Portland Streetcar

The Portland Streetcar is a streetcar system in Portland, Oregon, that opened in 2001 and serves areas surrounding downtown Portland. The 3.9-mile (6.3 km) NS Line runs from Northwest Portland to the South Waterfront via Downtown and the Pearl District. The Loop Service, which opened in September 2012 as the Central Loop (CL Line), runs from Downtown to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry via the Pearl District, the Broadway Bridge across the Willamette River, the Lloyd District, and the Central Eastside Industrial District and added 3.3 miles (5.3 km) of route. In September 2015 the line was renamed as the Loop Service, with the A Loop traveling clockwise, and the B Loop traveling counterclockwise. The two-route system serves some 20,000 daily riders.

As with the heavier-duty MAX Light Rail network which serves the broader Portland metropolitan area, Portland Streetcars are operated and maintained by TriMet. But unlike MAX, the streetcar system is owned by the city of Portland and managed by Portland Streetcar Incorporated, a non-profit public benefit corporation whose board of directors report to the city's Bureau of Transportation.

Like some of Portland's original streetcar lines, redevelopment has been a major goal of the project. The Portland Streetcar is the first new streetcar system in the United States since World War II.

Since September 2012, the Portland Streetcar system has three services, which share a section along 10th and 11th Avenues in downtown, through the West End.

As of mid-2015, the two-line streetcar system measures 7.2 miles (11.6 km), measured in one direction only – not round-trip lengths – and counting only once the section served by both routes. The end-to-end length of the original route, now designated the "NS Line", is 3.9 miles (6.3 km) since 2007, and the 2012-opened "CL Line" added 3.3 miles (5.3 km). The total one-way length of the CL Line is 4.4 miles (7.1 km), for it shares 1.1 miles (1.8 km) of route along 10th and 11th Avenues in downtown with the NS Line.

Of the NS Line's 7.8-mile (12.6 km) round-trip length, 5.3 miles (8.5 km) are one-way operation along streets which are mostly also one-way and with the streetcars following parallel streets in opposite directions. The remaining 2.5 miles (4.0 km) of round-trip route length are sections where the NS streetcar route uses a single street (or private right-of-way) for both directions of travel. The CL Line, similarly, follows separate streets in opposite directions over most of its length. The only exceptions are a length of about 1,000 feet (300 m) near the OMSI terminus (mostly on a streetcar-only viaduct over the Union Pacific Railroad main line) and the route sections nearest to, and across, the Broadway Bridge. With the opening of the second line, the system now has 76 stops.

The steepest grade on the system is 8.75% in the block of SW Harrison Street between 1st and 2nd avenues, which since 2015 has been on a section of track used by both routes.

Streetcars are scheduled to arrive at 15-minute intervals at most times, with a 20-minute frequency in the evening and on Sundays. Every stop is fitted with an electronic reader board giving real-time arrival information to waiting passengers, using the NextBus vehicle tracking system. This was first brought into use on March 25, 2002.