Why Downtown?
Nina Rosenbaum
3/25/2021
Why do the trips start downtown?
Map of portland scooter trips
On the map, there is a pattern of the most common trips occuring within Portland’s downtown (aka, central business district) than other parts of the city. The origin points for the scooters is partially determined by the scooter companies, as each company mandates contractors to place scooters in designated spots each morning (this data is not made publicly available for analysis). As a condition for receiving a permit, PBOT requires 15% of a company’s scooters to be placed in eastern neighborhoods daily (TRN-15.01). The locations of scooters may have a significant impact on where scooters are utilized, based on how far people are willing to travel to get on a scooter.
What’s the History of Downtown Portland?
Most of this redevelopment was initiated as the private buses of the 1960s were going bankrupt, soon to be replaced with Trimet. In the civil rights era, urban issues were becoming a national focus, as urban sprawl spread throughout other cities. Riots and protests over issues of economic and racial inequality in cities became common. In a lot of cities, neighborhoods had a lot of destruction from protests, and downtowns were thought of as dangerous places to live. Many people moved out to the suburbs to avoid this, causing urban sprawl. City governments wanted to stop protests, so they used mega-projects like highways to disrupt and divide neighbrohoods in the city (Rose, Mark H., and Mohl, Raymond A. 2012).
Planning Downtown Portland
Urban planning in Portland has been focused on making downtown attractive to residents through improving transit and downtown planning (Abbott 2004, 172). Amenities and attractions were encouraged by the city government to make downtown seem better than the suburbs. Protests for the freeway removal of the harbor drive successfully made the former freeway into the Tom McCall waterfront park, which set a further precedent for increasing public spaces (Rose and Moyl 2012). The McCall waterfront park, among other waterfront areas, now geo-bans e-scooters since it is such a popular pedestrian attraction (PBOT).
The Tom McCall Waterfront Park
With the construction of this and other new public spaces, downtown has remained not only as a site for tourist attractions but also a public space with lots of transportation choices. Many decades of urban planning and redevelopment in Portland aimed to create a downtown which, “…claims nearly all of the cultural institutions, civic facilities, and gathering places that serve the region as a whole” (Abott 2004, 165).