Bayside

Ten years after the City published its "New Vision for Bayside," and three years after the financial collapse scuttled a competitive slate of development proposals for the neighborhood, the empty, city-owned lots along Kennebec Street finally have a new owner.

The Federated Cos. now own five separate building lots between Somerset Street and the Bayside Trail. Details are still in the works, but city planners have verbally described plans to build mixed-use buildings and (in the first phase of development) a 500-car parking garage subsidized by the city and federal governments.

Map via the Portland Press Herald.

The Federated Cos. website shows a portfolio of mostly architecturally bland apartment complexes (although a planned reuse of a historic mill site in Worcester looks like a more interesting and creative project) and only a limited focus on retail and office development.

Still, even a vanilla mid-rise apartment building would be an improvement for lower Bayside, where there's already an abundance of retail services and office space, and not that many apartments. Adding a lot of housing to these blocks will add a lot of housing within easy walking distance of three big supermarkets, a pharmacy, the trail, and downtown Portland's jobs. And even the blandest architecture is better than an empty, trash-strewn lot.

The city has built incentives into the sale agreement to make sure that Federated actually builds something instead of just land banking the property: " Federated would have six months to get permits and approvals for its development plans, or pay $3,000 each for up to three 30-day extensions," according to the Press Herald, and City Hall will also have the right to buy back the property at the same price if nothing happens within 2 years of site plan approval.

Photo of the Elm Street sidewalk near Marginal Way by Corey Templeton, from his Walk Around Portland blog. This is at the western end of the newly-sold property, and the only way to get to Trader Joe's, due to landlord Peter Quesada's spite fence.

While the fast-track provisions are designed to make Bayside more of a neighborhood, I'm also a little concerned that the city's anxiousness to build something will come at the sacrifice of getting a better project for the long term. Also, there's the fact that infrastructure in the neighborhood doesn't match the city's ambitions for a walkable, transit-oriented district: bus routes haven't been adjusted or expanded (even though thousands of new workers and residents have arrived in recent years), sidewalks are broken and discontinuous (see image at right), and the Bayside Trail, while nice, is not particularly useful as a transportation connection (thanks to bad design and idiot landlords like Peter Quesada, who erects chain-link fences in order to inconvenience his tenants' customers).

In an ideal world, the Federated Cos. would realize that they could reduce their parking costs and add value to their own project by making small improvements to the streets and sidewalks adjacent to their property, and thinking creatively about the empty and under-utilized spaces in the surrounding blocks. I have some ideas on that score that I'll write about here soon...

Go Play in Traffic

John Brooking, the founder of the Portland Bike Commuters' Meetup Group, will be leading a 3-part introductory course on how to cycle safely and confidently on busy roads.

Here's John's description of the first class, "Train Your Bike," coming up on Saturday June 11 from 9 am to 1 pm:

In this three hours of fun you will train your bike to perform at low speed, at high speed and in emergency situations.

You will teach your bike to behave:

• As you start and stop correctly
• Stop without putting a foot down
• Maneuver with precision at low speeds
• Communicate with the drivers behind you
• Race sloooowly

You will teach your bike to be frisky at high speed:

• Use your gears efficiently to accelerate
• Avoid obstacles with the rock dodge
• Dance through a slalom course
• Corner with precision

You will teach your bike to get you out of trouble

• Snap turn 90° in a 4ft radius
• Stop on a dime ~ without going over the handlebars

The full course also includes these future classes:

The truth and techniques of traffic cycling (3 hrs):
Classroom session. Discover that bicycling is very safe and that with a few simple techniques, you can make your own cycling virtually conflict-free.

Tour of Portland (3.5 hrs):*
On-road tour. We will show you simple strategies to eliminate obstacles and ride with ease and confidence in places you might never have thought possible. *requires completion of previous 2 classes

A la carte session $30/each; full course package $75. Register online here.

What about a Streetcar in this Portland?

As a citizens committee mulls over how to improve Forest Avenue, I've been mulling over whether it might be a good place to try to build Maine's first modern streetcar.

I've run some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and I think that Portland could afford it - I'd actually go so far to say that Portland could easily afford it. It could well end up making the city fiscally better-off: smart-growth developers love streetcars, and a line along Forest could spur dozens of building projects to bring new thousands of new jobs and housing units into the corridor's empty and underutilized lots.

The stretch of Forest Avenue from Bayside to Woodfords Corner could be a really cool Main Street for Portland, similar to Congress Street downtown or Commercial Street in the Old Port. It's got a big university campus anchoring one end, and the down-on-its-heels-but-still-kicking Woodfords business district on the other, and a smattering of fine historic buildings and neighborhood attractions in between.

Unfortunately, a few businesses and landlords along the street are more interested in serving cars than in serving their own neighbors, and their drive-thrus and blighted parking lots are dragging the entire neighborhood down. Even the banks seem to be anti-development: two brand-new branches built within the past decade are killing the neighborhood's foot traffic (not to mention choke the neighborhood's vehicular traffic) with hideous drive-thru teller lines.

Still, a high-quality transit service might convince them that those parking lots and driveways might be more valuable as housing or workspace. By my rough count, there are over 20 acres of aging strip mall, parking lot, or empty land along the line from Woodfords Corner to downtown:

View Dowtown Streetcar feasibility in a larger map

If just a handful of those lots were redeveloped with 4-5 story buildings, the city could gain a few hundred thousand dollars annually in new tax revenue - enough to pay for the annual operations costs of a streetcar line. And many of these lots are owned by the government, from the Maine Dept. of Transportation's land-wasting Exit 6 interchange, to the extensive parking lots of the University of Maine Campus, to the City of Portland's public works lots in Bayside. The city and state could potentially sell 10-12 acres of downtown real estate, setting aside a few million dollars for a streetcar line and saving the rest for other programs.

