I ran across an editorial by Ottawa columnist David Ljunggren that spoke so glowingly, so effusively about our fair city, that I had to double- and triple-check that he was talking about PDX. After all, Portland, Oregon is the home of public transit that is dangerous, expensive, and ineffective at reducing traffic. We’re the city with the dysfunctional motorist-cyclist interface. We’re the city with a shiny silver boondoggle sliding up and down the hill to OHSU on a taut wire. We’re the city where local government can’t be trusted to rename a street, much less perform competent urban planning.

And yet, here’s a Canadian describing how Portland “would decide in the 1970s to focus on urban planning and ensure that the city was as pleasant as possible to live in. The result is one of the most impressive light rail, bus and streetcar systems of any U.S. city.”

Really? Portland?

Just as I was beginning to believe that someone had slipped Mr. Ljunggren some of the special Kool-Aid, I clicked to the second page of his editorial, where he grudgingly admitted all was not paradise in the Rose City: “Ask a few questions and you’ll quickly learn the city’s approach to public transit doesn’t please everyone”, and that some folks are “unhappy that the free transit system allows the homeless and other more marginal elements of society to travel around town with everyone else.”

Thank goodness. I thought I had stepped through the Looking Glass for a moment there.

In all seriousness, it’s easy to get absorbed in seeing the negatives in your environment, the things that most piss you off. And the people that are most irritated are precisely those that are going to be most vocal about it. Sometimes it’s good to hear someone else’s perspective. I guess from the perspective of Ottawa, we live in a pretty nice place.

Thank you, Mr. Ljunggren, for your kind words.