All About the Portland MAX (and associated Transit)

[Matthew H Fish]

Well, I guess my overall answer is that there is a lot of questions here, and some of them are really theoretical---like, I wouldn't say that transit can never clear congestion, because there isn't an infinite demand. I would also say that travelling is always going to be a little bit uncomfortable, just because people will stop paying for comfort past a certain point.
But I guess what I can show in this thread is what it looks like on the ground. Especially because between Portland and Vancouver, I have a pretty good contrast, where Portland, at least the central part of it, is built around the idea of transit as being a part of the core transportation infrastructure, while in Vancouver, it is more used as an addendum. And the difference shows in how those cities function. Taking a BRT line from Vancouver Mall to downtown Vancouver took a lot longer than a comparable light rail journey in Portland would. I will hopefully have more videos up showing more of the MAX system.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Looks like the 2nd Vancouver BRT line is about to open!
It might not be as glamorous as a train, but it is looking pretty spiffy.
I also think that this BRT line, as well as the 3rd line, still in development, will make the idea of Light Rail into Vancouver as more useful.
Right now Vancouver, Washington, like a lot of suburbs, has two contrasting demographic and social trends. On one hand, there are a lot of younger people, often with smaller families, who are looking to live closer to the center of a city---and you can see it in downtown Vancouver, with lots of apartment buildings going up. On the other hand, post-pandemic, a lot of people who work remotely want to live further out, especially because there are concerns about the safety level in inner cities---and even though some of that is due to propaganda, some of it is warranted.

 

[BlackDiamond]

From looking at the video, does the BRT have its own lanes or is it sharing a lane with auto traffic? Looks like the latter from what I could see. That would stretch the definition of BRT if it can get stuck in traffic. Sort of like the Washington St. Silver Line in Boston which was touted as a BRT replacement for the Elevated, but often referred to as the "Silver Lie" as it is nowhere near an adequate replacement, given that most of it runs in the street with other traffic.

 

[Just-Thinking-51]

From looking at the video, does the BRT have its own lanes or is it sharing a lane with auto traffic? Looks like the latter from what I could see. That would stretch the definition of BRT if it can get stuck in traffic. Sort of like the Washington St. Silver Line in Boston which was touted as a BRT replacement for the Elevated, but often referred to as the "Silver Lie" as it is nowhere near an adequate replacement, given that most of it runs in the street with other traffic.

Not a local, but yes at the area this was filmed it look like mix traffic. So I agree express bus route maybe, but not a BRT.

While a BRT does not need to be completely free of traffic, it should have its own lanes. IMHO

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Not a local, but yes at area this was filmed it look like mix traffic. So I agree express bus route maybe, but not a BRT.

While a BRT does not need to be completely free of traffic, it should have its own lanes. IMHO

Yep, it is basically an articulated bus, not a true BRT line. The biggest advantage it has is that its platforms allow quicker boarding and deboarding, since passengers can enter at three different doors and pay with contactless cards.
I think a lot of compromises were made when designing this, until it has been watered down to the point where it is just a little bit better than a normal bus line. Still, it does make the process easier, especially when moving a lot of people.

 

[Just-Thinking-51]

I think a lot of compromises were made when designing this, until it has been watered down to the point where it is just a little bit better than a normal bus line.

Congratulations, Sir you just won the thread.

 

[JamesWhitcombRiley]

The DOT apparently has a special category for projects under $200m, which get faster approvals. I don't know what happened in Portland, but in Miami Dade a route to the far off, and working class, Homestead and Florida City finally was built as BRT rather than the long-promised rail. The transit advocate on the county board said it was a compromise, but under the $200m cap for speedy delivery.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

The DOT apparently has a special category for projects under $200m, which get faster approvals. I don't know what happened in Portland, but in Miami Dade a route to the far off, and working class, Homestead and Florida City finally was built as BRT rather than the long-promised rail. The transit advocate on the county board said it was a compromise, but under the $200m cap for speedy delivery.

