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In last week’s article about Governor Tina Kotek’s interview with OPB’s Dave Miller (Oregon Governor has some questions for TriMet), BikePortland did what BikePortland does best—draw on a deep knowledge of transportation issues, put it all together, and find relevance where others might miss it.
In this case, Jonathan picked up on Governor Kotek specifically mentioning TriMet in response to a called-in question from the Street Trust’s Sarah Iannarone about transportation safety. He then pulled from his recent podcast with David Bragdon, and also from long-time advocates’ grumbling “about lack of accountability at TriMet,” to find significance in the Governor pivoting to TriMet on a safety question.
But enough about us.
Then you, BikePortland commenters, did one of the things you do best: fill out news stories with detailed and genuine personal experience about getting around in this town.
Michael responded to Governor Kotek as a “fellow resident of NE Portland,” and added specificity to her general comment about inadequate TriMet service. Here’s what he wrote:
As a fellow resident of NE Portland, I can unequivocally say that 90% of the time, no, [TriMet is] not a real option.
It’s ridiculous that my weekly 15 minute drive to South Portland becomes an hour-plus trip if I were to take Trimet. When the 87 bus runs only every 30 minutes, it makes it really hard to make my trip north to get to my frequent doctor’s appointments–God forbid my appointment runs even slightly long and I get stranded next to the loud, uncomfortable, and unsheltered stop at Airport & 122nd.
It’s great that we have these fancy, high capacity articulated buses on Division now, but they still only run every 15 minutes. I get Trimet’s desire to fix capacity issues by running bigger buses–it’s cheaper after all and I remember very well the operator shortage issues we were having recently–but that really only works at the margins to make transit more convenient. What Trimet desperately needs is to fix capacity by increasing frequency, as that will have the synergistic effect of making the bus more convenient for the people who currently have to make the choice between coming up with an active plan on how to get to A to B and figure out how much of a time sacrifice they’re going to make versus just hopping in the car in their garage or a few feet in front of their house or apartment and just… driving away.
Headways of longer than 5 minutes along major transportation corridors is a policy failure, pure and simple.
Thank you Michael! You can find Michaels’s comment, and other interesting commentary, under the original post.