Comment by nsnick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsnick | Hacker News Reader

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MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade because it has dedicated roads/lanes everywhere it goes. Portland will eventually ban cars downtown anyway (they are close).

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.

> MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade

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.

MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.

You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.

> MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.

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.

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