LATEST

Seattleites Guide to PortlandTravel & Outdoors

Portland v. Seattle: Stuff Seattleites Envy…and Stuff We Don’t

We'll pump our own gas, thanks anyway.

Author: Allison Williams

February 1, 2014

1 min.read

Stuff We Envy	Stuff We Don’t
You Can’t Pump Your Own Gas Must be nice when it’s raining.	You Can’t Pump Your Own Gas It’s a pain when you’re in a hurry.
The Aerial Tram Sure, the skyway only connects the south waterfront to the OHSU complex, but it’s a fun, cheap ($4) round-trip ride for tourists.	Warmer Weather You know how we barely get by without air conditioning? Harder to do in Portland, home of 100-degree-plus summers.
No Sales Tax Of course Oregon makes up for it in income tax (which we don’t have), but it’s awesome that price tags equal the actual cost.	No NFL or MLB Teams The Trail Blazers can only entertain you so long.
The Schnitz No concert hall in Seattle has as cool a nickname as the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, or as eclectic a mix of programming: the Pixies one day, the Youth Philharmonic the next.	Residents Can Keep Barnyard Animals Fresh eggs are nice and all, but a city’s awfully tight for keeping geese, burros, pygmy goats, and ducks.
Great Skiing Sure, we have great skiing at Snoqualmie Pass, but Mount Hood has dramatic acreage, six ski areas, and is open year-round.	The Timbers’ 19,000-person Jeld-Wen Field The Sounders crowd? An average 44,038 screaming fans—more than all but one pro baseball team.
Small Blocks The 200-foot-long city blocks make it feel like you’re getting somewhere quickly in downtown Portland.	Weed is Illegal Now who’s the cool, hip city for freethinkers, huh?
Their Breweries While we’ll stand by our Manny’s and our Interurban IPA till the end, it’s pretty cool that Portland’s 52 breweries is a world record.	The name Jeld-Wen Field The “Clink” is an awkward moniker, but at least our stadium isn’t named after energy-efficient windows.
The MAX Portland’s light rail system goes to the mall, the airport, the suburbs—52 miles total, to Seattle’s 17.3.	The Traffic Is Bad Yeah, maybe we aren’t one to talk, but theirs is the eighth worst in the country, yet the city is the nation’s 28th largest.

Published in the Seattleites Guide to Portland issue of Seattle Met.

Previous article

The Most Portlandy Hotel Rooms in Portland

Next article

Allison Williams

Since joining Seattle Met in 2011, Allison Williams has overseen the magazine’s travel and outdoor coverage, including deep dives into Olympic National Park, the Columbia River, and a Burger King drive-thru in Canada. She edits the travel-focused blog Tripster and contributes service, news, interview, and narrative pieces to the magazine, including long-form features about mountain mysteries and puppies in prison. She’s earned awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and been nominated for a City and Regional Magazine award. Allison was raised here in Olympia and studied writing at Duke University, Oxford University, Columbia Journalism School, and University of Alaska. She began her career in New York City in the newsrooms of Metro newspaper and Time Out New York, then hightailed it back to her native habitat so she could write guidebooks and climb mountains.