We haven't heard much from Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg these past several months. He's been on leave from the paper at Harvard University on a Loeb Fellowship. But in The Oregonian's Sunday commentary section, Gragg rang in on the tram debacle.
"No member of the media watched the tram's early history more closely than I did," he writes. "Back in 2001, I started beating the drum for an international design competition."
Gragg describes how OHSU used a "ski-lift engineer" back in 2002 to produce the first cost estimate for the tram. The asumption was that "a short, simple tower could be anchored with cables into the mountainside's bedrock. By contrast, the tram now being built lands at a hole in the side of OHSU's new 200-foot-high Patient Care Facility. To protect the new microsurgery facilities, the system's 1 million pounds of cables and cars won't touch the building. They'll hang off a 160-foot tower with no tie-backs to either the building or the ground. Imagine playing tug-of-war with a football team while standing on one foot: The tower will bear an extraordinary 160 million foot-pounds of torque. Nothing like it has ever been built anywhere before...Nobody bothered to study the radical new engineering problem OHSU had created."
Gragg concludes by arguing that this is one of the city's biggest ever public-private partnerships, and that what's at stake here isn't just the $55 million or even the future of South Waterfront, but the future of such civic projects throughout the city. And that's what I see as the most crucial point. The going has become tough. Are we going to keep going?
Read the Gragg piece, but Randy Leonard's response is also a must-read for a more complete picture of where we are.
Personally, I want to see the tram built - and clearly there's been a lot of demagoguing this issue - but not at any cost.
Posted by: Charlie Burr | March 27, 2006 at 07:57 PM
Ditto. I'd like to see it built. At this point, someone and someway they need to dig up the cash and finish what they started. If need be, redo the design, find a better and cheaper way.
Either way, get it done.
Posted by: adron | March 28, 2006 at 11:52 PM
I think neutering the design would be nearly as tragic as not finishing the job. It's up to the leaders... get it done or it's a failure of leadership.
Posted by: jj | March 29, 2006 at 10:01 AM
I love gee whiz transportation and all... but you have to wonder whether they couldn't just relocate the microsurgery center and anchor the tram cables uphill from the tower more cheaply.
The idea that these issues weren't even considered at the design stage just reeks of incompetence and connivance.
As Gragg says "So who lied? Who messed up? Who do we blame? The truth is, everyone was enjoying a long, local tradition. As historian E. Kimbark McColl once put it, "Portland is always looking for first-class passage on a steerage ticket." "
The problem with pressing ahead now on a project like this is that the good is obvious... a nice shiny tram... but the harm is spread so thinly and widely that it is hardly felt and difficult to mobilize against... incremental tax effects, closed schools, obscure budget tradeoffs, borrowing costs, national reputation.
We have a hard time comparing thin widespread harms with narrow and obvious goods.... and there are plenty of politicians and business people who count on that feature of human nature.
It's so hard to understand where the damage is, and so hard to compare the damage to a nice shiny bubble flying through the sky.
Still the vague sense that the public was set up and is getting the short end of the deal doesn't seem to go away.
Posted by: Miles Hochstein | March 30, 2006 at 12:06 PM
Thank goodness for Gragg's article. I really didn't understand what the issues involved were and I try and keep up on these things. The problem with the tram debate is that we've got about five sides in to it at this point (Lair Hill NIMBY's, OHSU, The City, retro/anti-tax grumps (Stanford and Bog) and SOWA developers/land owners) and each side has their own agenda. No one has really explained to the public what the factual reasons for the cost overruns, which should be the starting point for any discourse and lesson's learned.
I do hope the tram gets built and hope the city/developers/OHSU learns some PR and project management lessons. My one question is; with the fact that the top tower is such a first of it's kind engineering feet, is there a chance it could fail or not work within tollerances. That would put a damper on these type of ground breaking projects in Portland for quite some time. I can see the headlines now '$45M Wasted on Nonworking Tram!!!!'.
Posted by: EdgePDX | March 31, 2006 at 11:25 AM
If you build it, they will come.. right?
Posted by: mike conroy | April 04, 2006 at 09:32 PM
This may have been covered before but can anyone explain why the tram is being brought to the face of the OSHU building that houses sensitive programs?
I just don't get it.
It seems like a major design error.
Why couldn't the tram arrive alongside the building and end in a more generous, more public landing that could tie back to rock in a more straight forward way?
Posted by: david | April 07, 2006 at 10:47 AM