treat all of our 814 streets as though they were all the same, when they’re obviously not. There’s plenty of room for some variety in Chicago—for a few streets that prioritize pedestrians, or cyclists, or transit over cars. When it comes to streets, we could use a little more choice and competition.

The good news is that we have enough density in the Clark Street corridor to justify having one street that prioritizes commuter transit and shopping over driving and parking. It's the densest place in the city. We’re lucky to have enough density for world-class transit, for great neighborhood shopping in a pedestrian environment, and for car ownership to be an option rather than a necessity. We can spend less on car loans, gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking and more on real estate and restaurants. We could be wasting less time stuck in a car than anyone in Chicago—and spending more time at the beach or the bar, the zoo or the Cubs game, with our families and our friends.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Time for greatness

The density of a city and the transportation infrastructure that serves it generally evolve together. As population density changes, the infrastructure adapts to provide an appropriate, cost-effective, efficient mix of options for getting around town.

From its founding through the 1950s, the city of Chicago became increasingly dense. It was planned and developed around the largest network of streetcars that has ever existed. There was an electric streetcar line on almost every street, and there could be no development without one. 


In the 1950s automobiles and buses replaced streetcars and the city's population began to decline, sprawling out into the suburbs. Taxpayers fled, while spending to build and maintain roads ballooned as we replaced streetcars with the most expensive and least efficient transportation option on the menu: the private car. The result is some of the worst traffic congestion in America. While the suburbs have continued to grow, by 2010 the population of the city itself had declined to its lowest point since 1910. 


But things have begun to change again. For many, the dream of suburban living has evolved into a nightmare of traffic congestion, parking lots, and strip malls. It's boring. People have been moving back downtown for the convenience and the culture. Dynamic companies have begun relocating to the city center to attract a creative workforce that favors urban living. It's more fun. 

The transportation infrastructure needs to accommodate and encourage greater density and continued economic development. We need a growth-oriented strategy that brings more people and fewer cars into the Loop every year--more commerce and less congestion. The system we have today was designed for the era of suburban flight. It’s out of sync with the future of Chicago. 

It’s time for an upgrade to a modern transportation infrastructure that’s in time with the great city we are becoming. 

Greatness.


Mediocrity.


Greatness.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Reverse Option Analysis

My antidote for the status quo bias is the Reverse Option Analysis. That’s where you reverse the positions of the status quo and the proposed change. You treat the proposed change as if we had been living with it for generations; you treat the status quo as if if were a proposal for something new.
Ready?


How would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?


The Reverse Option Analysis makes the status quo bias obvious: people accept buses in traffic not because it’s a good strategy but because it’s the status quo.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Status Quo Bias



How come no one ever has to make an argument in defense of the status quo?

I spend a lot of my time making an argument for change—for designing smarter systems and investing more responsibly. How come those of us who want change have to work so hard to make a convincing argument, while advocates of the status quo get to just sit back and shake their heads?

There’s a good reason, actually. It’s the status quo bias.

The status quo bias is a good thing. It’s essential to our ability to survive and thrive. Our instinctive conservatism—our preference for keeping things the way they are—protects us from incapacitating self-doubt and the misery of regret (did I marry the wrong guy, choose the wrong career, buy too big a house?). It relieves us of the burden of constantly reassessing our past choices. It keeps us from becoming mired in thoughts of what might have been and allows us to get on with our lives, to make the best of what we have.

But as an advocate of change, the status quo bias is my biggest problem.

Good enough is the enemy of better.

The status quo bias is that look people get on their faces when they realize that I’m rethinking what they’ve always accepted as the natural state of things. They look at me like I’m asking, Are you sure you’re happy in that marriage? Are you sure that’s the right job for you? Didn’t you overspend on that house?

They can recognize that there’s a problem with the role of cars in our city. They can acknowledge that other cities have undertaken major changes that have fixed that problem, and that—theoretically, at least—we could do it too. And still it is inconceivable that we would do anything at all about it. There’s a gap between “we should” and “we won’t”: it’s the status quo bias.

It’s the status quo bias that allows people to confidently dismiss progress with the phrase, “That would be great, but it’ll never happen.”

