Portland #2 'Time Saving City in U.S.'

According to Adam Bluestein, of RealSimple.com, Portland is the number 2 time saving city in the United States.  Of course my first question when I saw the article was, 'What exactly does that mean, and how do you judge it?'.  Well, here are the criteria he used when judging cities for the study:

To assess which places help you make the most of your precious hours, we sorted through reams of data on dozens of large American cities, ranked each on various criteria in five categories (see below) on a scale of 1 to 5, and added up those categories to get an overall score.

Category 1: Getting around --Includes average commute, walkability, traffic congestion, airport on-time performance.

Category 2: Health and safety --Includes average wait to get a doctor's appointment, physicians per capita, response times of emergency medical services.

Category 3: Information and technology -- Includes broadband and wireless availability, bookstores and libraries per capita, helpful resources such as 311 hotlines.

Category 4: Green time-savers -- Includes recycling access and cost, number of farmers' markets and community gardens, bike friendliness.

Category 5: Lifestyle -- Includes number of personal trainers and organizers, restaurants offering takeout per capita, miscellaneous time-saving services.

 Portland finished right behind Seattle, and this is how Portland was graded out:

Portland, Oregon -- Score: 21.5 -- Population: 557,706

It's no hassle getting around this town, whether by bike or on the nation's fourth-largest light-rail system. There are few airport delays, and speedy emergency services translate to one of the highest cardiac-arrest survival rates.

And finding lunch is easy, with about 450 gourmet food carts around the city. "I could hit 100 carts in an hour," says Brett Burmeister, who runs Foodcartsportland.com. "It takes less than five minutes to get a cheap, amazing lunch."

Getting around: 4.5
Health and safety: 4.5
Information and technology: 4
Green time-savers: 4.5
Lifestyle: 4

While I will agree that Seattle has more technology and more hot spots, I disagree with the overall grade.  I think more weight should have been put on the 'Getting Around' category.  I have wasted countless hours sitting in Seattle traffic.  Every time I try to get somewhere in Seattle I seem to lose at least an hour sitting on the freeways.  There just isn't a way around, and the traffic is never ending!  I guess that's when you pull over and hit one of the coffee shops with free wifi. 

Either way, I still see this as a positive representation of Portland.  The more people I have visiting, the more I appreciate our city.  If we keep getting these 60 degree days in February and March, we may just have a mass migration to the great gray northwest!  

To see the entire article, click here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/03/15/rs.top.time.saving.cities/index.html?hpt=T2