METRO Fare Hikes Hearing Scheduled Next Thursday, After Buses Stop Running

The regional bus transit agency METRO is considering a $0.25 fare increase to cover serious budget shortfalls - even though ridership is increasing, operating funds from the city and state are diminishing. The new fares would be $1.50.

Personally, I think this is a reasonable price for transit, especially compared with other cities. However, METRO ought to use this opportunity to look hard at other cost-saving options. The biggest opportunity would come from streamlining the convoluted, impractical Route 8, which takes an entire hour to run a byzantine loop across the peninsula.

Streamlining Route 8, while supplementing it with better services for elderly and disabled riders, would let METRO increase its ridership and fare revenues, while also dramatically reducing its costs.

Anyhow, METRO will hold three hearings next week in Falmouth, Westbrook, and Portland.

The Portland public hearing on the fare increase begins at 7 pm next Thursday. Hilltop resident Bobbi Keppel pointed out on the Portland Bike/Ped Committee e-mail list that this is 20 minutes before the last Route 1 bus departs from downtown to the top of Munjoy Hill.

So METRO apparently doesn't want any transit-reliant East Enders to be there. But maybe you could pool your money and split a cab.

Downeaster extension to Freeport, Brunswick funded; work to begin immediately

The White House press office has announced the projects that will receive funding for high-speed and intercity passenger rail projects through the stimulus program. Here's the rundown for the Northeast - Maine will receive $35 million to extend the Downeaster north to Brunswick, with an intermediate stop in Freeport, on rehabilitated tracks.

According to this schedule, the work should be finished by the spring of 2012.

Maine had also put in a separate request to speed travel times on the existing Portland-to-Boston route, as well as several other rail upgrades in other parts of the state, but it now seems unlikely that those projects would be funded from the stimulus.

Elsewhere, the feds will give Florida $1.25 billion to initiate a fast train between Orlando and Tampa, and $2.3 billion to get California's ambitious bullet train network off the ground.

Tom Bell has a story about the grant, with local reactions in Brunswick, in today's Press Herald.

The New Veterans Bridge

A design/build team of Reed and Reed construction, a local Maine company, and T.Y. Lin International, a global civil engineering firm, has been tentatively selected to replace the Veterans Memorial Bridge between the West End of Portland and the Maine Mall area of South Portland.

The details are still scanty, but the new bridge is almost certain to be a huge improvement for bike riders and pedestrians who would like to make the three-mile trip between the Mall area and downtown Portland. It will create a pleasant and safe new crossing point between the two cities. But the new bridge, in a new alignment, also has the potential to dramatically simplify and calm traffic at the southwestern gateway to the Portland peninsula.

Here's what the area looks like now:


Those green dotted lines are the existing sidewalks in the area, and white dotted lines indicate crosswalks. There's a sidewalk on the bridge, but it dead-ends on a freeway offramp on the South Portland side. There's also the Fore River waterfront trail, which is little-used right now - its northern end leads to a freeway off-ramp and its southern end leads into the nightmarish intersection of the bridge with Valley and Commercial Streets.

This junction is a half-acre field of pavement, so vast that it's hard to see the other side. There are a full twenty lanes coming into and out of it, and it's a huge source of confusion for everyone who gets sucked into it. The truck in this Google Street View provides a good, unintentional commentary on how safe this place is:


View Larger Map

Fortunately, the word from reliable sources indicates that the new bridge design from T.Y. Lin would dramatically simplify and shrink this intersection by bypassing it entirely. Again, details are scanty, but here's a rough sketch of their proposal:


Instead of replacing the bridge in its current location, which leads into the Tombstone junction clusterfuck, T. Y. Lin is proposing to lead the new bridge into a new T-junction with Fore River Parkway, near the new Mercy Hospital campus. A new, 12' wide bicycle and pedestrian trail on the bridge would link to existing sidewalks and a little-used dead-end spur of the Fore River Trail south of Mercy Hospital. The word is that the bridge itself will also include bumped-out viewing platforms along its length, which would commemorate veterans, and that its length would be illuminated with human-scaled streetlamps (as opposed to freeway floodlights).

