The Rails and the Lands

Earl Blumenauer, Congressman representing Portland invented Railvolution 20 years ago and participation peaked this year when over 1000 participants convened for a family reunion once again in Portland, Oregon, the US capital of Smart Growth, transit, growth management and growth boundaries. This might well be the only city in the world where transit is the focus of guided tours for tourists, not only those coming to Railvolution, the urban transit conference but also for regular tourists. While we walked around with our conference nameplates on our chests, the bums on Sixth Avenue told us, "we know why you are here, you are looking at our light rail".

Last year we met in Boston, no slouch when it comes to transit either, but a city where this is more a utility than an attraction and where the presence of the Railvolution Conference made way fewer waves. Portland threw quite a party in the trendy Pearl District, a former warehouse zone now the place of restaurants, chic shops and dotted by new apartment and condo buildings, a bit like New York's meatpacking district. The Pearl shows why a city is more interesting than a suburb, how it can reinvent itself and how even loading docks and simple warehouses can become a vibrant urban space. Some attribute this transformation to the streetcar circling through the district adding a transformative energy like the Highline park did for the meatpacking District.

Railvolution has preached the transit land use nexus for twenty years and finally everybody seems to be in tune. Obama instructed the Department of Housing and Community Development to collaborate with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy in Livable Communities. From Washington to Houston Phoenix and Detroit, cities are laying light rail and streetcar tracks praying for urban reformation, re-investment and economic development. All should be well now.

But we should not get fooled. Sprawl continues and outpaces urban core development multifold. Transit is squeezed for money and service cuts and skimping on equipment alienate many of the new found riders. America is still far behind most other countries and our cities are still far from healthy. Yet, the change in the music is truly astonishing. What used to be a lone voice in the desert (the voice for density, mixed use and compact development patterns) has become a chorus. To be truly prepared for the post petroleum age and for the drastic demographic changes, we can't do enough of urban transformation and, we also need to begin to transform the suburbs in what will be, no doubt, a painful and hard process, because they will be harder to transform than the Pearl. We can learn from Vancouver, where density is introduced to all the major transit stations along their skytrains achieving a carbon footprint reduction getting the City already today beyond the world targets envisioned for a sustainable future.

Blumenauer, in his speech to his believers even quoted from the bible: "Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt," Blumenauer read, from Isaiah 58:12. "You shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in."

(Images: New supermarket and development in the Pearl next to streetcar stop. Below: The old Portland is still present as well, freeways bracketing downtown and taking traffic pressures away from downtown)