The City of Portland has just released its vision for a new system of faster, more frequent bus service. The Rose Lane Vision debuted tonight to coincide with the first of three public open houses.
City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly first announced the initiative at a Portland City Council meeting last month and said it would focus on eradicating racial disparities in commute times and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We hoped to see the routes under consideration at that meeting, but Eudaly’s staff said they weren’t ready for prime-time.
Now they are.
As you can see in the lead graphic, PBOT and Eudaly’s office have identified 20 corridors where they’d like to start building transit-priority lanes before the end of next year. The lanes will include a range of improvements including: red “bus only” paint, priority signals, queue jumps, and other elements taken from PBOT’s Enhanced Transit Corridors plan which was adopted in June 2018. The routes were chosen with feedback from an advisory panel and from data supplied by TriMet. PBOT looked specifically at corridors with the worst delay, highest ridership, and most frequency.
Here’s the list under consideration (in the order they’re numbered on the map above):
1 – Williams/Vancouver
2 – NE MLK Blvd
3 – NE Broadway
4 – NE Sandy
5 – East/West Burnside
6 – Belmont
7 – SE Hawthorne
8 – Cesar Chavez & Hollywood TC
9 – Gateway
10 – NE 102nd Ave
11 – NE 122nd Ave
12 – SE Holgate
13 – SE Tacoma
14 – SW Capitol Hwy (East/Central)
15 – Milwaukie, 9th/Tilikum
16 – Division & 7th
17 – SW 4th, 5th/6th, Terwilliger, SW Hall, SW Mill
18 – SW Columbia/Jefferson
19 – SW Washington
20 – Steel Bridge/Rose Quarter
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One one of the posters being unveiled at the open house tonight, PBOT has calculated time savings based on several different trips. Today, people using Line 6 to get from Dishman Community Center in north Portland to SE Belmont and 46th would save nine minutes in travel time. A trip on Line 75/Line 12 from SE Cesar Chavez and Division to NE Sandy and 82nd would take 49 minutes today and just 35 minutes once the Rose Lane is up-and-running — that’s 29% faster.
Learn more at the open house tonight from 5:30 to 7:30 at Rosewood Initiative (16126 SE Stark St.). The next two open houses are: Saturday, Dec. 7, 2:00 – 4:00 PM at North Portland Library Community Room (512 N Killingsworth St) and Monday, Dec. 9, 5:30 – 7:30 PM at White Stag Building (70 NW Couch St).
PBOT has also launched an online survey to garner more feedback for those who can’t make it to one of the open houses.
(Below is an embedded PDF of the Rose Lane Vision poster board)
[pdf-embedder url=”https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Dec-2019-Open-House-Boards_station5.pdf” title=”Rose Lane Project Open House Boards Station 5″]
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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Why, oh why was this not done 20 years ago!!! But better late than never. Three cheers for Eudaly and her staff.
Glad to see Sandy included, the 12 is so unreliable during evening rush hour currently that it is practically unusable westbound. I have gone to busing to the max instead.
A little less excited now that I see they marked large sections of grand as being completed projects so the dashed lines represent the areas where they might put some red, not that they are proposing a bus lane on that whole length.
Was just told that the current red on grand isn’t the full rose lane intended there but instead a smaller prior project.
An ambitious and encouraging plan for transit priority in this city. Praise be!
Major props to Commissioner Eudaly and PBOT staff for pushing this vision forward. I hope we can all work together in building support for this transformative plan.
As long as it addresses “racial disparity and climate change” then it should be all ok. How about a little critical thought? For example, why the express line to the Mississippi entertainment area?
Since when do hippies not care about climate change? Here’s what’s great about developing policies to benefit communities that are underserved and experiencing the worst impacts and outcomes—you know, besides JUSTICE—by better serving their needs you are almost necessarily helping everyone else who is using the system. For instance, I can’t get people from their homes in East Portland to their jobs downtown without making fixes throughout the entire system. An approach that did not take disparate impacts into consideration would be irresponsible and less effective. Think of it as universal design for policy making. As for the proposed corridors, we started with where there’s the worst delays and the highest ridership—basically where we could do the most good for the most people—before looking at a variety of other factors in developing this list of proposed corridors. Now we’re looking for meaningful feedback, suggestions and concerns. I hope you fill out the survey.
Are these bus/bike lanes or just bus lanes?
Ironically, this might even speed up car traffic, given that right lane through traffic won’t have to wait for parallel parkers.
Great reporting. Great project. Big thanks to Cmr. Eudaly and the PBOT staff crunching the data and laying the paint to make this work.
Sorry, TLDNR, but are the bus lanes going to be shared with cyclists or not?
If not, huge lost opportunity!
Yes, this is a good start. But the language “Proposed Candidate Pilots” is three Weasel Words in a row!
I thought “partnership with other agencies” was a real howler.
Definately code for as soon as ODOT will let us(which might be never), but if at some point we wrest control of 82nd away from ODOT then maybe if some of the planning is already done the implementation can be quicker.
