Category: Cities

Exploring the new terminal at PDX

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Exploring the new terminal at PDX

This past weekend I had the opportunity to participate in Portland International Airport’s “dress rehearsal” for the opening of the newly built main terminal building. The building has been under construction since early 2021 and with this phase, a big portion of the airport will reopen, reducing a lot of the check-in desk congestion that is present today. The dress rehearsal was to help the airport, the airlines, and TSA make sure that things were operating as expected and to work out any major hiccups before the terminal officially opens on August 14. I believe over 1,000 participants signed up.

All participants had to register before entering the space and this process was a bit painful as it meant waiting in the parking garage in a very long line. The bottleneck seemed to be that they were doing a quick orientation of around 75 people before releasing them into the terminal. To me, this seemed problematic from a realism perspective as the waves of people during the morning rush can be well into the 200-300. Each person received a script that let them know what airline they were flying, whether or not they were checking bags, the security line they needed to go through (PreCheck, express, or regular), and how they were checking in (app or website, kiosk, or with an agent).

The Nitty Gritty

The terminal is beautiful, no doubt about it. On the right in this photo is the temporary wall that blocks the current check-in area from the new space. Then there are the new check-in areas. They are long open areas giving plenty of space for travelers to maneuver, even if an airline’s queues are long. Then you reach the wooden floor and a large opening in the ceiling letting a ton of natural light fill the space.

New PDX Terminal

The wooden floors lead to a tiled space and here you are facing west. There are stadium seats (more on that later) that face the area where passengers will exit the secure area after their flights. In the next picture the security checkpoints are to the right and left of the center of the photo.

New PDX Airport Terminal, Looking at Exit Hall

The security checkpoints are where some of my qualms with the design start to become apparent. Each security lane, or spot where there is a body scanner, has three places where passengers can line up to fill the plastic bins with their luggage, shoes, toiletries, etc. This is marked with the lane number and a letter (5A/B/C in the next photo), but there is zero explanation of what this means. As you can see, people were kind of bunching up. This will speed up people going through the I.D. check but will probably cause some frustration as people try to jockey for the next open bin space. I’m not sure how to solve it but I brought it to the airport staff’s attention as well as the TSA’s, so maybe they’ll come up with something in the next couple of weeks.

West Security Checkpoint at new PDX Terminal

After you go through security you are in a new atrium area that will lead to the old terminal hallways, so no big changes there.

But, the good news for travelers is that the secure connector hallway between B/C and D/E terminals will reopen when the terminal reopens! This will be a huge help to passengers who are connecting between some of the airlines that interline and codeshare out of PDX. The downside is that this hallway is now contains the singular exit for all passengers. I’ve been told this is temporary until phase II of the airport is completed, so hopefully that is true. The other downside is that the connector hallway no longer has moving walkways nor the chairs that it used to have. If I had a flight delay I would typically grab a coffee, sit in those chairs, and enjoy the views of the airport operations. My guess is that the hallway is too narrow now and putting chairs in would just impede traffic.

Terminal Connector Hallways and Exit at new PDX Terminal

Now, back to those stadium seats. These seats face the single terminal exit. There is going to be a lot of traffic around this area with people waiting for their friends and family to arrive. I’m sure Loyal Legion will do great business but do you notice that glass partition between the booth and the area above the terminal exit? It’s definitely not high enough to prevent a child (or adult) from tossing things down onto the heads of people exiting after their flight.

I also don’t love the lack of backs on the seating in the area but it is an improvement to the current waiting areas for families, which is essentially 5-6 seats at each of the two exits.

Standing on Stadium Seating Area in New PDX Terminal

Overall the space is a huge improvement. The amount of natural light alone is a massive upgrade to what the old check-in area, security checkpoints, and waiting area were like. This new pre-security departure hall offers lots of open space for passengers and passenger’s family/friends to wait. And the concessions and stores that disappeared during the construction, we’re getting those back and some new ones, like Loyal Legion, outside of security that everyone can enjoy. What do you think of the new terminal?

Looking at new PDX terminal from stadium seating area

 

Delta dropping Portland-Amsterdam, KLM picking it up

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From KLM —

Starting from October 27, KLM will fly three times a week on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday between Schiphol and Portland in winter. In summer 2025, KLM will fly five times a week on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday between Schiphol and Portland. The flights are operated by the Boeing 787-9 and offer 30 seats in World Business Class, 21 seats in Premium Comfort Class, and 224 seats in Economy Class.