The status quo bias serves us well from day to day, but it’s a liability when we’re deciding how to invest billions of dollars in taxes, making decisions that determine what assets and liabilities taxpayers will own for generations to come. Big, strategic decisions (more highways, parking lots, and congestion or a modern electric tram in every neighborhood?) deserve an unbiased, objective, critical thought process.

For public-policy decisions to determine how we invest in energy and transportation infrastructure, we should adopt the following practices:

(1) Acknowledge the natural status quo bias in ourselves and others, and make a conscious effort to be open-minded and creative in our thinking in order to compensate for the status quo bias;

(2) Be just as critical and demanding of the status quo as we are of proposals for change, so that we make a fair and rational comparison between them; and

(3) Consider the Reverse Option: for example, how would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?

Friday, April 20, 2012

Is Chicago dense enough for streetcars?

People look at picturesque images of European cities with families walking together on pedestrian shopping streets, businessmen stepping aboard sleek electric trams, and well-dressed women biking to work in heels. They say, "It's just completely different there. There must be some good reason why we can't have that. We're too spread out, our cities were made for cars. We can't afford great public transit."

What if, in fact, every street in Chicago was originally designed for streetcars and pedestrians? What if it turned out that we had more population, more density and more traffic congestion--more reason to invest in walkable, transit-optimized streets--than they do? What if the every-man-for-himself approach to transportation planning turned out to be the most expensive option on the menu, and we ended up spending more time and money getting where we need to go than everyone else?


Strasbourg has one-tenth our population and less density. In 1994 they fixed their urban congestion problem and boosted their economy by replacing cars and buses on many downtown streets with modern streetcars that also connect commuter suburbs to the core. These light-rail vehicles rocket through the countryside like wind-powered bullet trains, then glide slowly and safely through the city's residential and shopping streets.





Monday, April 16, 2012

Clark Street: a good place to start

Most of the many new streetcar lines being developed in the U.S. are primarily business and property development initiatives rather than transit projects. They go in as catalysts to spark growth in underdeveloped neighborhoods. Revitalizing cities with infill development on vacant urban parcels instead of investing in more suburban sprawl is good. But it’s a long process, and one that takes great vision, political will, and long-term commitment from major stakeholders.


The Clark Street streetcar project is easier.

It’s the low-hanging fruit in the modernization of Chicago’s transportation infrastructure. It’s a good place for a starter line not because it would have the greatest positive impact on the city, but because Clark Street is the easiest place to demonstrate how a great a modern streetcar can be for a neighborhood.

The people are already here, and they’re already taking transit. We’re already spending a lot of money providing them with buses stuck in traffic.

Some neighborhoods in Chicago (like Lincoln Park) deserve streetcars because they already have the density and ridership to motivate upgrading to a more efficient mode than buses stuck in traffic. Other neighborhoods (like the near South Side) are vastly underdeveloped in light of their outstanding locations, and these are ripe for the kind of development seeded by streetcars that we’ve seen in Portland’s Pearl District.

Because of how diverse Chicago is in terms of population density and development potential, we should expect to see streetcars serving different purposes—maybe even along a single line. The Clark Street line might continue south through the Loop, swing past McCormick Center, and along Cottage Grove to Hyde Park. The north half of the line would be primarily a transit efficiency and congestion reduction project, while the south half would be primarily a neighborhood development and revitalization project. 

We might some day see an entirely different third type of streetcar project along Milwaukee Avenue. Instead of building a tremendously expensive express train between the Loop and O’Hare Airport, we could build a modern streetcar line on Milwaukee and convert the Blue Line to express service. That would cost about one-tenth as much as building a new heavy-rail express train. And the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar would provide much better transit service than the Blue Line: travel times would be similar, but the stations would be at street level right in the neighborhood instead of elevated and in the middle of the highway. The new streetcar would boost property values and business all along the line. 

