Portland?
* The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards.
* Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"?
* No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.
* Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
* Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density.
* Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.
Also every Canadian city, with some very rare exception to the bus lanes bit (there are like... two in Toronto).
> Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
The other things are more a matter of preference, while I think zoning insanity is the clear leader in making North America's cities and towns tend to be so tedious and isolating.
> Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
For all the investments of Dutch urban centres in bicycle infrastructure, it seems to me that it is the culture which makes or breaks this. As a more-than-commuter cyclist, I can say with confidence that a clumsy protected bicycle lane is more dangerous for cyclists (but quicker for motorists) than none at all. Most protected bicycle lanes are clumsy. Here in Hamilton (mid-tier city in Ontario), a lot of the roads are one-way (which has some benefits and drawbacks, the bus routes look funny), but on these one-way roads, the city of hamilton has installed protected two-way cycle paths. Now, these are convenient, to be sure, but you can imagine that when you get on a one way road, you do not expect oncoming traffic, this leads to all kinds of precarious situations, and (among other factors here) probably some deaths.
Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill. Plus, there is an urban growth boundary which will force higher density.
The bottlenecks in Portland are the bridges and there is at least one bridge that cars can't drive on, only busses and transit and there will be more in the future.
There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles. There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Portland is being upzoned all over the place. look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block. The suburbs of Portland haven't caught up, but in 20 years if trends continue in both places I could see Portland being more dense than San Francisco and the suburban sprawl not ending till the sierras.
Yes it is. It limits how long the train can be, because it can't block traffic downtown, which limits its capacity.
It also limits how fast it can travel. Having its own lanes is better than not, of course, but not as good as being completely physically separated. For an example of this that I'm particularly familiar with, a big part of Caltrain's unreliability comes from it having so many at-grade crossings.
> Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill.
Yes, but very slowly. The current state is that they're extremely bad. Less extremely bad than the US average, probably, but still extremely bad nonetheless.
> There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles.
Yes, and that's a good move. Would love to see more of those across the city. The way Portland has done it isn't as good as, say, Munich, but it's still a nice thing.
> There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Eh, I mean the neighborhood greenways are good, don't get me wrong, but there should still be more off-street paths and physically protected lanes on arterials.
> look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block.
I'm aware of the steady upzoning in Portland, and that's good. It's still true that they're decades away from the kind of urbanism that many cities in, say, Western Europe take for granted as the norm, where "only single family home" areas do not really exist in major cities.
You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.
That still limits its speed for that area, and its capacity everywhere.
> You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.
Nah, transit usage is much higher in SF, and BART + Caltrain + Muni is better than Portland's system.
Anyway, like I said, Portland is one of the better US cities for urbanism, it's just that that's a bit like claiming to be a more honest-than-average politician.
No bus lanes, but buses aren't just stuck in general traffic. Portland has a system that gives them priority at stoplights: https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2016/03/what_are_the_bl...