Bringing back Portland?

An interesting photo essay about Portland: Bringing Back Portland at Lending My Lens

As noted in the past, the natural configuration of Vincennes Street is as a portal to Portland, via the K & I Bridge, which remains closed to traffic of any kind apart from trains. The railroad closed the bridge more than 35 years ago, and Uptown began dying when it did.

Reopening the bridge for walkers and bikers would re-energize the Vincennes corridor overnight, and reconnect us to the Portland neighborhood ... assuming it wants to be linked. There's the rub. People in New Albany are fond of saying they don't want Louisville's West Enders to have access to the bridge.

Louisville's West Enders say precisely the same about us.

A true renaissance (anywhere) "must be sparked by the empowerment of existing residents."

Fundamentally better NA.

Gill Holland made a few good points during his talk last week at the Green Building in NuLu. Given New Albany's recent experience with capital-intensive, gleaming facade and plaque-ready projects, this part struck me hardest.

Gill Holland, Steve Poe talk development in West Louisville, what to do if Humana is sold, by Chris Otts (WDRB)

Government is good at spending a lot of money in one place, like $135 million for the new Omni Hotel downtown. But 135 separate investments of $1 million in west Louisville would transform the area, he said.

Ah, but it would depend on campaign finance opportunities and voting patterns in those 135 areas, wouldn't it?

Joe Dunman recognizes the positives in the chat by Holland and Steve Poe, but he also sees "important differences between NuLu and Portland that ... often get lost in the hype." In several ways, these differences are both significant and relevant to New Albany's position.

I'm not doing Dunman's essay justice by reducing it to a mere paragraph -- and the conclusion, at that. Go to IL and read.

A true Portland renaissance must be sparked by the empowerment of existing residents, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

... If Portland and the rest of the West End are to enjoy a true renaissance, it must be sparked by the empowerment of existing residents. It can’t be imposed by a few outsiders buying up cheap lots and flipping them, displacing locals in the process. It requires a collective effort with government leadership. Speculators can invest and enjoy returns, but if the city is to improve as a whole, everyone must reap the benefits of neighborhood revitalization.

Allegiance is a two-way street.

To be clear, this is bluegill, not the New Albanian, but...

Given this:

and this:

 

and this:

I keep seeing this...

in Portland.

Sunday Movie: Celebrating America's Most Livable City.

The transportation discussion engendered by a recent 8664 posting raised several interesting reader responses including mass transit advocacy, questions as to how other cities are melding their transportation needs with urban design and environmental principles, and, perhaps above all else, frustration with our region's continuing inability to imagine and explore better possibilities.

This particular video answer, with its spotlight on Portland, Oregon, is provided by the folks at Streetfilms which, like its siblings Streetsblog and StreetsWiki, are projects supported by the Livable Streets Network, "an online community for people working to create sustainable cities through sensible urban planning, design, and transportation policy." Combined, they represent a sort of urban geek heaven.

The video is roughly 30 minutes long but is so stuffed with good ideas that it's easily worth it, even if a few different viewings are required.

What Ed said.

In response to a general lament about poor transportation planning, reader Edward Parish said:

You need not have to be in Europe for such a bike gig, I'll be off to Portland, OR, in September and will have TRIMET to get to and fro from the airport and many other venues. Also, San Francisco has many of the same options; life without a car.



About Portland, Oregon, from the Preservation Institute:

During the 1960s, Portland was a city with serious economic and environmental problems.

Today, Portland is an economic and environmental success story. It is so successful that the Wall Street Journal, which is not usually known for its environmental advocacy, has called Portland an “urban mecca” that city planners from all over the country visit to learn how they can control sprawl, reduce automobile dependency, and build lively and attractive pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods.

When Portland decided to tear down the Harbor Drive freeway, the city made one of the key decisions that transformed it into a national model for effective city planning.

Between 1970 and 1980, Portland made a number of decisions that transformed the city by moving from automobile-oriented development to pedestrian and transit oriented development. The most important were:


* Pioneer Square: In January, 1970 the Portland City Planning Commission voted to deny a permit to build a 12 story parking structure on Pioneer Courthouse Square. The site had been occupied by a two-story parking structure, and it is now an attractive, pedestrian oriented plaza.


* Harbor Drive: In May, 1974, the state of Oregon closed Harbor Drive so it could use the land to build Tom McCall Waterfront Park, which would open up the waterfront to pedestrians, creating an important amenity for downtown.


* Mount Hood Freeway: In summer, 1974, the Portland City Council killed the Mount Hood Freeway and instead used the freeway’s federal funding to build the downtown transit mall, eastside light rail, and other transit projects. This freeway was part of a plan to criss-cross Portland with freeways, drawn up by Robert Moses, and killing it also killed all the freeways that were to follow.


* Comprehensive Land Use Plan: On October 16, 1980, the City Council adopted the Portland Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which established an urban growth boundary to stop sprawl and concentrated new development around public transportation stops.

The comprehensive plan is the best known of these decisions. But tearing down Harbor Drive and replacing it with Tom McCall Waterfront Park was also a key step in transforming Portland from a freeway-oriented city to a pedestrian oriented city.



About Louisville Metro, from the Brookings Institution:

The region has been building a lot of roads lately. The number of new lane miles in the Louisville urbanized area increased by 20.1 percent between 1990 and 2000, resulting in a 15.8 percent increase in roadway miles per capita. The region’s per capita road construction far outpaced that of key peer regions.

Consequently, the number of miles being driven in the Louisville urbanized area far out-paced population growth in the 1990s. Population grew by 3.7 percent in the urbanized area between 1990 and 2000. However, the total vehicle miles driven(VMT) in the region increased 34.4 percent over the same period. This contributed to a 29.6 percent change in miles driven per capita in the Louisville urbanized area. Most of this increase took place early in the decade as VMT rose only 6.4 percent from 1995 to 2000.

The increase in VMTs translates to greater traffic congestion. The percentage of congested lane miles in the region remains moderate in absolute terms, but it increased from 36 to 55 percent between 1990 and 2000. During that same period, the number of “rush hours”(the time during the day when the roads are congested) nearly doubled, increasing from 3.8 hours per day to 7.0. As a result,the total costs due to congestion increased by 509 percent from 1990 to 2000 to over $335 million per year, which is among the highest total costs for any medium-sized metro area in the nation.

Lesson from Louisville: Building more roads leads to more driving and more congestion, not less.

Lesson from Portland: Stop building more roads.

Portland photo of where the expressway used to be: Wikipedia Commons, posted by user Cacophony.