Hello again, blogosphere. I’m now married, honeymoon-ed, and attempting to get back into the swing of things. Since I’ve spent the last two weeks on a planner-geek trip exploring the Pacific Northwest, I may as well share a few thoughts from the experience.
I’ll post pictures of the most interesting things after I’ve had a chance to sort through what I took and upload to flickr, but that will take a few days.
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Seattle Seattle is a much larger city than I expected. The central city felt comparable to Philadelphia, rather than the Denver or San Diego scale that I anticipated. It is also more urban, although like most western cities the bulk of its neighborhoods are composed of bungalows rather than rowhouses. Still, most neighborhoods seem to have walkable main street business districts, in the Tenleytown or Takoma Park sense. Downtown Seattle is in great shape, and is fabulously retailed. From a shopping perspective it is better than downtown DC. Seattle’s major weakness is that it is in dire need of better transit. There is a downtown subway tunnel that buses and light rail trains share that is extremely cool, and very convenient, but outside of downtown the options are limited. The bus system is extensive, but there are too few trunk routes that can be counted on for frequent service. Trolley buses are common, which is cool (a future post will explain why I like them), but overall the system is just not adequate to the needs of a city like Seattle. With a proper transit system Seattle could be the urbanist equal of the big east coast cities, but without one it is stuck in the second tier. The good news is they are building their regional transit network, so the future looks bright. |
Portland Everyone said that Portland would feel much smaller than Seattle, and indeed it does. Portland reminded me very much of a college town that has grown to become a large city, as opposed to a city that was always destined to be big. Part of that is the scale, but part of it is also the arrangement of land uses. I’ve never before encountered an American city with such good integration of office and residential uses in the core. I would say that downtown Portland blends seamlessly with the surrounding neighborhoods, except I hesitate to even say that Portland has a traditional “downtown”. Rather than an office ghetto surrounded by residential neighborhoods, the entire central city is a mixed-use mass of both office and residential buildings. Portland doesn’t have a downtown; it has a city center. The architecture is American, but the land uses are European. Portland’s transit is equally impressive. Light rail works there, better than I’ve seen it work anywhere else. Many cities that try to use light rail as if it were commuter rail find that it is inconveniently slow, and lacking in capacity. Portland makes no such mistake. Street-running light rail is perfect for smaller places, and Portland’s scale fits it like a glove. Seattle needs its downtown subway, but smaller Portland feels complete and well-served with its slower surface trains. |
Vancouver Of the three cities, I had the highest expectations for Vancouver. More than any other North American city in the 21st Century, Vancouver has a reputation for embracing high rise residential infill. I was excited to see it in person. There are indeed many contemporary high rises, although the central city is not so blanketed with them as I had expected. Many of the high rises are wonderfully designed, and are excellent examples of contemporary architecture. That said, the new skyscraper neighborhoods still don’t have the sidewalk diversity of historic streets. They are better at the ground level than Ballston, but not by much. The best streets in Vancouver were lined by low-rise commercial buildings, which stand in odd contrast to the surrounding high rises. From a transportation perspective, Vancovuer offers much to like, but also falls short in a number of ways. Its SkyTrain system is by far the highest quality metro in the region, being entirely grade separated and automated. Unfortunately, it barely serves the central peninsula of the city at all. The trans-peninsula route that should be the backbone of the city does not exist, and is sorely missed. And while the bike infrastructure is wonderful and eclipses even Portland in quality and coverage, Vancouver misses many of the small things that Portland does right – things like the width of sidewalks, placement of curb cuts, etceteras. |
Overall, all three cities are good and I am happy to have finally visited them. Vancouver didn’t quite live up to my expectations, but they were probably unrealistically through the roof. I had more meager expectations for Portland, despite its tremendous hype within the planning world, but found that I liked it the best of the three.
November 2nd, 2011 | Permalink
Tags: bike, bus, lightrail, metrorail, transportation, urbandesign
