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I live in Oslo, and while public transport here is not too well developed, the situation for pedestrians is excellent. Pedestrians were not mentioned in the Portland article. People who use public transport need to cross the street more than car users. I visit England now and then (I grew up in Liverpool) and I am astounded at the lack of respect for pedestrians there and in other towns. Unless you are in a lights-controlled crossing you are at risk once you leave the sidewalk. In Norway, just standing at a simple crossing is often a sufficient signal to drivers slow down or stop. The British seem to have sacrificed road safety to the extent that few people dare to walk or cycle in towns. No wonder they drive whenever possible.
I should just mention that Norwegian law says that cyclists can use the sidewalk provided they do not cause inconvenience to pedestrians.

I currently live in another Oregon town, but spent part of my growing-up years in Portland. Some people complained bitterly about the use of public (tax) money to build the public transit system in Portland -- but I for one am grateful for public leaders who had conviction and the ability to carry the plan forward across multiple years. It is worth it for the sake of our environment and our children's children. My one complaint: U.S. cities should build physically protected bike lanes (not just white lines) to protect them from cars -- like cities in the Netherlands.

I think it is worth being wary of using the blogs as written advertising for the main programme. Surely there is plenty of space on the website to promote the stories Newsnight is covering. Blogs should be kept clean and focus on their true benefits which is insight, insight, insight

Some years ago I lived and worked in London. I was a regular user of public transport. However, when I got my first car I found my health improved remarkably. The continual coughs and colds and other minor infections, that I suffered from, miraculously cleared up. I believe due to my removal from continual contact with the great coughing, spluttering British public.

You go to New York and the streets are full of cabs. I arrived in Portland by train late at night - it took over an hour to hail one.

Once you get used to the idea of 'skate board lanes' and the fact that everybody either has a bike or a bus pass then it's a great place to visit and really easy to get around without a car.

Unlike Detroit, where people stare if you ask about busses.

Portland is a great city. I would love to live there. Still no jobs. On the East coast we seem to have given up on our cities. I live near Philadelphia and they have a good commuter train system but unreliable bus system. Bicycle are not seen on the major roads but we have an exstensive rails to trails network. Not to convenient for commuting. Hopefully gas goes to $4/gallon to get more people to use PT.

Portland is the only place in the world where Google Transit planner can be used:

Portland continues the pioneer spirit!

I used to live in England and at that time we had a good public transport network which has since been dismantled by privatisation.
I live in Portland now and enjoy a very integrated system. The buses are equipped with GPS so you can go online and find out when the next bus will arrive at your stop (this can also be done by phone from the stop). Some routes are designated frequent service (every 15 minutes or less) more info at www.trimet.org . Drivers are very bike aware and there are published bike routes for the city. Oregon law also requires motorists to stop for pedestrians at any road junction whether or not it is a marked crossing, a lot of motorists in Portland will stop if they see you about to cross. There is also noticeably less use of the car horn in Portland.

As a Portland resident, bicyclist, and frequent transit rider I was delighted to see your article on our fair city. Portland is a wonderful place to live, and many aspects of the urban planning here really are revolutionary for a U.S. city. However, your article somewhat overstates our experience with public transit. It's worth noting that only 12% of Portlanders reported using public transit to commute to work in the 2000 U.S. Census. Just as in nearly every other U.S. city (except perhaps New York and San Francisco), a large majority of Portlanders still depend on their cars.

I agree with Andy that Portland is a great place to live. I think though that the use of public transport has changed quite a bit since 2000. The west side blue line was fairly new and the red and yellow were not open in 2000. The existence of the max system has concentrated more of the new development around the stations. Most of my neighbours in NE Portland either bike or bus to work. If you ride the blue line you will find the trains crowded in the morning. I forgot to add that the buses and trains all have bike racks which is another plus.

