91ÊÓƵ

This is a press release I wasn’t expecting: TriMet and Metro were honored with what appears to be an invisible national award (see below) for the this week. Yes, that is the project that broke ground this summer and won’t open until 2015.

The honor is the Federal Transit Administration’s “Outstanding Achievement Award,” distributed annually and somewhat vaguely to agencies that provide “truly useful” information to the public about a project. The project’s , a document that is more than 1,000 pages long, was apparently lauded by the FTA as “exemplary,” and thus Metro, TriMet and consultant Parametrix, which helped with the document, were honored with the (previously noted invisible) award. The official announcement for the wonky-as-heck honor adds that TriMet is being being honored for “efficiency” and “inclusiveness.”

All kidding aside, the team behind the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Project, or as I call it, the Baby-Faced Deer Statue Project, has done a lot of things right in its public involvement process, other than the apparently quite readable environmental impact statement tome. The team invited media to “bridge school” for a nice presentation about its new car-free bridge; it had like a million meetings and a pretty good website and – most importantly – they’re offering â„¢, so any ol’ member of the public can watch the new bridge under construction. Now that I think about it, I don’t know why it’s important that the public be able to watch crews building the bridges all the time… but the extreme nerds here at the 91ÊÓƵ at least find it entertaining.

I hope you enjoy your invisible statue, TriMet!