 

It isn’t outright stated in the release but this service replaces Delta’s daily A330 service between Portland and Amsterdam. This is overall a large reduction in seats on the route, especially since it will no longer be daily in the summer.

This route originates from Northwest’s old route network which Delta continued for a little while and then slowly started shrinking over time. Delta has operated it as a “scissor” route, meaning the flight would fly Portland-Amsterdam-Detroit so that the plane could rotate through a Delta hub for maintenance. The return flight to Portland would operate in a similar fashion. This probably created a small amount of planning headaches, but Delta had been doing it for years.

Because Delta has a joint-venture with KLM/Air France, KLM flying the route will still earn Delta cash and they can connect some traffic through PDX, though I think that will be rare. KLM will operate a more fuel efficient plane, the Boeing 787-9, reducing costs on the route.

At the same time, I think it’s a downgrade for Portlanders both because of the reduction in schedule and because of the plane change. In economy Delta operates the A330 with 2-4-2 seating while KLM’s 787-9s operate with 3-3-3 seating. For a couple traveling together, those 2 seats by the window are a great option. The reduction in service is disappointing but maybe KLM will up the summer flying after selling the route for a while and seeing how well (or not well) it is doing. Of course the news release doesn’t acknowledge the reduction but in my opinion it should.

It does make me wonder about the future of Delta’s base at PDX. It feels like they are so focused on making Seattle work that they’ll reduce other west coast flying in pursuit of that goal. There have been rumors of Delta trying to get a Portland-Seoul route operating but I am very skeptical of that happening.

One little side note, at the bottom of the KLM press release it states:

Portland is the capital of the state of Oregon.

 
Portland is not the state capital of Oregon.

The Montreal Snow Removal Army

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I spent a few months traveling to Montreal for work right before Covid hit, right in the middle of winter. I noticed that the sidewalks and streets stayed mostly clear of snow and now I know why. This fascinating article on the snow removal process in Montreal makes every other city’s efforts pale in comparison.

In Montreal, a blizzard is a call to action. With a budget of nearly $180 million and a staff of over 3,000 workers, the city is poised and prepared to manage and remove it all. Once snow begins accumulating, a multiphase operation begins to unfold across the city’s 19 boroughs. Between roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, the city clears over 10,000 km – roughly the distance between Montreal and Beijing.

Montreal doesn’t just push snow to the curb with plows – instead, snow is picked up by a fleet of trucks and transported up to one of 28 snow dump sites across the city. Throughout a typical winter, roughly 300,000 truckloads of snow are transported – a volume of about 12 million cubic meters.

Part of the snow removal process is available to view:

The whole article is a fun read. Montreal has massive snow mountains where snow is trucked to melt later and they use the old Francon quarry as a storage area as well –

The final site we visited was the crown jewel of Montreal’s snow storage strategy: the Francon quarry. In decades past, it provided the limestone that built Montreal’s posh downtown districts. And since its retirement, it has become the city’s largest snow dump.

This doesn’t mean Montreal’s snow removal is perfect though. On two of my trips to the city there was a large storm the day before I arrived and sidewalks were an absolute mess.

A Tale of Two Grocery Stores

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H-E-B

When an H-E-B grocery store lost power in Austin, they didn’t throw food out or make people put back their purchases.

From the Washington Post:

Around him were a couple hundred shoppers, some with only credit cards, trying to stock up during a statewide emergency. The power had been going on and off in this Austin suburb as cold weather overwhelmed the Texas grid. But no one told shoppers to put their items back if they couldn’t pay cash.

When Hennessy got to the cashier, he said, she just waved him on, thanked him and told him to drive home safely.

Compare that to a similar incident in Portland where a Fred Meyer lost power. From The Oregonian:

The food continued to sit unrefrigerated as the power outage dragged on at the store in Northeast Portland, prompting employees to toss out boxes of packaged meat, cheese and juice, whole turkeys, racks of ribs and other items they feared had spoiled.