The streetcar construction projects in the other Portland have averaged $12-$13 million per mile - a figure that includes road reconstruction work and the costs of the vehicles. The line I sketched out above would be 1.8 miles of track downtown, plus 2.4 miles of track out to Woodfords Corner and back (or 1.2 miles in each direction). Based on the ballpark $13 million per mile figure, Portland could buy this for around $55 million. And given that these streets will probably be reconstructed soon anyhow, the marginal additional cost would be substantially lower.

$55 million is a lot of money. But in terms of transportation investments, it's relatively cheap.The Jetport terminal expansion, for instance, is going to cost $60 million - funded by surcharges on our plane tickets. The old Turnpork Authority tollbooth proposal in York would have cost about $50 million. And widening Forest Avenue to accommodate more car traffic might easily run to over $100 million, in addition to the loss of dozens of taxpaying businesses and buildings.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the federal government matches up to 80% of our transportation infrastructure expenditures. If we could compete in effectiveness with other proposed streetcar projects in other cities, and earn the full 80% match, then City would only need to raise $11 million locally.

Still, even though a streetcar might be possible, it won't happen unless three very uncertain conditions are met:

• key property owners along Forest Avenue and in Bayside get smart enough to replace their parking lots with new buildings, to help the line attract enough riders;
• the surrounding neighborhoods remain open to having new neighbors, more businesses, and taller buildings along Forest Avenue, and
• a leader in city government can champion the concept and secure funding from state and federal partners.

Right now, we have weak leaders, a lot of NIMBYism, and mostly unimaginative landowners. But maybe the idea of a high-quality streetcar line, and a fast connection to downtown Portland, could change things for the better.

Transforming Forest Avenue - Corridor Walk and 1st Public Meeting

The Great Lost Bear is the same distance from Monument Square as the Western Prom (about 1.3 miles) - but while a walk through the West End is pleasant, a walk along Forest Avenue through the freeway interchange and along the strip of drive-through banks and fast food franchises is almost unheard of.

A lot of the city's planners and leaders would like to change that, so they've commissioned a study that's now underway called "Transforming Forest Avenue."

"The goal of this study is to develop functional and safe pedestrian, bicycle, bus and motorist access both along and across Forest Avenue - a key gateway corridor. This study will also look at land use, leveraging public investments to stimulate private redevelopment and infill of underutilized properties."

The study should also look at options for Exit 6, the cloverleaf freeway interchange that blocks Forest Avenue from the rest of downtown Portland.

The study's steering committee met for the first time last week. Unfortunately, it sounds from their reports that people aren't bringing a lot of vision or ambition to this - there's a lot of "sure, Forest Ave. is bleak, but what can you do?"

Hopefully, members of the public can come and change that attitude tonight, at the study's first public meeting, by bringing some big ideas and letting the planners know that this can and should be a walkable main street for the city.

Transforming Forest Avenue - Corridor Walk and 1st Public Meeting
May 12, 2011

Corridor Walk: 4:30 pm-5:45 pm
We will meet in front of the University of Southern Maine Glickman Library on Forest Avenue.

Public Meeting: 6-8pm
At the University of Southern Maine Abromson Center (on Bedford Street), Room 109-110.

For details, call Molly Casto, Senior Planner at 207-874-8901.

Portland and South Portland bus schedules & routes now on Google Maps

View Larger Map

The schedule and route information for METRO and South Portland Bus Service buses have been added to Google Maps. Ask for directions in the Greater Portland area, and you'll now be able to get directions by public transit (in addition to walking, cycling, and driving directions).

This is a handy way to use the buses without a printed schedule. Now, instead of consulting a timetable, you can just get on a computer or your phone to see when the next bus is coming, and find different routes to get where you need to go on time.

Maybe you've arrived on a flight from the Jetport, and are interested in saving a cab fare downtown - follow this link to see when the next 3 buses depart.

Or maybe you got carjacked in Falmouth Foreside. No problem! Here's the schedule for the Falmouth Flyer.

Happy riding.

New Funding for Amtrak Downeaster

The federal government will fund $20.8 million towards track improvements on shared Downeaster and MBTA railroad tracks in northern Massachusetts in order to improve on-time reliability for the Portland-to-Boston Amtrak service and for Massachusetts commuter rail services.

Here's a map of where the upgrades will take place (in red) in the context of the rest of the Downeaster route (in blue):

View Downeaster Track improvements in a larger map

If you've ridden the Downeaster before, you may have noticed the train slow down or stop altogether on this section, which sees a lot of train traffic. These upgrades represent another step towards the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority's goal to reduce travel times between Portland and Boston to 2 hours - the time it takes to drive - and add enough track capacity to allow for six daily round trips (up from the current five).

Portland Bike/Ped Advisory Committee - May Meeting

Tonight, Portland's Bike/Ped Advisory Committee meets at 5:30 pm in City Hall's Room 209. Come by and learn about what's going on with -

• the City's efforts to redesign Forest Avenue - including Exit 6 interchange - as a walkable, bikeable neighborhood Main Street;
• the design of Portland's first Neighborhood Byway in Deering Center;
• new bike lanes and streetscape improvements we can expect to come soon with the summer construction season.