A Comparison of the Portland and San Jose Light Rail Planning Processes
Abstract
The two cities of San Jose, California, and Portland, Oregon, faced some similar transportation-related decisions in the 1970s. Leaders for each city were beginning to understand the connection between land use and transportation. Each metropolitan area was faced with the challenges of revitalizing its downtown, managing its boundaries, providing traffic congestion relief, and creating transportation systems that would benefit the cities and endure into the next century. In the 1970s, leaders in each region made the decision to construct light rail systems. In this paper I analyze the events that led Portland and San Jose to dramatically change their transportation planning strategies by adopting a light rail program, after decades of road construction geared towards serving the automobile.