The realignment will save a lot of money, since the new bridge would be slightly shorter and allow the builders to work while the old bridge remains in service. But once the new bridge is open, there will also be an opportunity to reduce lanes and calm traffic at the junction of Commercial and Valley Streets, which will go from an awkward four-way intersection to a three-way T-junction. The five lanes leading to and from the old bridge will disappear, and turn into a park. But three additional turn lanes leading from Valley, Commercial, and Fore River Parkway would also become obsolete, making room for median pedestrian refuges, or larger sidewalks.

One of those lanes - the long, right-turn slip lane from Fore River Parkway to the old bridge - could be retrofitted as a new sidewalk on the south side of the railroad overpass. This conversion would significantly reduce the city's long-term maintenance costs on this smaller bridge, and create continuous sidewalks on both sides of the Fore River Parkway between Valley Street and the new Mercy Hospital campus.

More detailed bridge designs should be available soon, and some elements are still open to tweaking. A public hearing on the proposed design will probably happen in February or early March, so that final designs can be completed for construction in the spring. Stay tuned.

Help Set Portland's Bicycling Agenda

Earlier this year, Portland submitted an application to the League of American Bicyclists to become a certified "bicycle-friendly community." We didn't win any awards, but the League did send back a list of detailed criteria - sort of a checklist of steps that Portland can take in order to improve.

Now, the City wants the public's input on which of those steps we should be taking first. Should the city invest its limited resources into more bike lanes? Education and enforcement? Making critical connections easier to bike across?

Help us decide, this Saturday morning:

Saturday, Jan. 9, 2009
from 9am to Noon
Merrill Rehearsal Hall, entrance on Myrtle Street behind City Hall.

Please register ahead of time by following this link, so that we'll know how many people to expect.

I'll bring donuts from Tony's!

WiFi Technology Moves Travelers to Transit

NPR's Marketplace radio show last night had a story about the booming inter-city bus services, and how new on-board amenities like wifi service is letting bus services steal market share from airlines and Amtrak. Here's the transcript, and an excerpt:

ANDREA BERNSTEIN: Brandon Prust is not the kind of guy you might expect to take the bus. He's wearing a nice suit and overcoat, and has a laptop slung over his shoulder. The international finance worker might have taken the train...

BRANDON PRUST: But there's no Wi-Fi. So if there were Wi-Fi, I'd probably take Amtrak but...

BERNSTEIN: Do you ever think the bus is kinda low class? It's you know...

PRUST: Not this one.

Here in Maine, though, the situation is reversed: the Downeaster passenger rail service offers wifi for its passengers, but Concord Coach hasn't... yet.

That will soon change, though: a number of new buses run by Concord Coach in Maine now sport their own free wifi connections. Still, for the time being, the new white buses are only a small part of the Portland-to-Boston fleet. There's no way to know whether the bus you'll be riding has wifi until it's time to go, so it's a bit of a crapshoot for passengers. Hopefully Concord Coach will roll out the technology to the rest of its buses quickly, so that its passengers can be as certain about getting wifi as they are about getting a mediocre movie.

According to the Downeaster's manager, Patricia Quinn, an on-board wifi connection costs about $230 per unit, plus $45 a month for the service. For a bus carrying hundreds of passengers a day, those costs are pretty minor, and they're likely to be offset by the addition of new (and happier) riders. Other bus services, like the ZOOM Turnpike Express, a commuter bus that travels between Biddeford and Portland, should also be adopting this technology as soon as they can.

Whether it's on a bus or a train, wifi on transit services is just one more reason that fewer and fewer people are willing to waste their time in the driver's seat of an automobile.

The Boom: The Best New Buildings of the Decade

The 'aughts are almost over. This was the decade of the real estate bubble, but it would be easy to assume that the bubble passed us by. After all, the city's skyline, as viewed from Falmouth or across the harbor in South Portland, hasn't changed much in the past 10 years.

But take a closer look, by walking along the city's main streets and through its neighborhoods, and it's clear that Portland is substantially newer and more vibrant than it was in 1999, when I graduated from Bonny Eagle High School and left for college in that other Portland. Many of the buildings are the same, but they've been refurbished and re-inhabited with households and businesses that care more about them. And elsewhere, abandoned lots and under-utilized parking spaces have given way to new housing and businesses.

The Portland peninsula has sprouted dozens of new buildings in the past decade. Here are five of my picks for the best, in no particular order (I'll post five more in a follow-up post next week):

• Bayside East. Corner of Smith and Oxford Streets, East Bayside. Designed by Scott Teas, TFH Architects. Completed 2008.
  