Well, also, to put this in perspective, I have had some topic drift in this thread, which was originally supposed to be about the Portland MAX system, which is a very extensive and utilized service for a medium sized city. I then focused a little on when and where the service would be extended to Vancouver, Washington. And then, as an extension of that, I talked about the BRT lines in Vancouver. Given Vancouver's size (about 200,000 people) and its general characteristic (spread out suburb), this BRT is better than it could be.
It is also, as the joke goes, where the action is. Since 2015, the Trimet MAX has been pretty static. Most of the areas that are technically feasible and that have demand already have lines. Apart from maybe the Tigard area in SW Portland, or extending service to Oregon City, both of which are just conceptual at this point, there isn't really a lot of news.
So that is why I've been focusing on Vancouver, even though the BRT line might carry around 1-5% of the passengers of the MAX Blue Line. It is basically the only news in town.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Exception to the above:
The airport Red Line is being expanded, but it is mostly technical fixes to improve service. They are also extending the Red Line to Hillsboro, but that is a pretty nominal distinction, since it is co-lined with the Blue Line on those tracks already.

https://trimet.org/betterred/

 

[tgstubbs1]

Seems like a good way to improve serviceand it isn't very much more than $200 million. I see the Hillsboro airport has a direct connection.
When I rode the Red line I remember there was some sort of wait at the airport, I don't know if it was from interference with the Blue or Green lines but I can understand how they could interfere with each other when they get off schedule because there are so many of them.
I lived right next to the Elmonica station and rode the Blue line frequently. While it was fun to pass stuck traffic on 217 the screeching wheels in the tunnel to downtown could be deafening if any windows were open in the car. They had a LOT of stops downtown. I missed a MAX once and easily walked to the next stop to catch it.
It's a really good system for a city the size of Portland .

 

[Rambling Robert]

Hey, there’s a little known fact about the food at Portland Oregon Station. There is a newsstand inside the station disguised as a trinket and souvenir shop. There’s a very small grill in the back, and they made the best frankfurter in the world. And the fries are the best in the universe. That is IMHO.

Just sayin…

 

[Antibuff]

Is there any substance to what I was told about the demise of Portland's streetcar system by the Lady Mayoress of Portland, Dorothy McCullough Lee? I remember reading that she hated streetcars so much that she forbade Rose City Transit from even bringing in a PCC car as a demonstrator.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Is there any substance to what I was told about the demise of Portland's streetcar system by the Lady Mayoress of Portland, Dorothy McCullough Lee? I remember reading that she hated streetcars so much that she forbade Rose City Transit from even bringing in a PCC car as a demonstrator.

There might be some truth to it, but I don't think that one person's support or opposition to transit tells the entire story, because the overall economic and demographic environment are probably the bigger stories.
That is the truth today. While there have been some politicians who have spoken out against the light rail, the areas that are possible extensions (Vancouver, Tigard, Oregon City) don't have extensions not because of some single figure, but just because the general math of the engineering and demographics don't add up.

 

[Willbridge]

Is there any substance to what I was told about the demise of Portland's streetcar system by the Lady Mayoress of Portland, Dorothy McCullough Lee? I remember reading that she hated streetcars so much that she forbade Rose City Transit from even bringing in a PCC car as a demonstrator.

I did my senior thesis on Lee's career -- up to her four years in office (that would have been another thesis and in 1968 there were still a lot of people who wouldn't speak on the record). As a city commissioner (council member) during WWII she was responsible for public utilities. A lawyer, she had no background on transit, but her Eastmoreland neighborhood had a feeder streetcar line replaced by the first trolley coach route. Portland Traction Co. had a 20-year franchise starting in 1936 that voters had approved on a pledge of gas buses for feeder lines, trolley coaches and modern streetcars on the heavy lines. A willingness to acquire modern streetcars was shown by the purchase of Brill Master Units in 1932 and like Seattle, Vancouver BC, San Francisco and Los Angeles they also showed an interest in trolley coaches.

By the start of WWII, Seattle streetcars and their cable line were gone. Portland's standard-gauge city streetcars and some narrow-gauge lines had been replaced by the biggest ever order of Mack trolley coaches (141), as well as Mack motor coaches. During the war, Lee fought with Federal administrators to get rationed copper feeder wire for the new trolley coach lines, which had not been built to handle the crowds of out-of-state defense workers and gas-rationed locals. The streetcar lines, of course, had legacy power supplies that could handle more traffic. PTCo took 40 wooden streetcars off the rip track, repainted them, and put them into service. They ripped new asphalt up to re-convert the Bridge Transfer line to streetcars.

In this period, she became known as an advocate for trolley coaches, likely due to having to defend them to get the feds to get the copper wire. Before the war was over, Portland leadership was focused on planning a new, much larger, city that would retain the people who had come for war work. Trolley coach lines could be adjusted to fit into new boulevards more easily than streetcars, and a consulting study was done to propose route changes (compared to Denver, which mostly kept the old streetcar routes until 1978).

It's important to note that Lee was not primarily interested in transit as mayor. She became mayor as a clean government campaigner. Portland law enforcement, according to a secret federal report was "typical of that of large West Coast cities." Think films "Chinatown" or "Maltese Falcon." As my mother, a fan of hers, said of that era "anything good for you was rationed and anything bad for you was widely available." I interviewed Lee at her law office for my thesis and she said that she had learned that people wanted other peoples' vices to be cleaned up. She never mentioned transit.

