Vancouver is ready for light rail
I guess with gas being what it is these days, more & more Vancouver residents are in favor of having some sort of light rail. The big question now is - where will it be?
The easiest way would be to extend TriMet’s Yellow Line over the Interstate Bridge and into downtown Vancouver. But, as someone who has worked in downtown Vancouver and also has family living near there, after 5pm on weekdays downtown Vancouver is almost a ghost town.
If you go a little east from downtown, there’s more activity. Walmart, I-205 & considerably more shops & restaurants bring in more people around that area. Could you build off of the red line at the Parkrose Transit Center so light rail goes over the Glen Jackson Bridge and to Mill Plain? Then again, it gets quite congested there during rush hour… and where would you have the line go?
While Vancouver might be ready for light rail, it’ll be a tough decision on how to implement it..
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
There needs to be a loop. Up I-5 over some route to I-205. But I also believe that the Future Milwakie line should connect to the green line at Clackamas.
The blue line should extend to Forest Grove and up to Sandy. We should have a commuter rail like WES to Hood River and Astoria. And WES needs to extend down to Salem. But they also need to run every couple of hours on Sat and Sun. That will all be done by 2100.
Relocating the bike path would be welcome. The current path is very loud, very narrow, and debris is thrown in your eyes by passing traffic. I have heard proposals of putting the bike path under the bridge, although perhaps a supplemental transit bridge could also have an improved bike bridge.
Bjorn
I realize this is part of the never-ending emotional debate about Lite Rail……. I’m an occasional rider of the 105 to work in SE PDX. The thought of having to sit on MAX to get to work depressed me for a long time.
I was relieved to read that C-Tran would continue the Express buses even with LR up to 4th Plain. I suspect C-Tran has gotten lots of feedback from current express customers that MAX is not an acceptable replacement.
Herb (alias)
“Could you build off of the red line at the Parkrose Transit Center”
Yes. (Or have it split off somewhere near Cascade Station)
“so light rail goes over the Glen Jackson Bridge”
No. Although there is physical room to do this, there was a recent article (sorry no link) detailing the structural limitations and apparently the path down the center just can’t support the loads. (Plus, you’d have to relocate the bike path.)
So some kind of new parallel structure for rail would be needed.
In my opinion, that’s a tragedy caused by lack of foresight. The incremental cost of making the 205 bridge a few feet wider and a bit stronger down the center when it was first built would have allowed for some great future transit options at little cost. There was already a transitway right-of-way established on I-205 (that’s where the Green Line is being built now), but apparently not across the river, or it was just assumed that the transit would be buses sharing lanes with auto traffic.
So now to make it happen for rail, another structure may need to be built.
A line running on the Green Line tracks from Clackamas to Gateway and then continuing north into Vancouver would be very useful on the east side.