The cause of the tram cost overrun has been discovered

An investigation has uncovered what has caused the cost to build the Portland Aerial Tram to skyrocket from $15 million to $55 million and counting.  The ultimate cause is a simple clerical error, compounded by a cultural misunderstanding between the American designers and the Austrian builders.  Neither factor by itself sparked the near-quadrupling in cost, but the two mistakes together sent the costs soaring before anyone realized what had happened.

The tram is being built in Austria to an American design.  The designers completed their plans and shipped them to the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT), which is overseeing construction.  Then came the first error.  It was intended to send four copies of the plans to the contractor, identified as copies one, two, three, and four, to be distributed to different points in the factory.  PDOT’s employee, so far unidentified, marked the four copies "Tram — Set 1," "Tram — Set 2," "Tram — Set 3," and "Tram — Set 4," and told a clerk to send them to the contractor.  The clerk sent the plans in four separate envelopes without a cover letter explaining that they were identical copies of the one set of plans.

The Doppelmayr Company, the contractor building the tram, was expecting the plans to arrive from Portland but who had not been involved in the design, opened the envelopes.  Doppelmayr’s chief engineer, Heinz Grossenthaler,  worked out the German equivalent of the English notations on the plans as "Tramset 1," "Tramset 2," "Tramset 3," and "Tramset 4," and set to work to construct four identical trams.  The contract allowed for adjustments for changes in the costs of time and materials, and as four times the materials and four times the labor were required, the estimated cost was roughly quadrupled.  (Some efficiencies in building the same tram four times over reduced the cost from $60 million to $55 million.)  "Ach, we’re sorry about this," said Grossenthaler by telephone, "But fine trams they all are.  You will like them."

The discovery that not one tram, but four trams, are en route to Portland set off varying reactions across Portland, first to assess blame and second to decide what to do with the three extra trams.  Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has long argued that Portland east of 50th Avenue gets far less than its share of city services, has claimed one tramset for Rocky Butte, near Interstate 205.  "We can put a snowmaker there and have year-round skiing," he said in a hasty press conference.  Homer Williams, the lead developer of the South Waterfront district around the east end of the tram, wants two of the extra sets, one to connect his development to the Chart House restaurant on Terwilliger Boulevard and the other to run between South Waterfront and the Portland Development Commission’s Old Town office.  "Workable development is all about connections," Williams said, "like the connection the tram will make between the river and OHSU, and I can use a fast connection to the city government.  At three minutes for the trip to PDC, the tram will get me to the government faster than telephoning and being put on hold."  And an innovative idea came from a prominent Southeast Portland activist, who proposed using the cars on one tram as halfway houses for released felons.  "Put one tower in Ladd’s Addition and another tower at the Convention Center," he said.  "The halfway houses will still be in Buckman, where the city wants to put them all, except that they’ll be 90 feet in the air, and our streets will be safe again."  Sheriff Giusto is said to be studying the idea.