Next Stop: Rose Quarter Transit Center

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Everything deserves a beauty shot, and here's another one of the MAX Blue Line, taken as though I was documenting it for TriMet (allow me a fantasy here). It's leaving the Steel Bridge from the east end and about to pull in to the Rose Quarter Transit Center bound for Gresham ... and no other points east.

At a time when there was only one MAX line, and it was just called the MAX, no color-coded lines or any of this gallimaufy we call transit in Portland these days, The Oregonian's Jonathan Nicholas (the latter-day Doug Baker and our fin de siècle version of Herb Caen) noted that a correspondent, noting that it didn't quite and was never going to route any farther east than Cleveland Avenue in Gresham, mentioned it would therefore never be the Boring Train ...

... but one could think of it as the Almost Orient Express. Which I do.

The Multimodal Bridge

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Multimodal is a funny word. It's clear what it means but it gets used so much by city and transit planners it sounds like one of those power-buzzwords that get hammered to death on resumes.

But multimodal is what the Steel Bridge is, a bridge that, in its hardworking way, links the halves of Portland like no other. Here it is, doing what it does best. Multimodally.

There was, back in the 1980s, before there were multiple MAX lines, the possibility of driving through the middle part of the structure, where that oncoming MAX is right now. It was fun to find yourself driving in front of a train, or with one on the left side of you. As the lines multiplied, though, they took the middle of the bridge for MAX lines only, and relegated cars to the two outside lanes. 

The approaches to the bridge have seen much revision over the past 40 years. 

I-205, Monday Afternoon, With Occasional Mount Scott

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I really am at something of a loss to understand why I think I should go out these Covid-19 "Stay-at-home" times and find of Portland a howling desertion suitable for the opening to The Omega Man. I guess I figure since I'm going to be living in times like this, it should at least be a spectacle as I was conditioned to be frightened of since I was a kid.

I used to read magazines and books that told you the most amazing things back in the 1970s about the world of 40-50 years hence. Now I'm here and it's just bewildering and intimidating. I mean, I swallowed Chariots of the Gods? without question ... ah, but that's another program for another time.

As for the reality of life during a particularly spooky global pandemic, the daytime Portland, Oregon, after the city gets going, seems plenty busy enough, if the traffic is a little light. The star photograph of this post is a long view of Interstate 205 looking south from the overpass of SE Holgate Boulevard. I-205 is the official boundary between East Portland and Outer East Portland, and it forms a sort of half-loop around the core areas of the city. And, last Monday, it looked like this:

Running along the super-slab there is the Green Line route of the MAX; just beyond that pedestrian crossing in the middleground can be seen a train coming this way. Look carefully and one can also see the Foster Road off and on-ramps.

That massif defining the horizon is a butte called Mount Scott, one of our modestly-named Portland heights that exult in the title Mount, and is a member of the Boring Volcanic Field.

And this is an awesome post because not only is that a cool angle on the freeway but I also got to say Boring Volcanic Field, which sounds like the mixed-est message you ever heard, but Google it up, chum. Go learn something.