New Trolley Line!
The city of Portland is building an extension to the downtown trolley line, to extend the line from Portland State University down to the nasty California-style high-density development at where the Red Electric Jefferson Street station used to be many many years ago. Since I'm not working in the middle of downtown any more, I don't get very many chances to watch the construction (when we moved to Portland, the Hillsboro interurban was being built, and we would walk down Morrison to our jobs in the Bank of America building -- I'm working 4 blocks away from the new trolley line, so I never think of going out there to see how close to being finished they are.) But sometime last week, pell decided to just crash for no apparent reason, so I had to go into downtown to reboot it. When I walked back to work, I stopped and took a picture of the new line.
From PSU, the trolley line runs down Harrison towards the river, and after it crosses front it drops down an 8% grade to reach the old Red Electric line, which will apparently be rewired so that the streetcars can go into the New! Fancy! Development! in the ex-industrial park at the north end of Macadam.
The downtown streetcar web page says that they're buying three more Skoda cars to operate on this entension, which I think brings them up to 10 streetcars (8 Skoda Astras and two Gomaco "vintage PCCs"). Hopefully this means that they're going to replace the leisurely 15 minute headways with something more appropriate to a downtown circulator line.
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"Hopefully this means that they're going to replace the leisurely 15 minute headways with something more appropriate to a downtown circulator line."
That is the stated goal. In one of the original financing mechanisms was a commitment to reaching 10-minute headways.