New Urban Desire: Streetcars : Oregon: Portland will be first in the U.S. to revive the venerable means of transport. With no domestic manufacturers, project managers turned to Czech Republic for the cars.

It has been nearly half a century since streetcars clanged and rattled through the streets of Portland, and in most cities they are little more than nostalgic, oak-and-iron memories.

Now this city that prides itself on its forward-thinking urban planning is going back to the future, digging up streets where some of the old rails ran and trying to become the nation’s first to build a new streetcar line.

But the sleek modern streetcars scheduled to go on line in 2001 will bear little resemblance to their creaky, open-sided forefathers. Planners here say these cars are intended not for tourist nostalgia trips but as a way to keep commuters moving and the downtown vital in an era of explosive growth.

“We want to keep the urban flight that goes to the suburbs,” said Mary Volm, a spokeswoman for Portland’s Department of Transportation. “It has killed a lot of cities. We want to have a continually growing and healthy downtown.”

The streetcar is just a small part of long-range planning for a metropolitan area that has nearly 1.5 million people and expects another half million to move in over the next 20 years.

Parking fees, parking bonds and tax hikes are funding nearly all of the initial $52.8-million building costs, with $8 million privately raised through a downtown improvement district that made it clear it didn’t want just another bus line.

“They told us rubber tires wouldn’t do it,” said Vicky Diede, the city’s project manager. “Bus lines change. Rails have a sense of permanence.”

Five modern, 66-foot streetcars, with air-conditioning and ramps for the disabled, are being built for the project in the Czech Republic. Nobody makes them in the United States.

“These cars are all over Europe,” said D. Carter MacNichol, the overall project manager. “They’re everywhere. But the company has not sold a lot of them in the Western world, and these are the first in the United States. The Czechs are thrilled to have the opportunity.”

Track is being laid for the initial 4.3 miles at the edge of the downtown area with connections to light rail and bus lines.

The initial loop will connect the Pearl District, a 150-acre former industrial area programmed for upscale development, to the downtown area and Portland State University.

With an urban growth boundary that limits sprawl and protects surrounding farmland, Portland is increasingly looking at high-density housing within that boundary to soak up the flood of people moving to the area.

City officials see a streetcar system as a catalyst for development of parts of the city that are ripe for it.

MacNichol said other cities, including Aspen, Colo., are interested in seeing if Portland can do what it wants to do at a relatively low price.

Aspen will be watching how the Czech cars work in Portland with an eye to using them to reduce heavy bus traffic to Snowmass, a popular ski area, said Claude Morelli of Aspen’s transportation department.

“We know we can justify the line because we have the ridership. The bus system here is very successful,” he said. “We’re watching Portland because they are buying these interesting vehicles.”

While the Portland City Council was unanimous in approving the project, some Portlanders wonder if more research should have been done.

Brad Carman, who owns a hair-and-tanning salon along the planned streetcar route, contended there has never been a study to determine what the ridership would be, and that there is no reason why the trendy northwest section and Portland State would generate heavy traffic between them.

He noted studies that indicate users of Portland’s light rail system are largely former bus riders, not new users of mass transit.

“It’s fine to put the train sets in, but ridership remains to be seen,” he said.

Carman added that city commissioners should have allowed Portlanders to vote on the project, as they did on light rail, before raising parking fees to pay for the streetcars.

Project managers say they doubt Portland will ever again have the 200 miles of streetcar track it had from the 1890s into the 1930s, when the city began to pave over the rails as reliance on the automobile increased. By the 1950s they were gone.

“But I believe Portland will build more of these,” MacNichol said. “There is talk of other connectors from other neighborhoods to the downtown and the northwest district.”

When a downtown bridge across the Willamette River was refurbished recently, it was engineered to facilitate streetcar rails, just in case.

Fares will be the same as bus and light-rail lines run by Tri-Met, a regional government agency. Within the downtown area, the ride is free. Tickets will be transferable.

The route will have everything from a hospital to churches, bookshops, supermarkets and myriad shops. Everything, city transportation spokeswoman Volm said, except a funeral parlor.

“You can be born there, you can live there,” she said, “but you just can’t die there.”