Portland Traction bought one more order of trolley coaches, built by Kenworth. Post-war ridership was plummeting and so those, plus a couple hundred Mack and Twin Coach gasoline and then diesel units sufficed for a decade until 1961. The trolley coaches were phased out from the mid-1950's with the last pulled off in a surprise move in 1958, which had the bonus of removing the new Rose City Transit Company from state taxes and regulation as a railroad.

I had the good fortune of having one grandmother on the Mack-equipped 40mph Interstate Avenue line (US99W) and the other on the 30 mph Sandy Blvd. line. As our mother knew how to flag down pull-in trips on Sandy when we headed home, we sometimes were the only passengers on a garage-bound trolley coach and so I suspect that we were doing 40 on Sandy Blvd. (US30) deadheads in that line's Kenworths, too.

All of this relates to the Portland MAX lines. Because of the fight to retain the trolley coaches and the Portland Traction interurban lines (also suddenly shut down in 1958) there was a continual thread of citizen advocacy leading up to the first pro-LRT study in 1973.

Here's Dorothy Lee's neighborhood in 1936. That's Reed College in the background.

In 1958 a Kenworth was painted in the new Rose City Transit colors (Rose Red and Rose White).


P.S. With this week's schedule change, the Tri-Met service in Dorothy Lee's neighborhood has been discontinued in favor of walking a half-mile to an arterial street.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Today was also the first time I rode the BRT FX2 line.
This video is a pretty casual look at what it is like to ride it, just a short journey from downtown across the Willamette River.
Like the Vancouver BRT, and unlike the Eugene BRT, this BRT only has doors on one side, and as far as I know, doesn't have its own ROW anywhere along the route. So its been watered down until it is basically an articulated bus, although that does make boarding and exiting easier, especially for mobility-impaired people or people with bicycles, etc.
One thing about BRT, though, is that it often seems "empty". Like even on an off-hours run, there was 18 people on the BRT---which would be a very full bus.

 

[Willbridge]

I rode the FX2 in June and it was useful, but no more or less than a regular bus route with a good headway. One fundamental problem is that SE Division Street east to the old city limits at 82nd Avenue was not built to be a major arterial, so it's hard to insert transit priority measures. The big streetcar route was on SE Hawthorne Blvd., which segued into having decent bus service into the 1960's.

The Mt. Scott and Hawthorne lines were standard gauge, built originally as part of the interurban system. They were replaced with the Foster and Hawthorne trolley coach lines, which then were converted into motor coach lines. Hawthorne is much wider than Division but runs into Mount Tabor.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

And here is the Tilikum Crossing Bridge, which I've wanted to get a video of for a while, and which is interesting from both an architecture/engineering standpoint (which I wish I knew more about), and from a policy standpoint. This bridge carries only transit: two types of rail transit (the MAX and Portland Streetcar), the BRT line (which I just showed), and normal buses, as well as pedestrians and bicyclists.
I wonder from a technical standpoint how much effort it is to schedule the rail transit of the bridge, especially since the MAX and Streetcar are now run by different agencies (Trimet and Portland BOT). It seemed pretty busy, so I do wonder at what point this bridge, like the Steel Bridge, will become a choke point for transit.
One other reason why I wanted to share this picture was that I admit I am sometimes defensive about Portland, with so much recent negative media attention. So I wanted to show what a lot of Portland still looks like: futuristic and whistle-clean. I hope this video captures just how...nifty...the bridge is.
And finally, there is something I mention in the video: sometimes big transit projects have "sticker shock", but they are not that much more expensive than certain things like maintenance of highway. This bridge cost about $125 million, but for example, out of a list of ODOT projects, I picked out this:


https://www.oregon.gov/odot/projects/pages/project-details.aspx?project=20508Where it costs about 7 million dollars to repave three highway onramps. Highway maintenance is expensive, it just usually is of such a nickel and dime variety that people don't realize it.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I rode the FX2 in June and it was useful, but no more or less than a regular bus route with a good headway. One fundamental problem is that SE Division Street east to the old city limits at 82nd Avenue was not built to be a major arterial, so it's hard to insert transit priority measures. The big streetcar route was on SE Hawthorne Blvd., which segued into having decent bus service into the 1960's.