  While prosperity arrived in most of Portland's neighborhoods during the 2000s, East Bayside was largely left out. The neighborhood is centrally-located geographically, but it remains isolated thanks to the lousy ideas of 1960s urban renewal: a monopoly of government-owned housing and dead-end streets cut off by the wretched Franklin Arterial. It's Portland's most Detroit-like neighborhood.
  
  Bayside East is a another affordable housing project, but unlike its older neighbors, it doesn't look like one. The south-facing patio works well as a pleasant public space for the building's residents, and the solar hot water heaters take a prominent place as a sort of awning on the top floor.
  
  It's not at all flashy, but of all of Portland's new buildings, this one might be the most successful at integrating itself into the scale and context of Portland's central-city neighborhoods. It goes a long way towards healing East Bayside's tattered urban fabric.
  
  
• 280 Fore Street, by SMRT Architects. Completed 2004.
  
  There was a time when banks invested in good, quality buildings to establish a public trust in the solidity of their institutions.
  
  During the 2000s, though, most banks were content to put up cheap offices ringed with drive-thrus. Banks literally sought to emulate fast-food joints, both in the facile idiocy of their products and in the shittiness of their architecture. And then they collapsed.
  
  Bangor Savings Bank wasn't immune from this impulse - they built Burger Bank franchises out on Brighton Ave. and over the bridge in South Portland's Mill Creek Strip Mall - but at least they put some effort into their downtown Portland branch and corporate offices. It's a quality building, and the curved acute angle of its northern corner adds a dynamic presence to the corner of Franklin and Fore Streets. I don't mind admitting that my admiration for the building led me to choose this bank over its competition.
  
  
• 490 Congress St., by Jim Sterling. Completed 2007.
  
  Like the W.L. Blake Building addition below, this is an attractive modernist structure that fits in well with its historic surroundings on Congress Street. It's even more striking in the context of what it replaced, a pair of half-abandoned 2-story hovels that stuck out like a missing incisor in Congress Street's smile.
  
  The wide glass windows and striking metal siding probably make this building the city's most stereotypical example of 'aughts architecture. It's clearly making a hard sales pitch for "loft living" - you can even buy Eames chairs and contemporary art from the ground-floor retail tenants. Still, it's a damned attractive sales pitch, and even if it's a bit cliched I much prefer this to the urban abandonment that prevailed in the latter half of the last century.
  
  
• W.L. Blake Building Addition, 79 Commercial St. By David Lloyd of Archetype Architects. Completed 2001.
  
  This was one of the first new buildings of the 'aughts, and it set a good precedent. The new building respects its historic neighbors on either side by adopting the same scale and massing. But it stops short of imitating their brick cladding and granite sills and lintels (unlike most other new buildings in the city, regrettably) with fine-looking building materials of our own era.
  
  The view from inside the offices must be incredible. But the view from the street ain't bad, either.
  
  
• Unity Village, Stone, Oxford, and Cumberland Streets. By Winton Scott Architects. Completed 2001.
  
  At the beginning of this decade, the city was in the midst of a severe housing shortage, thanks to decades of pointlessly-restrictive zoning and a resulting lack of investment.
  
  Unity Village was one of the city's first proactive efforts to turn things around. City Hall offered up three city-owned parking lots behind city hall to developer Richard Berman (disclosure: I helped build his company's website) for a new, mixed-income housing complex. Today, it's a place where the newly-homeless can live comfortably and unassumingly next to white-collar downtown office workers and immigrant families. The homes have abundant porches that mesh the private life of the households with the vibrant public life of the narrow street and a nearby playground.
  
  If Unity Village hadn't been as successful as it is, the City could easily have slid back into the old habit of Not-In-My-Backyard zoning, which would have effectively stymied most of the other projects listed here. Instead, it helped spark the broader revitalization of Bayside. Unity Village demonstrated to Portlanders that new development - even if it brought poor people into the neighborhood - could be an improving asset for the community.
  
  

Paul Niehoff, a planner for the Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System (PACTS) committees, writes:

On behalf of the PACTS staff and Bruce Hyman Planning, thank all of you for your interest and enthusiastic participation in the update of our 1995 Bike/Pedestrian Plan. A lot of thought and hard work went into this plan and we think its excellent document.

It can now be accessed and commented on at our new blog site; PACTS Blog.

We hope you enjoy and utilize it. Let us know what you think!