“Dead in the water,” “going into hibernation,” and “very bad news.” These are the quotes we last read about the Frog Ferry project, an effort to launch passenger ferry service on the Willamette River. But now project backers are seizing the massive change in Portland’s government structure and hope a new slate of elected officials that come into office next year will give the ferry another look.
It’s been nearly a year since we last checked in on the ambitious project. In our story last fall, former transportation commissioner Mingus Mapps announced he would not support the addition of Frog Ferry to the Regional Transportation Plan project list — a required step that would position the project for state and federal funding.
But that was then, and this is now. This morning at what she hopes will be a future ferry terminal, Frog Ferry Executive Director Susan Bladholm and her team of supporters will host a press conference. “It’s time for Portland to do big things again!” reads the statement sent to local media in advance of the event. “The new city charter enables bold innovative ideas. It is time to come out of hibernation and activate Portland. It’s time for Portland to do big things again!”
Bladholm will have significant support by her side, including noted river advocate Willie Levenson from Human Access Project and Downtown Neighborhood Association (DNA) Board Chair Xavier Stickler. The DNA fully supports Frog Ferry, calling it “thoroughly researched, eminently feasible, and urgently needed.”
To underscore those compliments, Frog Ferry’s press release boasted a number of reasons their project is worth supporting:
Name a proposed Portland project that:
- Is affordable with federal Infrastructure Bill dollars available for green passenger ferries
- Fits criteria for the adopted Portland Climate Investment Plan: $100M for green transit
- Can be operational within three years and is a transit mode that is in demand
- Offsets 3,170 metric tons of CO2/year (growing to 95 million lbs. C02 with seven vessels)
- Will build community resilience
- Will activate our waterfront; Is a proven best practice around the world
- Will connect Portland with its largest green space
- Will reduce commuter time and foster a broader transit network
- Will encourage more people to live car free?
Frog Ferry says they need about $9 million to launch a proof-of-concept service between Cathedral Park and Riverplace in downtown Portland. That trip would take 25 minutes and cost $3 (one way) per passenger.
With the city’s budget still on life support, it will be interesting to see how — or if — candidates talk about this project on the campaign trail, and whether they believe it’s something that will earn them voters in council districts two (north Portland) and four (west side of the river and Sellwood).
Thanks for reading.
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There is nothing this project can do that an electric express bus can’t do faster and cheaper. At this point, I’m convinced that this is a grift on the part of everyone involved.
Ferries are great for connections that lack parallel road networks. Portland doesn’t have that problem anywhere they are proposing to run. Additionally, every frog ferry landing point has a terrible walkshed because half of the walkshed is water.
This all sounds neat. I love ferries. Loooove them. They might be favorite part of Puget Sound.
I’d love a deeper dive on this:
Given how bike share and transit share are trending, I have a difficult time imagining people who would otherwise drive opting to bus/walk/ride to a ferry terminal to take a ferry and then bus/walk/ride their proverbial last mile.
And if anyone else found the difference in magnitude of 3,170 and 95,000,000 jarring, 3,170 metric tons is just shy of 7,000,000 lbs.
So 7 vessels x 7,000,000 lbs CO₂/yr is approximately 49,000,000 lbs CO₂/yr. So there’s a factor of two that I’m missing some where (perhaps larger capacity vessels or increased frequency, etc).
The numbers won’t hold up to any serious scrutiny. At best, they are generous and likely full of errors. At worst, they might just be completely made up.
Ultimately, I think that’s what the angle should be for the Frog Ferry. I also don’t see this really replacing car commute trips for a lot of people. Maybe they should be pitching Frog Ferry as a tourism/recreation attraction more than a transit thing. Heck, even run a seasonal extension to Sauvie Island so people can get their pumpkin patch Instagram content without having to sit in a soul crushing line of cars (I’m 100% on board if they also stop at Rocky Pointe Marina for car-free MTB trips).
Example from my experience: DC area has a water taxi that primarily does “scenic monument tours” and ferries people down to Mount Vernon. Its a pretty appealing option for Mount Vernon, since the fare includes admission and you don’t have to worry about parking when you get there. Really great for visitors that don’t want to rent a car.
I agree–it would be more of a tourist novelty than a commuter solution.
But while pitching it that way would be honest, I can see the drawbacks. It raises questions like:
–Why can’t people just patronize any of the several existing tourist boat options?
–If someone wants to go into the tourist boat business, they’re free to join others that have done that already. Why subsidize this one?
