Darkness Over Parkrose/Sumner TC

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Also in the last couple of days there was some dramatic cloud cover serving as a very dramatic backdrop to the Parkrose/Sumner Transit Center.

 It made the old-fashioned neon at the Jim Dandy burger dive, a fixture in this area since the 1940s, stand out with the warm-hearted nostalgia that is built into such a thing.

 Though there are four pullouts on the south side of the transit center drive, only one is a bus stop ... this one. The 71-60th Avenue and 73-122nd Avenue are the west and east halves, respectively, of what was once a single route: the 71-60th/122nd. You now have to transfer to use the whole route, though if you're travelling the whole thing, you're doing this big inverted U across Portland's east side, which is not something a commuter's likely to do.

The two routs alternate stopping here, while the others that serve the route layover in the three pullouts behind it. It's a frequent service line, which means that you aren't late for one (unless that was the one you needed), just early for the next.

[logo] A New Logo And Type Look for Salem's Transit

3466.

I follow the news with the mass transit agency serving the greater Salem area, Cherriots. Mostly it's in the 'how much of it they got' department; having grown up in the Salem area, it was my ride around town for a great deal of my high school experience. It connected me with high-school and a good many things around my erstwhile and doughty home town, and it seemed to be more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of funding than the other two major systems I was then familiar with, the Lane Transit District and TriMet, whose service I always envied because in Eugene and Portland the buses ran later and they had transit on Sundays. I survived hour-long waits on Saturdays, buses that quit running around 7 PM, and at least one major service cutback (during the late 70s the service, which was then a function of the City of Salem, was curtailed back to within the city limits only, where formerly it had gone just beyond. We Salem fringers living along Lancaster Driver and in the Four Corners area missed it mightily until the Hamman jitneys came along, but that's all a story for another time).

Then Salem-Keizer Transit established its district, service returned to the Salem urban fringe, and I left town to see the greater world, in more or less that order. Latterly, Cherriots has had to cut Saturday service because revenue but has been extremely clever in using what they had to best effect, constantly rethinking service and how to deliver it. It's been an impressive story so far, and if Salem-Keizer Transit ever gets the funding I think they deserve, with the agency's creativity, Salem could someday have world-class mass transit for a city its size.

Since the 80s, the agency has had an informally-styled script logo with a visual pun on the name, which looked like this:

The o being styled into an abstract cherry and the name itself are all puns on a somewhat forgotten-by-now nickname for the capital, the Cherry City, Salem's cherry orchards once having been a great draw to the area in the spring. The Oregon Statesman and, for a short time, its successor, the Statesman-Journal, published suggested driving tour routes when those trees were in bloom.

Slowly infiltrating the agency's public presence and by now its printed and PDF collateral, has been this new look:

Featuring a hip, bold sans-serif font with some weight to it (which reminds me of the font used by C-Tran in Vancouver), the logo expresses a very mission-driven agency which is visualized by the sweeping curves both concentric on and emanating from the enlarged initial capital, which quite obviously evoke a high-speed highway.

The brand has been simplified; gone is the tagline Salem-Keizer Transit, it's simply CHERRIOTS now, and the simplicity combined with the sturdy, bold type gives a real visual strength and presence. The sweeping abstract highway provides dynamic tension in the way it emerges from above the C and in the way it ends on a cut-off angle. Gone also is the bright dash of red filling an o stylized into a cherry, a feature of the system's logo since its inception.

The brand is also going region-wide. Up until now, the division of Cherriots that provided rural transit service to Marion and Polk counties has been known as CARTS, an initialism that stood for Chemeketa Area Regional Transit System, whose logo wasn't much to speak of. CARTS is being rebranded as Cherriots Regional and being brought under the brand's banner.

The new graphic look hasn't emerged on the website but it appears to be on all digital and PDF collateral, including service advisory graphics as well as schedules, and presumably printed matter as well.

Bottom line here for me is that this is a fairly cool, modern look for a transit agency that hasn't changed much graphically in long time and stands comfortably alongside the other major transit agencies in the Willamette Valley; it's a refined, poised, and serious presence. As I read the current news about Cherriots, I get the impression that they are, at least in spirit, trying to lay the foundation for a fully-grown up transit system to serve Salem, maybe one that will at last have buses on Sunday. The logo fits an agency who is trying to level itself up into the next-generation system for Oregon's state capital city.

Those who liked the splash of red in a stylize cherry will have to make their own peace with that.

[transit] Good News for West Salem Bus Riders … More Routes

2827.Have been following the news in transit down in Snailem ever since the peoples decided not to vote the last transit levy, which, in Oregon's third larges city, and the State Capitol, shaved the Cherriots down to a five-day-a-week system.
Which is embarrassing to me, and I Salem's been in my rearview for a very long time, now.
But they seem to be doing some impressive number work. No Saturday service, and they still have to fix the ongoing heartbreak that is the downtown transit mall and the Courhouse Square building, but somehow they're managing to expand service in West Salem, which is creditable, I think.
Routes are going from just three to six new routes, and this includes an express going up and down Wallace Road NW. There will be more service on the flats, and the heights are going to get more service up Glenn Creek and Doaks Ferry Rds NW, but some of the off-peak frequencies - 2 hours - are not exactly anything to scream about. But it's better than it was, and that's what counts.
Here's a link to the PDF.