Somebody said ambitious? I’ll grant that if all those things are really on the table. Just hope it’s enough to create a virtuous cycle of increased capacity and improved rider experience to create a constituency for more of the same.
I’ll vote for Eudaly just for having the guts to put this on the wall. May she ride the storm!
That said, I’m very glad the city (PBOT) is taking such a bold approach, and so extensive!
I think dedicated bus lanes are a great idea. But how does this plan intend to fit bicycle lanes (e.g. on Vancouver/Williams and lower SE Hawthorne) with the bus lanes? Shared?
That remains to be seen Mark, but I too am very concerned about how these projects will impact cycling. Stay tuned.
I have it from a “reliable source” in the city burocracy that Rose Lanes in constrained corridors would need to be shared with bikes/rollers. There is no other way to add bike facilities to roadways like East Burnside or Belmont. I know riding the East Burnside gap 68-41st would be much safer sharing it with one bus line versus the door zone in an 11 foot lane.
I’d support replacing the bike lanes on Vancouver and Williams with dedicated bus lanes.
I’d support removing all that parking, we could have room for both dedicated bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes..
i will note that this is not inconsistent with my comment.
yay, excited to see these getting rolled out! can’t wait to see them out east of 82nd, and maybe one on powell
Slightly off topic, but TriMet ought to consider relocating stops for uniform spacing when making these improvements.
For example, the Foster Road improvements are working well, but stops were removed to increase speed of buses, even though lowering speed for general traffic was a major goal of the project.
My peeve is removal of stops at 60th both ways, leaving a big gap between a cluster just east of 52nd and a cluster just west of 67th. Line 14 Foster is frequent service, which I long relied on evenings and weekends when Line 10 Harold does not operate. I rarely use 14 now as a result.
Not too expensive to relocate a few stops, is it?
I feel your pain about the Foster Rd bus stops. We lost a lot of bus stops after the street-scape. By my count we used to have 13 and now we have 8. They’ve made it harder to get around Foster via bus. At least it’s safer to walk now.
Bus stops westbound between 50th and 82nd:
On Foster (line 14 now): 50th, 52nd, 58th, 63rd, 68th, 72nd, 77th, 82nd
On Foster (line 14 before): 50th, 52nd, 56th, 58th, 61st, 63rd, 65th, 68th, 70th, 72nd, 77th, 79th, 82nd
On Powell (line 9): 50th, 52nd, 56th, 60th, 62nd, 65th, 67th, 69th, 72nd, 75th, 80th
On Harold (line 10): 52nd (on Steele), 54th, 57th, 60th, 62nd, 65th, 67th, 69th, 72nd, 74th, 79th, 82nd
Foster has more businesses and with almost as many residences behind it as Powell or Harold and yet the stops are fewer and father between. Also keep in mind that Foster is diagonal so that every block is longer.
Why did they make all those improvements to walking and then not make the bus more convenient? Or at least as convenient as it was before?
This is very exciting. I am filling out the survey and leaving a comment because I feel very strongly that one driving assumption to all this planning is that people are traveling to/from downtown. And, based on work in Copenhagen and the work on bias in design by Carolyn Criado Perez, this assumption is often based on the mostly male commuting mode of to-from work (assumed to be downtown). This leaves out a huge segment of the population that uses transit a) not to go simply from point-a to point-b and b) does NOT work downtown but instead needs to get cross-town (and to bring it home, in my case, does not need to cross the river, but all my transit options force me to). Again, I’m a huge advocate of biasing our roads towards transit users first, but I do think more work needs to be done in redefining who those users are what their actual transportation destinations and needs are.
I take one bus to go to grocery stores farther away because I’d have to take 3 buses to get to the closer ones and it would take longer.
This looks great on a map, but I feel like we’ve been through this before. Look for implementation, not promises and plans. Don’t get your hopes up prematurely. This is all very aspirational.
The Rose Lane on NW Everett has been in place for a few months now, and is right on my bike route home. So far it doesn’t seem like a big win, the buses that use that stretch aren’t real frequent so that lane is a very under-utilized resource. But I’m sure the buses do move faster now, and if you’re trying to force people out of their cars then, well, I guess squeezing two lanes of traffic into one might help.
I sure hope the intent is that cyclists can use that lane too, because there are a bunch of us who do!
Why isn’t Greeley on the list? It seems like a no-brainer to make the right NB lane bus (+ right turn for Going/Swan Is) only!
Really excited to see this move forward. Long-since due for us to start treating transit as the preferred, rather than last resort, of travel options.
Now, TriMet needs to do the hard work of making the user-experience better by focusing on restoring some sense of order aboard their fleet. Not hopeful on that front. TM is loath to confront any disruptive behavior lest they be accused of profiling or worse, targeting some combination of minority-income-age-gender trigger happy protected class. Adding to this is an out of touch TM board bent on making the system Free or nearly Free. Sigh. Lets make a system which people actually WANT to ride.