ST. QUARTERLY By Ed Blatter Have you ever walked Portland’s waterfront, gazed into the Willam e tte’s pleasure-craft-infested channel, and wondered why you see no ferryboats there? Dreamed of the halcyon days when steamboats drifted into shore at the wave of a hand to pick up passengers from Astoria to The Dalles? Puzzled, in fact, over the obvious boon that the river offers to the city’s transportation woes? Portland’s transit planners obviously haven’t. A regional transportation plan that is now taking shape under the auspices of the Metropolitan Service District (Metro) dwells on land-bound alternatives: carpooling, buses and a light rail line. No mention is made of the possibility of using what one local observer calls the “ 900- to 1,000-foot highway running down the middle of Portland.” To native Portlander Ken Rose, the thought of a mass transit river system is not just an idea, it’s an obsession. “One day I was driving my car during rush hour from Vancouver to Portland,” says Rose in the musty downtown office he shares with a portrait photographer. “ Sitting there parked on the freeway, I got to wondering why people couldn’t ride boats up and down the river. I wondered why no one was operating a ferry service. Why wasn’t the river being used to bail us out of some of our transportation problems?” When Rose got out of the traffic jam, he went to the library and began reading about waterborne transportation. Although there was nothing written about modern-day river mass transit, there were histories about the old Portland and Sauvie Island ferries, and about the sidewheelers which steamed up and down the Columbia and Willamette rivers before the turn of the century. “ I admit I became obsessed,” he says. “ Here was a city with a unique and beautiful waterway running right down the middle of the town, and it wasn’t being used for anything but freight and pleasure boats. A river transit system could alleviate pollution and congestion on the 1-5 corridor and be an aesthetic addition to the mass transit network in Portland. It just seemed stupid not to be using the river.” Rose was obsessed enough to go past merely studying the concept. In October 1978, he quit his job working a dredge for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and with a bank officer and a business advisor, formed the Rose City River Transit Company, a non-profit corporation. The heart of Rose’s transit dream is the surface effect ship, a vessel that can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour riding on an aproned cushion of air. Such a vessel has several advantages over conventional ships. It has a minimal wake, high maneuverability, low noise and the ability to stop from full speed in less than three times its length. Because it runs on a cushion of air and only a small portion of the hull rides through the water, damage from floating debris in the river is less likely than with conventional hull-type craft. A 100-passenger version of a surface effect ship costs about $500,000 per vessel. Yet, while this is relatively cheap by industry standards, Rose City Transit has been barely able to scrape together enough money to pay rent for its half of the office. Rose and his associates therefore do the only thing they can — wage an educational campaign aimed at local governments and community organizations. Money, they hope, will someday come from public funds, given the proper climate. They have written letters to politicians, addressed neighborhood associations, and canvassed the city with flyers about their cause. They have talked to anyone who would listen. The idea of river transit seems to spark the imagination of all who are told about the idea. Letters of support have come from a broad crosssection of politicians, including Governor Vic Atiyeh, Congressman Robert Duncan, Senator Mark Hatfield, Multnomah County Executive Donald Clark, and Portland Mayor Connie McCready. Letters of encouragement have also come from William M. Fast, branch agent for the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association and the Marine Cooks and Stewards unions, and from Donald E. Liddle, vice president of the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific. It has been an auspicious beginning for Rose City River Transit, and Ken Rose has only been encouraged. “ I figure we can start on a gradual scale,” Rose says. “ We can start with a small shuttle service between St. Johns and Downtown, or Swan Island and Downtown — our main function at first would be to serve the industrial community. “ With Wacker Siltronics in Willbridge, the St. Johns Riverfront Development in the offing, and the Rivergate Industrial District under development, the community of St. Johns might as well move. The streets up there will become freeways.” In the first half of 1979, the City of Portland Bureau of Planning received a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration to explore innovative transit alternatives to serve major municipal industrial districts. At the prompting of North and Southeast Po rtland community groups, who had heard and liked Rose’s proposal, river transit was included as one of four elements of the study; the others were a traffic behavior survey, a vanpool program and an Eastside transit station. Of the $150,000, river transit was given $5,000. On June 28, 1979, the city made an agreement with the newly forned Metropolitan Service District to to- operate in the study. They retained the consulting firm of George M Baldwin and Associates, Inc., oi Portland to study the feasibility of river transit in Portland. Metro’s obligation was to draw from the Baldwin report what it would need to determine the costeffectiveness of the river mass transit. River Transit Feasible The Baldwin report was completed in March. It was heralded by Portland Mayor Connie McCready, a self-described “ river person,” as an exciting possibility. “ It has been a long time since the people of Portland thought of the river as a transit corridor,” said Mayor McCready. “ Given the problems we face today, the river may once again become an integral part of Portland’s daily life.” But while there was optimism in her announcement, the mayor cautioned that to earn implementation, any new transportation mode would have to be cost effective as well as have a potential for high ridership. The Baldwin report concluded that while “ transporting people between residential areas and employment centers in the Portland metropolitan area by water” was feasible from an operational standpoint, there were some difficulties. Low clearance under the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge across the Columbia River, low clearance under the railroad deck of the Steel Bridge across the Willamette River, and shallow water in the confluence of the Clackamas and Willamette rivers were identified as the major obstacles to overcome if a full-scale service was to begin. On the other hand, such anticipated problems as interference with commercial and pleasure boating, noise, dangers caused by floating debris and inclement weather were found to present no particular drawbacks to commuter travel on the river. Then it was Metro’s turn, and Metro’s transportation staff went to work calculating the costs of operating such a system based on potential ridership. Their findings were not favorable. The staff concluded that further investigation into river transit in Portland not proceed and recommended this to the district’s Joint Policies Advisory Committee (J-PAC) — made up from representatives of city, county, port, and Washington and Oregon state transportation departments. J-PAC agreed with that recommendation, as did the entire Metro Council. “ If you look at living patterns — where people live to where they want to go, there’s nothing cost effective or fuel conserving about fiver transit,” says Mike Burton, Metro councilor from District 12 (North Portland), who sits on the J-PXC committee. “ River transit just didn’t prove all that attractive.” Metro investigated three major factors involved in the cost effectiveness of operating a river transit system: travel time, operating cost, and riderIllustration by David Sondin 5
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