[OR_liff] 30 Minutes on Mass Transit in Oregon

2823.This also speaks to mapping and information design, as well as being just darned interesting.

Before I quit the computer for the day, my wandering eye happened on this article at The Atlantic, titled "30 Minutes on Mass Transit in 20 World Cities": http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/05/30-minutes-transit-20-world-cities/2033/. It is what it says it is, but it gives you a concrete idea by diagramming it against maps of those 20 world cities.

Alas … this is one list Portland did not make. Didn't anyone tell them we were hip?

The maps in The Atlantic's article were generated using an interactive tool called "Mapnificent". Mapnificent allows you to zoom in on any city featured and, via a simple graphic slider, choose your time span. Three Oregon transit systems opened their secrets to Mapnificient, and they are, of course, Portland (TriMet), Salem (Cherriots) and Eugene (LTD). Here is Mapnificent's idea of how far you can get in Portland in 30 minutes on TriMet, starting from Pioneer Square:

Here's Eugene, on LTD, point of departure being Eugene Station (the block between 10th and 11th Avenues and Willamette and Olive Streets):

And Salem on Cherriots, departing from the Courthouse Square block, between Chemeketa, High, Court, and Church Streets NE (Mon-Fri only … Salem you are awesome!):

The intriguing part is the discontinuities on the smaller cities' diagrams. One can only assume that schedule information is a little incomplete, or the data set is elided due to some sort of express route or lack of stops along certain streets in certain areas.

The tool is located at http://www.mapnificent.net/. You can watch a short instructional video or just zoom in to the city of your choice, click on the marker, and use the slider to your hearts content. The interface is rather self-explanatory.

Cincy's Going For A Streetcar-But They Almost Had A Subway, Once

1999.In a posting that appeared on CincyStreetcar Blog and has been linked about to here in  Unicorn City, it would indeed appear that, at least on paper, Portland Oregon and Cinicinnati Ohio are kind of the same: Similar populations, similar median incomes, even similar climates and acres of parkland per acre of city.

Cincy doesn't have rail transit yet, but they're working on that. Visit the blog linked above and you'll see that they are coming up with a pretty nifty looking streetcar line similar to our own Portland Streetcar. The blogger is quite insightful, actually, has visited Portland and has been serious enough to know the difference between streetcar and light rail. It's a good read.

I hope they get thier system, because Cincy has been denied rail transit, and it's particularly disappointing in this case because they almost had a subway once.

Not something that calls itself a subway or something that is inspired by a subway, but an actual, big-city style subway. It's one of the great missed opportunities of modern times.

If you look at a map of central Cincinnati Ohio, you'll see a peculiarly arranged street called Central Parkway. It's shaped like an L; the baseline part is where Eleventh Street would be, and is about three full standard city blocks on either side of the dividing line of Vine Street (East Central Parkway and West Central Parkway). The upright part usurps Plum Street's place in the street hierarchy, and leads you out of the central area (and is parallel to and one block east of Central Avenue, coincidentally)

A wide, promenade-y street is what it seems. And a street hanging a dogleg in the center of town like that is highly unusual. But there is a reason-and it's even more interesting than that.

A great long time ago, a canal ran through central Cincy there, on that route. As time passed and wheeled transportation began to take over from river freight, the canal fell out of fashion and out of use.

A trench through the middle of town ... what a great place for a subway! You won't have to dig ...

And so, in 1910, planning on the Cincinnati Subway had begun. It was to be merely the pivotal segment in a rail loop that would have served central Cincy as well as communities north and east on a great real loop, from which greater things might have grown.

Central Parkway is the above-ground legacy of the Subway-that-might-have-Been, resulting from covering over the old canal bed in anticipation ov the transit service that was to follow. But that service never happened. At first, it was too expensive (in light of WWI). Then it was planned and replanned. Then they ran out of money. Then history passed it by.

In Portland, we have the legendary Shanghai tunnels, those underground passages found in downtown that were reputed (but to our knowledge, never actually proven-but it makes a great story) to have been used to shuttle drunken sailors-to-be to their new jobsites at the old waterfront. Not everyone knows about them, which is another commonailty between Cincy and PDX; not everyone knows about the Cinicnnati Subway and some who do apparently think it a legend.

Unlike the ultimate purpose of PDX's Shanghai Tunnels, however, ample photographic evidence exists for the Cincy Subway. And it's obvious from the architecture what those tunnels are good for:

Photo nicked from Cincinnati-Transit.net
excerpted for fair-use purposes only
all rights belong to the photographer

There is about two miles of tunnel and four constructed stations (Liberty Street, Race Street, Linn Street, and Brighton Corner) and despite the neglected look, much of the tunnel and station architecture is still quite sound and can be expected to last a while, not least because since Central Parkway, a major road, runs over the top, regular maintenance and inspections can occur. Being available, the water utility also runs a main through the subway tunnel.

It was also designated as a fallout shelter during the Cold War Era.

Even though Cincy is getting rail now, it's interesting to wonder what it would have been like for them had they gotten a real big-town subway. I still think building MAX on the Mall here in Portland missed a big chance at making a subway for this town. But then, Seattle built a rail-compatible transit tunnel, and it still just takes buses. So, who knows.

Cinicnnati-Transit.net unwittingly provided me the stuff to tell this tale, but its a fascinating way to waste your time. Endlessly interesting.

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