It's safe to say that I'm fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it's certainly something that I've explored before. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.
Despite Portland once having one of the largest streetcar networks in the United States, finding reliable, empirical information about it is surprisingly difficult. Books about the history of the streetcar – like Richard Thompson’s series of books or John Labbe’s Fares Please! – tend to be more photographs and captions than exhaustive detail, internet sources are incomplete and at times contradictory, and even contemporaneous sources are frustratingly incorrect. A much-referenced Pittmon map of streetcar lines […]
This small cafe on Fifth Avenue in Portland is housed in one of the last remaining bus shelters from the pre-2007 transit mall, and (awesomely) still retains the maps and informational signage of that vintage. To the left is the transit mall directory, featuring the last iteration of Portland’s icon-based route grouping – a beaver for routes to the southeast, a leaf for southern routes, a rose for southwest routes, and a deer for those […]
While I may be undecided about certain elements of the new official Portland Streetcar map, I do quite like this simple little diagram that can be found on their website. With a minimum of fuss, it shows the two new loop lines, the two bridges they cross over the Willamette River on and the four distinct neighbourhoods that they link together. Okay, so the NS Line looks a little vestigial, but let’s let the loop […]
Amidst all the hoopla surrounding the opening of the new MAX light rail Orange Line, it’s easy to forget that Portland’s streetcar is now also running over the new Tilikum Crossing bridge. They’ve taken this opportunity to rework their system map to bring it more in line with their new branding – check out the rather nice new logo at the top left of the map, which doesn’t look half bad on the streetcars themselves. […]
Portland’s new Orange Line light rail opens tomorrow! And while I’m excited, I’ve long wondered why exactly it’s being called the Orange Line instead of just being an extension of the Yellow Line. I’ve heard mutterings that it allows operational flexibility – with some northbound Orange Line trains becoming Green Line trains if demand requires it – but that’s always seemed like pretty weak reasoning to me. And this promotional map almost entirely abandons that idea […]
Submitted by “Sounder Bruce”, who says: A quasi-transit map that shows electric vehicle charging stations in Washington and Oregon, centered around the Interstate 5 corridor. Transit Maps says: I really like the idea behind this map – a simplified road map much in the vein of many of my own mapping projects – but I feel like the execution lets the concept down a little. Because of the stylised “transit map” format, the distances between […]
Submitted by Breck, who says: Here’s a neat little animated map and explanation that show how the new MAX Orange Line will tie into the rest of the system in downtown Portland. Like many other transit fans, I too have wondered how the Orange Line will work and why it won’t just be a simple extension of the Yellow Line. It is all explained here, and the reasoning seems to make pretty good sense. Transit […]
Portland’s MAX light rail system as it appeared just after the initial opening of the Red Line. Note that the Red Line doesn’t continue out to Beaverton as it does these days, but turns around just west of downtown. Later, the Yellow Line would turn around here as well, before it was rerouted down the transit mall. The map itself does a nice job with a relatively simple system. The gracefully curved Willamette River is […]
Question: Do the MAX Rail Yellow And Green lines Terminate at PSU or loop around? On the official map, they terminate and on your combined rail map they loop around. Answer: Operationally, Green and Yellow Line trains terminate southbound at the SW Jackson station. All passengers have to disembark there, but the trains do then enter a loop between SW Jackson and the SW College station for a short layover before changing their destination blinds […]