However it rains a lot in the winter so please don't move here :-)

This was a vice-chair of the UK Conservative party, praising public transport and not mentioning privatisation? Have they realised that breaking up the UK trains, buses and underground systems was a huge mistake? If so, how about a plan to repair the damage instead of saying how great something quite different, half the world away, is?

I gave up owning a car 15 years ago and, in the UK, can manage with public transport, including taxis, with a rented car once or twice a year. I live in a city with excellent and cheap taxis, on a mainline. Bus and train fares are about ten times what they were 15 years ago but I still save money. However, many would have more places they needed to go, and at times, that public transport couldn't match.

Drunks on public transport, insecure stations and bus stops, and buses and trains that either don't run or pass by because they are over-filled, are all big deterrents. As are services that stop too early making many events impossible to attend, or cause one to fear being stranded. One's own car is a hugely attractive alternative to all that.

The problem with cars is that, if you need one much then once you own one you are committed to so much fixed outgoing that it isn't economical, or maybe even affordable to leave it sitting at home and use other transport methods. What with interest, depreciation, tax, insurance. Public transport has to be very good and very cheap to make inroads into the travel needs of that proportion of the population.

We need efficient and attractive (healthy, well ventilated, predicatable, reliable, well planned) public transport that is hugely less carbon emitting and cheap, and to cut the fixed overheads of car ownership, or make renting or pooling more economic, so that people actually can make rational and responsible transport choices.

I have lived since 1989 in the Portland, OR area & am a transportation planner. The information given in this article is wildly inaccurate, false, & has clearly never been checked. Census and local travel surbvey data indicate very clearly that no modal switch to transit has occurred (we had 7% transit use in 1963, it's about 3% of all trips today). Also, traffic congestion has grown here faster than in any other similar sized US city (see Texas Transportation Institute website for their Congestion Index data). The officioal Metro report on their first (1986) Light Rail line showed no overall modal diversion at all. Had the author looked at the mountains of factual data available & not taken at face value the lies of our local on-the-take leaders she would have found this out. If this is a "Conservative" leader then Britons can look forward to high-priced government foolishness with mega-lies by those profiting from it no matter who wins the next general election. I might add that the same data from Census Journey to Work files and trafficc counts shows that the UK's "New Rail" cities (Newcastrle & Birmingham) have also flunked out: much higher auto use, a lower transit share than when they had bus-only systems, & auto ownership way higher than ever.

I’ve lived in both Portland and London and I can tell you that there are positive and negative aspects to both cities in relation to public transport. For instance, Portland has a much more environmentally friendly and cleaner system in MAX and Streetcar. London’s Tube is anything but clean and often I felt filthy coming off the train – with black dirt on my person- and feeling as though I needed to take a shower.

Conservative critics in Portland always complain that the public transport system isn’t working. But, I ride it daily and I can honestly say that it works very well. It is always packed with riders during the weekday – and now even the weekends are seeing an increase in rider ship. Moreover, you won’t see even half of the shutdown problems on public transport in Portland as you would in London. For example, I lived in London when an employee of the Underground was caught on camera engaging in sport while he was supposed to be on medical leave – he got fired – and his co-workers on the Underground went on strike. I don’t miss that frustration.

But, Portland’s system has flaws as well. London’s Tube reaches vast areas from Canary Wharf past East Acton and south to Wimbledon. In Portland, light rail is effective for those who live close to the city core and very few reaches into the suburbs. In fact, residents who live in cities such as Lake Oswego or Wilsonville (suburbs just south of Portland) the car is the only option for transport as busses are cutting back on express trips to those areas. Moreover, if it weren’t for the terror crisis, I would actually feel safer on London’s Underground system. Portland’s public transport is actually very affordable – and even free in the city center – which attracts a numerous amount of homeless, reckless teens and panhandling patrons… not to mention security is non-existent (I have only been checked for my light rail ticket once in one year).

