Steam Tram (Photo credit: State Records NSW)
Leaders for Portland Streetcar Inc. have refused to hand control of nearly $500,000 from annual ticket sales and sponsorships to city officials, saying it would undermine the organization’s autonomy as the nonprofit hired to operate the city’s streetcar system.
The dispute underscores a complicated and cumbersome relationship between the city – which owns the streetcars and pays millions toward operations – and the company formed 18 years ago to champion Portland’s streetcar renaissance.
Renaissance? Really? Hundreds of millions of dollars for some tracks and wires that run through the "Pearl" district, downtown to PSU, then back over the Broadway Bridge (at 4 miles an hour in a 30 zone), then down more city streets to OMSI is a "renaissance"? You can walk from any one point to any other along the streetcar route and get there ahead of the so-called "people mover". Personally, I've never seen more than six people or so on the thing - even on rainy days.
This isn't a "revival", it's a tourist attraction - and it doesn't draw all that many tourists, either. Why not just bring it back in its original 19th-century incarnation: horse-drawn, as the first such trams were in Portland, or steam-pulled, as came later? At least those would be tourist draws. And they likely wouldn't require $8 million a year in taxpayer subsidies.