–It may (or may not) be somewhat green to take a ferry for a fun visit to Sauvie Island vs. driving, but how green is that vs. renting a kayak, or taking a bus or bike to the Rose Gardens, or doing any of a number of other things tourists do already?
–Are ferry boat rides “adding to the economy”, or do they just mean people are buying a ferry boat ticket instead of spending that money at a non-subsidized Portland business?
–Or does the ferry boat ride just mean people will be eating or buying stuff on Sauvie Island or in Lake Oswego or wherever else the ferry is taking them, instead of in Portland, or downtown instead of St. Johns, or St. Johns instead of downtown? Why is any of that “green”?
Well now that you mention getting dropped off near RPT, I’m a Frog Ferry man. Always was. Always will be.
25 minutes between Saint Johns and Portland can also be achieved by the #16 bus, a route that gets pretty paltry ridership (less than 1,000 passengers/day). I’d probably ride the Frog Ferry, but only as a novelty.
Also… mixing metric tons with million lbs is so annoying to me. 3,170 metric tons is ~7 million pounds.
How many Empire State Buildings of CO2 is that?
About 1% of an Empire State Building
The Empire State Building weighs 730,000,000 lb, occupies 37,000,000 ft^3, and emits 15640 metric tons of GHG/yr (CO2 equivalent).
For
95,000,000 lb:
By Mass:
(1 Empire State Building)/(730,000,000 lb)×95,000,000 lb=0.13 Empire State Buildings
By Volume:
(1 Empire State Building)/(37,000,000 ft^3 )×(1 ft^3)/(28.317 L)×(95,000,000
lb)/(0.00220462 lb/g)×(1 mol CO2)/44g×22.4L/(1 mol CO2 )=20.94 Empire State Buildings @ STP
By Emissions:
(1 Empire State Building)/(15640 mt)×(95,000,000 lb)/(2205 lb/mt)=2.75 Empire State Buildings (GHG emissions/yr)
Hope I did that right…
Or a bike that takes you wherever you want to go. I second your annoyance with the mixed units.
I like the 16 bus, but:
The bus service out of St Johns to downtown is very much in the realm of “something you settle for if you can’t afford to drive”. I’d love to see 16 frequency increased, but I’d be just as happy to have the Ferry option – especially if it ends up expanding to more stops.
At minimum it feels worth trying the proof of concept.
Agreed on the metric mixing point though!
If you take even a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars this Ferry project will dump into the river and spend it on improved service from St. John’s to downtown, you could easily have bus service that bests even the rosiest projections for the ferry.
Ferries are great, but they just don’t make sense when you have a parallel road network. And keep in mind that ferry services, especially when they have a limited fleet size, absolutely do get disrupted. High water periods, high wind events, and downtime for fleet maintenance or unexpected breakdowns all happen.
Here is one example:
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/kitsap-transit-fast-ferries-experience-unforeseen-disruptions-risks-cancelations/JQFMPHXBZJCYHAPIWRAWVNMJ7E/
Unless things have changed significantly with the #16 bus, 25 minute transit times to downtown aren’t always a given. If a train blocks NW Naito at the steel bridge, you can get extended delays.
And the return trip can be agonizingly slow. Leaving downtown is usually a breeze. But the St Johns bridge gets backed up at rush hour. The travel time from St Helens to the bridge, a distance of a half mile, can take 20+ minutes.
If there was some way to build a bus priority lane, avoid train delays, and increase frequency, the 16 would be great. Lacking those things, it’s pretty bad.
All that being said, I’d expect a ferry to be worse. I think it would be easier to fix/improve the 16 than it would be to create a whole new service.
I had just looked at Google Maps time and it was 25 minutes from the foot of the bridge to Naito/Burnside Bridge area. The ingress/egress time of the ferry will be much greater than a bus as well, probably 5 total minutes if it’s anything like the West Seattle Water Taxi. But fair, to the South Waterfront it would almost certainly be faster to have a ferry
For construction/disruptions: I’d call it a wash. Weather is much more likely to affect a ferry than a bus. Not having traffic is a plus, but if St Johns – Downtown was a huge transit priority there’s a ton of room on the entire route for dedicated lanes. Could even do a freight/bus shared lane (ala MLK).
Ironically, the 16 is on the chopping block right now (to be replaced by an extension of the 15). It’ll make downtown to St Johns much slower (at least 15 minutes), but gives a more reliable connection to NW. I don’t have any skin in the game for that, but I’m not crazy about it. I think the Hwy 30 Corridor is very underdeveloped for transit service, and with good investments it might be able to offer the rare “good service to near a trailhead” in Portland – not to mention the plethora of jobs and it being the natural route between St Johns and Downtown.