Overall, though, I am surprised more Europeans don’t check out Portland when they visit the USA. It is simply much easier to get around than most cities in America with the exception of New York City or Chicago. And, Portland, while its museum or man-made wonders are weak in comparison to other places… it does have an abundance of natural wonders nearby such as waterfalls, The Gorge (Hood River white water rafting and wind surfing), the Pacific Ocean and active volcanoes. It’s an outdoor paradise that grows more cosmopolitan each day.

Sayeeda Warsi's film was interesting but at the end she asks why we don't have such integrated transport in Britain.
We did in some areas before the tories smashed it apart out of spite. In Tyne and Wear where the Tyneside Metro was the hub of an integrated system buses fed into the system rather than competed with it and served areas the Metro didn't. Through ticketing was available, you could board a bus and buy one ticket that took you on the bus then the Metro, British rail and then another bus to complete the journey. It covered virtually all transport operators in Tyne and Wear county, publically owned and private. Now the city centre is packed full of empty polluting buses while the more remote areas have lost their services as buses no longer feed into the Metro system but compete with it. In terms of public subsidy it cost far more than the integrated system that once existed and most of that public money goes into the pockets of the shareholders of Stagecoach and the like rather than on providing public transport. So why was a sucessful and efficient (more passenger km per employee than anywhere else in Europe at the time) integrated public transport system destroyed? The Conservative government de regulated bus services in 1986, preventing the passenger transport exectutive from co ordinating services, the transport supplementary grant was changed so it could only be spent on road building and they also sold off the bus industry at a fraction of its true value to their friends, this drove down wages and put the final nail in the coffin of British bus manufacturing.
They did this because inexpensive, integrated public transport was a popular vote winner in London, Sheffield, Tyneside and elsewhere. They also abolished the councils who undertook this democratically mandated policy. As well as this Thatcher vetoed building railways alongside new road schemes (building them in this way only costs a small fraction of the total costs for a new road). Just one example of this is the Itchin bridge in Southampton which has rail track within a few yards of either side of the bridge and which would have made a large reduction in the rail journey times from Southampton to Fareham and Portsmouth. Over twenty years on it is often quicker to walk than drive in congested Southampton as a result and this has also condemmed many residents of this city to respiratory disease. The same short sighted, spitefulness was demonstrated by Thatcher's refusal to build a railway alongside the bridge in the Dornoch Firth (it would have cost peanuts compared to the total cost and taken an hour off the journey time from Inverness to Thurso).
Sayeeda Warsi would do well to remember that Thatcher said anyone still using a bus at the age of 30 was a failure. The conservatives bear most of the responsibility for the transport problems we have today (not that the tories in power at the moment are any better). They could have build railways and cycle lanes alongside roads in the 1980s at very little extra cost, like the Danes did. To build such schemes now would be much more difficult and very costly indeed.
Sayeeda Warsi is smooth talking and persuasive. Unless she is ignorant of this country's recent political and transport history (and I doubt this)she knows the answer to the question she put at the end of her film but she doesn't have the honesty to tell us why we don't have public transport like Portland.

Oh dear,

Portland has the highest female participation of any marathon in the world. Does that give us an indication of who guides this city?
Yes common sense is just too easy to ignore. Is it the men or women that drive that ignorance?

The dumb take the NHS as an overhead and the clever see it as 'the' club. If we cannot unite Jew/Christian/Muslim and money should not be our God then look to our NHS. It is a membership that some 60 million people will potentially and sometimes regularly have contact with throughout our lives. It should have that caring club that attaches a heavy investment in a communal health care structure and where the hospital is considered the option of last resort. We should be embarrassed that we have to go to hospital if the cause is self-induced. The numerous articles, moans and budgets simply bore me. Where is the network and structure for our 60 million members? What does the membership want once we have started that club?

As a cyclist, runner and walker our British provision for 'free' travel is pathetic. A couple of hundred yards of cycle-lanes here and there will not save me from the traffic. The pavements are in poor condition and walking just ain't cool.

Rule Britannia!

R.
Maidstone, Kent.