Difficult as it is for me to admit, I think I've caught a mild case of soccer fever, not from anything going on in Portland, but from watching the Seattle Sounders' opening game from a skybox at Qwest Field. It's a fine facility that serves football and soccer, My hosts claimed that soccer outdraws baseball in Seattle, at least in attendance per game. It's a stadium with a lot of visible sponsors and it's remarkably easy to get to on foot or by car, train, bus, or light rail.
I was also struck by Seattle's bus/rail tunnel. I had first seen it when it was bus-only, before the rails were installed. Now, with buses and trains sharing the tunnel, it's an efficient way for mass transit to pass through downtown. The thought occurred to me that instead of replacing the Interstate Bridges with a new 10- or 12- or 16-lane bridge (I'm not sure where the count is today), we could build a bus-rail tunnel underneath the Columbia and not do anything about the bridge and car traffic. With a massive park-and-ride on the Vancouver side, light rail between Portland and Vancouver might become faster than driving, something that should have been the goal of our rail system in the first place.