And the grift goes on….
Jfc. This should be in the story above.
I hope the new government leaders see this for what it is….a continuation of the push by Frog Ferry Executive Director Susan Blandholm to enrich herself at the expense of taxpayers for a nonsensical project.
Frog Ferry is the Street Trust of river transport.
As much as it pains me to say it, it’s more like the West Side Express.
“The first one is free.”
The Frog Ferry is like herpes, if herpes asked for money every time it showed up.
You know what would be actually useful and cost a lot less? A protected bike lane over the St. John’s bridge and then to downtown on the west side
Bike lanes, including some brand new ones on Willamette, connect St Johns to Greeley to Interstate to any of the bridges (Broadway, Steel, Burnside, Hawthorne, Tillikum, Sellwood), so it’s a pretty nice and easy ride to downtown on either the E or W side of the river. The worst segments are along the overlook on Willamette, which I think may be improved in the next few years, and Interstate between Greeley and Rose Quarter. These sections are not bad. I would love love love a better way to cross the bridge itself.
Even if there were a good St Johns bridge crossing, I still wouldn’t ride on Hwy 30 W of the river. I’m sure people do and I respect their choice to, but I’d be afraid for my life every second of the journey.
That said I’d very much like the bridge itself to be safer to bike on for a long list of reasons (it’s insane that this iconic bridge, that should be one of our biggest tourist spots, is both dangerous and miserable to be on outside of a car). If that did eventually lead to safe connections to Forest Park & Downtown, even better.
Interstate’s slightly less terrifying, but it still feels very unsafe and I’d sooner go 2mi out of my way on a safer route than risk it with how narrow/exposed the bike lane is and how fast people drive there.
TL;DR St Johns badly needs better options on both sides of the river for both biking and transit. N Willamette project is a great first step, but there’s a lot more to do there to finish the connection(s).
Hi Matt! I misread Jay Cee’s original comment and wrote about the E, not W, side of the river. (I should take Lisa’s advice and learn to be a better reader!) However, unless your destination is pretty far into NW (Slabtown), it’s shorter and faster to take the route I outlined above on the E side of the river. That being said, Hwy 30 is totally chill — the shoulder and car lanes are both wide, and once you are on St. Helens, there is very little traffic (and acres of pavement). I feel safer on HWY 30 between the bridge and St. Helens Rd. than I do on Interstate Ave. underneath the Freemont Bridge. The St. Johns Bridge is a significant missing link in the bike network IMO, and not just because it is a cool bridge.
Also… if you don’t fancy Interstate, it’s significantly less than 2 miles out of your way to go over to Vancouver. The section on Rosa Parks is 1.5 mi by google maps, but you get some back because it’s more direct to Rose Quarter from Rosa Parks and Vancouver than Rosa Parks and Willamette (google maps say 1/2 mile difference from Willamette and RP to RQ — depending on where you start form in St. Johns there might be a more direct route to RP and Vancouver…). I’m not discounting your complaints, but I think St. Johns is fairly well connected for biking — I bike there a lot and really enjoy it.
Happy pedalling!
Every time the Frog Ferry comes up I try to consider it with an open mind, and each time I come away wondering what the actual benefits are? As others have mentioned, an electric bus could do the same trip without any of the fuss that comes with a ferry.
Honestly I can appreciate the drive that these folks have to try and make this a reality, but I wish they’d put their efforts into something that would be useful; like frequent, all-day regional rail. A line following the current Amtrak route with stops in; Somewhere N of Vancouver, Vancouver(with extended Vine service), NW industrial, Union Station, OMSI/Water, Milwaukie, and Oregon City would probably do more to shift folks away from driving and could be done using existing tracks. I know it’s all owned by UP but just let me live in my fantasy land for a minute. Carbon emission reductions could be achieved with battery locomotives or (the holy grail) overhead electrification.
In Germany, where my son lives, passenger rail and freight rail do share the same tracks. Passenger rail is frequent and tightly scheduled. This is possible because freight is also required to schedule its track time rather than lengthening the trains to where they meet their price point like is done in the United States
The public could buy the track and impose whatever scheduling restrictions we want. There are obvious reasons why this would be a terrible idea, but if we wanted a system like Germany, we could have one.
A person can dream….
The downside is that Europe ships far less by rail than the US. We have a roughly 80/20 freight to passenger service and they have nearly the opposite. The US having rail that is heavily freight focuses removes millions of tons of cargo from roads and is far more efficient than trucks.