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The next generation

The stats
From 2001-2009, among Americans aged 16-34,
Driving is down 23%
Biking is up 24%
Transit use is up 40%
Among those with a household income over $70,000, transit use is up 100% and biking is up 122%.
Source
Article about the report


Recently a friend told me about her son’s trip with some friends to a national park out west. They took the train. I thought that was an indication of their environmental awareness, but no—she said they took the train so they could play the whole way.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but young people today don’t want to do one thing at a time. They don’t want to make separate trips for everything. They don’t want to begin and end their day with an hour of sitting behind the wheel looking at the bumper in front of them. They want to be able to work, relax, or connect with friends on the way to work. They want to be able to shop on the way home. They want to live upstairs from a fun restaurant, down the street from a great bar, and around the corner from a movie theater.

The next generation will take transit not because it’s green but because driving is boring. They’ll live in walkable urban neighborhoods not because it’s fashionable but because being dependent on a car is such a hassle. To these kids, the idea that they would have to work the first two hours of the just to pay for owning, fueling, insuring, maintaining, and parking a car, which they would be stuck sitting in for a further two hours of the day just to get to the office and back, all so they can live in a suburban development where there’s nothing to do, is plainly insane.

What they want is to live in a streetcar neighborhood. The streetcar is a catalyst for economic development—the kind of development based on convenience, efficiency, comfort, and a socially interactive and vibrant urban lifestyle.


Monday, April 9, 2012

Don't wake up in a roadside ditch


Commercial photographers and location scouts know that most things have an established meaning even if we’re not consciously aware of what that meaning is. Their job is to put people and products into scenes that clearly, if subconsciously, convey the values of the brand or the feelings of the person shown.

You can learn a lot about American culture by searching through stock photography websites. I once designed a showroom for a wood flooring manufacturer, and by searching for stock images that had been tagged by their photographers with “wood floor,” I learned that wood flooring means authenticity. When you want to convey that a couple having breakfast together are really in love and not just sleeping together, you show them sprawled out on an old wood floor. If you want people who come to your restaurant to know there’s someone in the kitchen who really cares about them, you need to have a wood floor.

What do trains mean? What does “rail” mean?

There’s a TV commercial that warns people to give up cable and switch to satellite television, because otherwise you’ll get frustrated, hurt yourself, get an eye patch, get chased by thugs, and be left lying in a roadside ditch. What is the appropriate scene for getting chased by thugs? Where would they attack you and leave you in a ditch?


"Don't wake up in a roadside ditch."


It would have to be someplace where there are no people around. An abandoned industrial zone with no apartments, no offices, and no shops. How do we know for sure that no one will be coming by anytime soon? Because of the train, of course.

Trains go where people don’t. No one wants to be where trains are. Trains ruin every place they go, so they have to be segregated out away from where people want to live and work and shop.

Trains have this meaning in America because our experience of them is limited to freight trains, long-distance passenger trains (Amtrak), commuter trains (Metra), and heavy-rail elevated and subway trains (CTA). Until the 1950s, though, Chicago had the largest network of streetcars that has ever existed anywhere: practically every street in the city was designed and developed around the streetcar. When I talk about reintroducing electric streetcars to Chicago, sometimes someone will say, “What—right in the street? Where the people are?”

In many German cities, they never completely abandoned the streetcar lines, and in recent decades they’ve been making a huge comeback all over Europe. Modern streetcars are long, low-floor electric trains that carry something like 288 passengers and run on renewable energy. They run like wind-powered bullet trains connecting suburbs and satellite communities with the urban core. Once downtown they serve as “pedestrian facilitators,” gliding safely and predictably on rails down car-free pedestrian shopping streets. Even in smaller, low-density towns, there’s a “shopping street” with lots of people, outdoor cafes, and a tram running down the middle of it. Like Americans—we love our malls—Europeans prefer to stroll in a car-free environment while shopping and dining.


Streetcars and people go together.


The streetcar goes where the people want to be, and people gather where the streetcar goes.

Here in the States we have a number of examples of streetcars bringing people together, especially tourists in shopping and sightseeing areas, in places like San Francisco and New Orleans. And all over America, cities are investing in new streetcar lines—not as transit initiatives, but as a catalyst for economic development and renewed urban life.