I do kind of wonder what the target demographic for the FX2 is, because it seems a little like a solution in search of a problem. (Which is the same thing I say about the Portland Streetcar in a video I will be editing and posting today). Is this bus supposed to be a replacement for a neighborhood streetcar, for people doing close-in errands and shopping in inner SE? In which case the low speeds don't matter too much. Or is this meant to be a commuter line to bring lots of people to and from downtown and East Portland/Gresham? The first model makes more sense from what I saw, because it does make getting around the neighborhood for lots of short trips more convenient, but it doesn't really seem to have the "R" in BRT.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

And as a final video from yesterday, I took the Portland Streetcar back to Union Station:


The Portland Streetcar opened in the early 2000s, years after I had become accustomed to riding the MAX. I find the MAX to be useful and wide ranging, while the Portland Streetcar is mostly a niche thing that I've used for a few purposes.
In this video, I say that the Portland Streetcar is a problem in search of a solution, and wonder what its target demographic is. I don't hate the Streetcar, and as you can see, its clean and comfortable, but it seems to mostly to be used for people taking short hops downtown (and also along the main commercial belt on the east side of the Willamette.) It also seems to be smoother and more efficient in the South Waterfront---an area that didn't even exist when I was a teenager and in my early 20s.
The Portland Streetcar is also run (now) by the Portland BOT, not by Trimet. So we have two train systems in downtown Portland, using different technology, to different purposes, run by different agencies---one by a bureau of the city, another by a regional transit authority. And the MAX, I think, has really transformed the entire Portland area, while the Streetcar seems to mostly be a convenience for a few niche uses.

 

[Chris I]

I do kind of wonder what the target demographic for the FX2 is, because it seems a little like a solution in search of a problem. (Which is the same thing I say about the Portland Streetcar in a video I will be editing and posting today). Is this bus supposed to be a replacement for a neighborhood streetcar, for people doing close-in errands and shopping in inner SE? In which case the low speeds don't matter too much. Or is this meant to be a commuter line to bring lots of people to and from downtown and East Portland/Gresham? The first model makes more sense from what I saw, because it does make getting around the neighborhood for lots of short trips more convenient, but it doesn't really seem to have the "R" in BRT.

It's definitely BRT "lite", but it is useful. I live within walking distance of MAX, and the FX2 sped up the trip on Division enough (frequency being a more important factor when transferring) that I now take it to access OMSI and the Tilikum area, instead of taking MAX + streetcar to get there. The expanded stops and all-door boarding are definitely a plus. The reduced stop dwell time is noticeable.

Even if we don't get true BRT, I would like to see the FX treatment on all of our major bus lines.

 

[Willbridge]

It's definitely BRT "lite", but it is useful. I live within walking distance of MAX, and the FX2 sped up the trip on Division enough (frequency being a more important factor when transferring) that I now take it to access OMSI and the Tilikum area, instead of taking MAX + streetcar to get there. The expanded stops and all-door boarding are definitely a plus. The reduced stop dwell time is noticeable.

Even if we don't get true BRT, I would like to see the FX treatment on all of our major bus lines.

Good points. I should have mentioned that on my longest trip on FX2, all the way from downtown Portland starting what seemed late to downtown Gresham, on the stretch from the bridge to 82nd Avenue, our leader was on our tail with a 40' bus, apparently substituted for a breakdown. We were held at 82nd Avenue and our leader ran around us. The traffic signal measures seemed to help keep the double-heading from getting worse.

One of the problems with BRT schemes comes into play when routes run through multiple jurisdictions. Lane Transit has a true BRT in Eugene, and the last I heard, some BRT measures on an ODOT stretch, and then no priority on the Springfield segment.

RTD and the City and County of Denver and CDOT are collaborating on an East Colfax BRT project (first discussed when I was new at RTD in 1986), but a big chunk of the ridership comes from the outer end of the corridor in Aurora, where they'll be running in mixed traffic. That means that inbound headways will be difficult to maintain.

I don't know how much Gresham cooperated, but just as a rider we seemed to move right along. The photo shows the starting point, a block from Portland Union Station and adjacent to the back side of the abandoned modern Greyhound station.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

In my last 24 hours in Portland/The United States, I had a lot of time on my hands and walked around Portland. Here are two videos I took while walking around Portland in the rain.



The first is of the City of Maywood Park, a small town of less than 1000 people, surrounded on all sides by Portland. There is an interesting story here: in the 1960s, with the proposed development of the I-205 freeway, an affluent neighborhood outside of Portland decided to incorporate to have more standing against the construction of the freeway. While they didn't get it blocked, they did get concessions to lesson the impact.
Now, he MAX Red Line also runs through the middle of that freeway, making it one of six cities that the MAX tracks pass through---although without a stop. It would be interesting to know what type of feedback the city gave to the development of the MAX Red Line.
As I say in this video, while we usually think of NIMBYism as a bad thing, this was a case where a community used it to preserve a neighborhood.