Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Harold Street Station

Harold Street Station, which boarders the Sellwood-Moreland and Brooklyn neighborhoods, is only a proposed Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail MAX station stop. Tri-Met has not committed to building this stop as part of the project plan or including it in the Supplemental Environmental Impact Study (SEIS). Inclusion of the Harold stop in the project is really based on strong neighborhood support for the station.

At a recent Citizen's Advisory Committee (CAC) meeting, Tri-Met presented a further study of Harold street which appears to conclude that ridership/households served would not provide an adequate project return on investment, in addition to adversely impacting the trains' schedule with the additional stop. The average cost of the Harold station built at-grade, is estimated by Tri-Met to be between $4M to $5M. I would expect the price tag closer to the $5M range, since there would need to be at least 1 or more pedestrian bridge features at this station to accommodate Union Pacific's train tracks and McLaughlin Blvd.

In the ridership and cost/benefit study presented to the CAC, it was also found that the overlapping service radius of Holgate and Bybee stations covered portions of the proposed Harold street service area, reducing the potential ridership of households serviced by the Harold platform.

To illustrate this point, Tri-Met presented a graphic which I have attempted to recreate here (and is not to scale). Harold services approximately 1,800 households in the service radius. When looking at the overlap of the Holgate and Bybee radius, the Harold service area is reduced to only approximately 800 households (see below).



Do you live in the proposed Harold station area? Do you feel that this station would be needed on the MAX line or would you rather not have a station at this location and prefer to use Holgate or Bybee?

Please feel free to post a relevant comment answering the questions above. You can also send email to me, Mike at southeastmax@gmail.com and I will make your views known at the next CAC meeting. Even better, attend a CRC meeting (schedule linked on the right) and provide public comment to the committee.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Happy 2008 ! -- New Year Light Rail Update

I hope everyone had a great holiday season. I am thankful that the December CAC meeting was cancelled, as I was able to focus on the upcoming holidays and finishing various personal projects.

With January, the CAC will meet 2 times each month. This is to accommodate the increasing amount of information for the SEIS (Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement) report.

I have updated the Google calendar (to the right of this page) to reflect the current meeting schedule. There will be other items and agendas that will be added, but this is the general schedule for the CAC in 2008.

In addition, I have posted January's Light Rail Project Updates. Click on the link to this PDF file.