Chicago was born a city of streetcars and pedestrians. We fell asleep for fifty years or so and woke up to find ourselves in a roadside ditch. But at least we’re awake now, and if we’re willing to pick our heads up and look around a little, the way out of that ditch—and back to a city of life—is as clear as day.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Why is the Clark Street corridor still stuck with buses?

The Clark Street corridor runs through a series of north-side neighborhoods between the Red Line elevated train and the lakefront—the area far enough east that transit riders take the bus because it’s too far to walk to the L.

This is the most densely populated area of Chicago, and the four zip codes with the highest transit ridership in the city. Over 70,000 people board buses on an average weekday in the Clark Street corridor—that’s more than on the average elevated train line.

Car commuters are a minority here, and almost all who drive to work are headed for the suburbs or for the Loop via Lake Shore Drive. Clark is too narrow to be a good commuting route for most drivers—it was designed for streetcars and pedestrians, and has become choked with through traffic. There’s too much congestion and not enough parking for Clark Street to be an attractive place to shop by car, so local business depends almost entirely on foot traffic.

Half of the buses in the corridor run down Clark Street itself, crawling through heavy rush-hour traffic at little more than walking pace. The other half avoid that traffic by running along the outside of the neighborhood near the lakefront. There’s less congestion there, but no businesses, so commuters forego the convenience of shopping on the way home and local business loses the benefit of all that foot traffic.

It’s a tough compromise. It would be better for commuters and for local business owners if all the buses went down Clark, through the heart of the neighborhood business district, but there’s just too much car traffic for that.
















It seems to me we have four choices.

First, we could do nothing: stick with the bus system we have. As the city grows, increasing congestion will force more drivers onto buses, but those buses will be stuck in traffic too, running slower and slower every year. Our inefficient transit system and worsening traffic congestion are already costing us $7.3 billion annually in wasted time, and have become a powerful barrier to economic growth.

Second, we could make it easier to drive through the neighborhood by removing the bike lanes, parking, and trees and narrowing the sidewalks. We could add another lane to Lake Shore Drive going each direction. That would bring a lot more cars into downtown, and we’d have to figure out what to do with them (maybe build some high-rise parking structures with automated car elevators?). And expanding LSD would be really, really expensive: about $100 million per mile. Unfortunately, adding more capacity to urban highways just encourages more people to drive, so the additional capacity fills up quickly until congestion was as bad as before.

Third, we could build a new heavy-rail elevated train line along the periphery of the neighborhood or a subway beneath Clark Street. Unlike the road infrastructure, the train service would become more frequent and cheaper per trip as more people used it, which would encourage economic growth while alleviating congestion. But at $300 million per mile, elevated trains and subways have become so expensive that almost no one’s building them anymore.

Fourth, and finally, we could consolidate transit service from the periphery to Clark Street, bringing commuters through the heart of the neighborhood business district where they can combine commuting and shopping. We could move car traffic from Clark out to the periphery, where there’s less congestion. That would allow transit to move freely in a dedicated lane rather than being stuck in traffic, which would make the commute much faster and attract many to take transit instead of driving. That would essentially make Clark Street a bus rapid transit (BRT) route.

But we already have over 70,000 daily bus boardings—even if faster service and convenient shopping didn’t attract any new riders, which they surely would. With that kind of transit ridership (more than most elevated train lines), it would be cheaper to invest in upgrading to light rail—a modern electric streetcar running in a dedicated lane down Clark Street. At $30 million per mile, it’s a big investment, but a lot less than building more roads and only about 10% of the cost of an elevated train or subway. And because each driver of the long, articulated modern streetcar can transport two or three times as many passengers as on a bus (288 instead of 84 or 125), and since the drivers account for 75% of the operating cost of a transit system, streetcars would be much cheaper to operate than buses, saving taxpayers money in the long run. The fact that they don’t pollute, are safer to be around because they move predictably on rails, and increase property values (buses don’t) are all added bonuses. In Portland, the new streetcar has sparked enough development along the line to quickly pay for itself in additional tax revenue.

My choice would be to consolidate those buses and upgrade them to a modern electric streetcar line that transforms Clark Street into a world-class environment for commuting and shopping.