Raise the Hammer

Jason, if the streets of Portland are 2 way with as many lights as you claim than I doubt any vehicle gets above
10-15 MPH. I also expect that there are lots of ways to avoid the downtown if you do not want to go there, unlike Hamilton. Portland is the biggest city in Oregon and the major metropolitan area for many miles around. Not quite the same description as Hamilton.

The Blue Line connects Gresham a suburb of 100,000 to Portland and is 15 miles long (24 KM) so it's a lot like the Go train running into Toronto . The Red Line is a little short of your 25 mile claim, it is actually a 5.5 mile (9 KM) line running to the airport which has well over a million people flying in/out of it a month. The Yellow lone is 5.8 miles (9.4 KM) and goes to the Expo Centre a complex well over 300,000 square feet, a lot like the 500,000 Toronto International Centre. The new Green line is 8.3 miles (13.4 KM) and will run to the Clackamas Town Centre via the Portland State University (almost 25,000 students).The town centre is almost 1.5 million square feet of retail, a lot bigger than Eastgate. Klackmas is another suburban area with a population of well over 300,000. The cost? budgeted at $575.7 million. And that's US currency so add the 20-25% conversion on top of that.

So the whole thing is a lot different than you describe it as. The Hamilton downtown does not have enough jobs or residents to warrant the kind of expense 16 km of LRT would cost. Portland is the largest city in Oregon and is the hub of the entire state. Hamilton is half city half suburb. Toronto still dominates all of Southern Ontario.

The best way to re-vitalize Hamilton's downtown, if that is what we are trying to do, is get people to live there. I suspect that will take a lot of money. Perhaps some subsidies for condo projects or office towers?

Portland is a very different city than Hamilton with different challenges. Hamilton's geography is very unique and must be taken into account. Unfortunately a lot of the features force traffic into or at least through the downtown. Maybe we need new mountain accesses to take traffic away from downtown rather than into it.