The mound of discarded food in two large dumpsters attracted a crowd of 15 to 50 people at times who started taking some of it. Employees called police when they felt the scene got tense. Activists said police were “guarding” the food. Police said they were responding to “restore order.” National media picked up the story.

Two very different ways of handling similar problems. And while I am sure there is more to the Fred Meyer story, the idea that the store had to call the police to “restore order” is preposterous. What I would have liked to have seen from Fredy Meyer, which is a Kroger owned brand, is them to create order themselves by having food that would have no problem out of refrigeration for a little while, cheese and other dairy products, packaged cold cuts, etc. and hand them out in a reasonable fashion. Throwing it all in a dumpster while people watch and then throwing your hands up when there is a commotion is disingenuous. At the same time, the Portland Police should have shown up and immediately said “you created this problem, fix it”.

Looking at the Austin story, I have to wonder if corporate will back up the store managers. Sure it is good press, but it is also a lot of product that is leaving the store. Even if there was no story, it would be tough at the corporate level to come down on store managers for doing what is right for the community, regardless of the cost. The situation in Texas was and continues to be dire for a number of individuals, a few thousand in expenses for a company the size of H-E-B is small potatoes.

The team at Fred Meyer needs to take a good look at the H-E-B story and the reasoning behind it and learn something.

Tree from Hell

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Tree of Heaven Growing Next to a House
A tree of heaven growing out of the side of a porch in Portland, OR

I have been fighting an enemy that continually sends in reinforcements and those reinforcements seem to pop up in all kinds of locations that are meant to ambush me. Locations that are hard to reach or they show up even stronger than before, attempting to break my will to fight them. I’m talking of course about the tree of heaven or Ailanthus altissima, or as I like to call it, the tree from hell. Go ahead, read up on this kryptonite of a tree, but if you don’t have time for that, here are some quick, important points about it.

  1. The tree of heaven crowds out native species and secretes a chemical into the soil that is toxic to surrounding plants.
  2. The tree’s aggressive root system can cause damage to pavement, sewers and building foundations.
  3. If the plant has matured, cutting alone will only help temporarily by reducing its ability to spread.
  4. The wood is useless. It is brittle and has no structural value and burns poorly.
  5. The cuttings smell like burning garbage.

Those are just a few of the issues with the tree of heaven. Really, it comes down to how easily it spreads and how quickly it grows. I can rip out the seedlings, getting all of the root, but more plants will show up in a week or so. If I give the plants more than a month, then their roots become established and it’s even harder to get rid of it. There are two full grown tree of heaven next door to our house in the exact disturbed soil that they so much love and they are constantly dropping seeds. On a windy day those seeds get carried all over the neighborhood and we’ll find seedlings growing on our evening walks. Some people let the seedlings grow because it looks like a tree, but they don’t understand that it is invasive. They don’t know that it spreads so fast it’s hard to control. Even in the image at the top of this post, there is another tree growing across the street from the mother tree. It spreads like a disease.

Unfortunately, the city of Portland has been somewhat reluctant to take fast action against the tree and they are popping up everywhere. Part of the issue is that the city says it’s a “nuisance” tree not “invasive”, even though a post on their website calls it invasive. Since the tree is a nuisance, it requires a paid permit to remove. This should be a case where the city sends a worker out, confirms it’s a tree of heaven and lets the trees removal occur without a permit. It’s going to cost property owners enough just to get them removed, and it’s not a single step process. Even with the tree cut down, there are multiple applications of chemicals needed to kill the root system and insure the plant doesn’t come back. The other option for the homeowner is that they let the tree grow and risk it causing physical property damage.

Tree of Heaven on a sidewalk

The big headache comes when a tree of heaven hits a sewer or water main. Only then does the city care about the tree and the problems it causes. There’s a train yard not far from our neighborhood and there swaths of trees of heaven covering parts of the yard. I would guess because it’s open area where wind can easily blow, they are one of the main spreader areas for the tree of heaven.

For my fellow Portlanders please give the city a call if you see one of these trees on city property; They are commonly on sidewalks next to power line poles and near fence lines. If you need help with the tree of heaven, you can also contact TenPDX.

San Diego’s Smart Streetlights

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From IEEE Spectrum:

San Diego’s network of smart streetlights, which has been rolling out since early 2018, continues to grow. To date, some 2,000 of the sensor-laden devices have begun gathering pictures, sounds, and other data.

