Lately I’ve been snottier than usual about the suburbs. I’ve been reading too much about how we’re about to run out of gas, and about how we have blindly designed an astonishing portion of our lives around the belief that there’s an endless supply at the pumps. Yet we continue to build and build some more. Sometimes we even build green!
So I’ve been somewhat amazed recently at the amount of coverage the local media showers on the people in the towns of Beaverton, Tigard, Tualitan and Wilsonville, though mainly the people of Tualitan, who have been whining and pouting about the choo-choo train. I think Beaverton may be a different story, but I will vouch for this: in the towns of Tigard, Tualitan and Wilsonville, the term public transportation means picking up more than one child from the private school in the SUV. For four years, I worked in an office park in that godawful stretch of banality, which could be reached more efficiently by bicycle than by bus. Even though I live in what is considered to be the United States’ most well-planned city – and I tend to agree – the company I worked for managed to set up shop in a place that took two hours to reach by bus. They don’t like public transportation out there. Hell, they don’t even like sidewalks out there.
Not long ago, we shelled out $160 million to develop the Westside Express Service, a TriMet (that’s the BiState of Portland, for the Saint Louisans) train that goes through these communities at rush hour, carrying people to and from the transit center in Beaverton, which in turn connects to the rest of the bus and train system. Since the train began running a little over a year ago, the people who live near the tracks have been whining more regularly than the train schedule about the blowing of the whistle, which is a federal requirement at points where the tracks cross the road. I think that sort of behavior is to be expected of people who think it’s their birthright to consume as much as they need in order to live in places accessible only by freeways, places where the main geographic feature is the parking lot, people who think, evidently, that living in the city is beneath them. I live in the city, and there’s noise all day long: people coming and going, the freeways nearby, the airport, the endless screaming sirens on Burnside, Glisan and 82nd. Where’s my news conference! To be fair, though, the people who bought million-dollar condos in the Pearl a few years ago pitched a royal fit because the mail trucks going to and from the post office – which has been there for many, many years – are too noisy. At least in the Pearl, unlike Tualitan and Beaverton, they don’t take over an obscene amount of square footage, and they have buses and streetcars.
But what’s surprising is how much air time they get. Not nearly as surprising, though, as the bit that came on the news on Wednesday night: somehow, an exception has been made, and the whistles won’t be at such a high decibal in Beaverton. Which makes me wonder, of course, how long it will be before some driver paying no attention to the task at hand manages to get smashed while crossing the tracks. It’ll be interesting to see who gets blamed for that.
