“It’s so futuristic for a city that’s so green,” Ms. The couple, both musicians, stood at the front of one cabin as it descended, with snow-clad Mount Hood at sunset. Kaitlyn Ni Donovan, 37, and Jonathan Drews, 38, rode a scooter to the tram on Saturday. The alternative newspaper Willamette Week, dutifully jaded, noted the political correctness of the choices, and suggested that the politician who pushed the idea should have gone instead with “Pan” and “Dering.”īut few riders seemed jaded this weekend. Both are now in their 80s and rode the tram for the first time last week. The other is named Jean, for Jean Richardson, the first woman to earn a civil engineering degree in Oregon. Small plaques in each cabin note that one is named Walt, for Walt Reynolds, the first African-American to graduate from medical school at the university. Portland tram officials say they have multiple backup motors to avoid such a fate. The only other “commuter tram” in this country, officials here say, is the Roosevelt Island Tramway in New York City, the one that got stuck last April and required a daring rescue by firefighters. Dopplemayr hired cabin attendants after posting the jobs last fall on. The city managed the construction and owns the tram, but the university is paying all but $8.5 million of the building costs and is contracting with the manufacturer, the Swiss firm Dopplemayr, to operate it. Though the tram opened to the public this weekend, doctors and hospital staff members have been using it since late last year to travel between the main campus on the hill and clinics and a gym at the waterfront, where the university hopes one day to move its medical schools. The tram makes the trip from the main university campus in less than 5 minutes, while driving can take 15 minutes or longer. It is meant to be a critical link between the university and the South Waterfront, now home to condominium projects and the university’s Center for Health and Healing. More tangibly, the tram is supposed to help develop former industrial land along the Willamette long hemmed in by highways. Pearce said such concerns would be addressed. The tram cabins have few handholds, and at the open-air waiting platform on Marquam Hill, only modest barriers protect passengers from foul weather and a steep drop. Some residents beneath the tram route are not pleased to have people floating past their back decks and bathroom windows. The fare announced last week - $4 round-trip unless riders are visiting the hospital, work there or have a transit pass - is more than twice initial estimates. As its construction budget soared from early projections of $15 million to nearly four times as much as that, disputes between the city and the university arose amid calls to rethink the whole idea. Still, some critics have called the tram a folly. More than one-fourth of afternoon commuters on some major routes out of Portland use light rail. It says ridership over the last decade has risen faster than both the population and the average number of miles people drive. TriMet, the regionwide system that unites most of the various modes, boasts that it has more riders than public transit systems in bigger cities like Seattle, Denver and Miami. So enamored with public transportation is this city of 560,000 (the population of the metropolitan region is almost two million) that it is laced with electric streetcars, light rail and buses. “Whoa!” passengers whooped in unison each time.
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