So far, the city has focused on the image data, using it to count pedestrians and cars as they move around the city. This data is only just starting to feed into the way the city designs and manages traffic flows, and any consumer applications remain far in the future, says Erik Caldwell, the city of San Diego’s interim deputy chief operating officer for smart and sustainable communities. Officials are still talking through all other possible applications, such as using the streetlights to locate gunshots, track airport noise, or monitor air quality.

The amount of data generated over time will be enormous and San Diego seems to be doing a bit of experimentation to see what kind of applications they can build around that data. And they aren’t alone, Atlanta, Georgia is also embarking on a pilot program to install smart streetlights.

One downside is the maintenance that will be involved with such sensors. Streetlights are important safety devices for cities but if the “smart” piece of them is not reliable over time or through storms, the upkeep might be their downfall.

A Farewell to Portland-Tokyo?

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This post may seem premature and to be clear, I have no inside information from Delta or the Port of Portland. This is simply a hypothesis.

With Delta’s newly announced joint venture with Korean Air it is becoming more and more likely that the Delta hub at Tokyo’s Narita Airport will be dismantled. For me it means that a great non-stop option to Tokyo PDX-NRT, will likely go away, or at least become Portland to Seoul.

But I am with Cranky Flier on his analysis.

This may be sad for those who liked having elevated service to Tokyo, but the vast majority of people, this new Korean relationship will be far more valuable. At the same time, Delta can continue to develop its relationship with China Eastern to further penetrate the Chinese market. China will likely become the most important air market in the world over time. While there are joint venture issues since the US and China don’t have open skies yet, Delta is now incredibly well positioned with both Korean and China Eastern offering tremendous penetration. Meanwhile, for American, China has been one of the most vexing problems, so it decided to do something about it.

As nice as having a non-stop option to Tokyo is, having a one-stop option to all over Asia is even better. The current Delta connections out of Narita are varied (Manila, Singapore, Bangkok, etc.) but mean that the airline has to dedicate aircraft and crews to a hub halfway across the world. Back in say the 1970s and 80s and really even into the 90s, having a hub in Tokyo made a lot of sense for airlines. Interline agreements, joint ventures, and airline alliances did not exist so if an airline wanted to carry passengers from a hub to a far off destination they needed all of their own resources available along the way. Today that model has changed. Airlines are leveraging partnerships to get passengers to destinations where they do not themselves fly. Delta, disappointed with the lack of Tokyo-Haneda slots that have been given out, is smart to reallocate the planes that currently fly in and out of Tokyo-Narita to places where it makes more sense (read, money).

While I will be sad to see a historic route go away, I love the idea of connecting in Seoul for other places in Asia. The airport is laid out well and Korean Air has a good reputation.

The unanswered question is, will a Japanese carrier like ANA or Japan Airlines approach PDX to offer a non-stop option to Narita or Haneda. With the new partnership between Alaska Airlines and Japan Airlines, there is a case to be made that a Japan Airlines flight is a no-brainer. But my fondness of United and the Star Alliance would really love seeing an ANA 787 parked at PDX offering a non-stop to Haneda.

Use car2go to Portland Airport starting July 1!

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car2go
car2go, the smart car sharing company from Daimler AG, announced that starting July 1, 2016 you will be able to use their cars to go to and from Portland International Airport. Parking will be at AirPark, a short shuttle ride from the airport. Trips to and from the airport are charged a $5.00 Airport Fee, but even with that, from places all around Portland, this is now a really cheap and convenient way to get to and from the airport. The real beauty of car2go in Portland is that they can be parked anywhere within the boundaries of the program, even paid parking spots.. And since they are small, it is really easy to find spots. Since paid parking is in downtown Portland and expanding to Northwest and the inner east side, the ability to park in these spots (for free) is a great feature.

The biggest downside is the off-airport parking area. It would have been great if the short term parking garage would have been the parking area, as you could simply walk out of your car2go and be in the terminal. I don’t know if a deal could not be reached with the airport or if the parking situation there is too constrained to allow for it.

I will try to get out there and document the process and how quick the shuttles are as soon as this comes online and would love to hear what people think of it when they use it.

You can read more about car2go parking and the new airport features on their website. The press release sent to members regarding airport parking is also available.