A few pointless corrections: the line is owned by BNSF, by way of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle (a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific, merged with Great Northern and the Burlington Route to form Burlington Northern in 1970, then with the Santa Fe in the late 90s). Anyways, in old SP&S timetables you can see stops on the line at St. John’s and the Stockyards (now Expo Center-ish). A regional line can and should have a stop in St. John’s!
(See page 1080 of the Official Guide of the Railways, 1950) East St. Johns and North Portland appear as flag stops on the SP&S service from Portland to Spokane
I remember calculating how fast the ferry would have to go to achieve the optimistic times it was claiming for its various legs (when it was being proposed to also run south of downtown). It would have to go at speeds much faster than it could legally go and not violate wake or other speed regulations.
It’s one thing to go propose going fast in the middle of the Columbia; another to blast past Ross Island or other fragile shorelines south of downtown. The environmental impacts of this are certainly not all positive.
If I recall, prior comments from the maritime community included: underestimation of stop/unload/load times especially if a lot of bicycles are involved, underestimation of travel times during high current/high water/high debris seasons, possible mis-estimation of staffing needs and costs per USCG rules; potential need for bridge lift of Steel Bridge during peak high water (needs UP cooperation/scheduled conflict avoidance); substantial underestimation of time it takes to get a USCG certifiable boat built, and underestimation of current costs to do so. It’s also disingenuous for them to say it’s shovel ready, when no agreements are in place for landing sites, much less any permits or environmental reviews (NEPA if you are planning to spend federal $) being underway.
I have a lot of reservations about this but the fact that Xavier Stickler supports it is a big deal. He’s very legit and an expert at evaluating urban projects on their merits and doesn’t have a horse in the race. Causing me to take a much closer look.
The CO² number seems bogus. If a ferry could totally replace cars, 689 average cars would have to come off the road for a single boat just to -break even- on CO². Since the ferry would theoretically displace commuting use of a car and all other trips would carry on, double that. Do they expect one boat to carry 1378 people a day, both ways?
Somewhere in the notes we’ll find they’ve got cold fusion.
Please. Please. Let this go away forever.
This is so unrealistic at so many levels. Costs. Travel time. Emissions. No accounting for river conditions or weather.
I’d much rather spend $9 million on actual bicycle infrastructure like protected bike lanes, rapid flash beacons that can really have an impact rather than wasting $9 million for proof of concept that will prove the Frog Ferry really can’t work.
“That trip would take 25 minutes and cost $3 (one way) per passenger.”
Bus #16 takes 30 minutes and costs $2.80 (one way) per passenger.
And does that 25 minutes take into account boarding and deboarding time?
What about the walking time needed at each end to get to and from the dock?
This proposal is a joke. Always has been.
Exactly. Think about how many stops the 16 has in the actual neighborhood, where people actually live. Even the pathetic existing bus service is better.
If the Portland Diamond Project follow through on their agreement to buy the Zidell Yards and brings an MLB team to the South Waterfront, a fleet of fast, electric-hydrofoil ferries bringing fans from satellite parking lots could actually be a pretty significant way to reduce the impact of stadium events on the increased traffic and parking demands. A free ferry ride included with your stadium ticket? A Diamond-Frog partnership might be a way to scale up the whole project and make it successful enough to be useful even outside of game days.
I’m really interested to see how Portland Diamond Project plans to handle the transportation problems with the Zidell Yards location (if indeed they’ve even thought about the logistics at all). The only way to get there by car is along Moody Avenue, which is one lane each way from multiple bottlenecks to the north and south, and with no realistic way of expanding them.
The site is served at the NW corner by the Orange line MAX, both Portland Streetcar lines, and six bus lines including the FX2. Is the plan to fill the stadium by jamming almost 30,000 baseball fans into crush-capacity buses, streetcars and light rail on game days? Because you sure as hell won’t be able to drive there without creating a massive traffic jam in every direction.
Biking there, at least, should be pretty easy once they fill in the gap along the Willamette Greenway.
Not to mention all the support vehicles you’d need moving in and out to keep a baseball stadium running, never mind to build the thing.
Let’s just light money on fire, I guess.
Classic Cars of Perry Mason (Season 1) (youtube.com)
Frog Ferry just lost its Pearl District landing.
Personally, I’d be a bit sheepish about claiming high interest levels for my business if it had only the 653 Instagram followers that Frog Ferry does.
Putting that in perspective, BikePortland has 17.6K followers (27 times more).
My dog has quadruple the Frog Ferry’s followers on his Instagram. And he got about 15x more likes for one 7-second video of him at a drinking fountain than Frog Ferry’s got for all their three years of posts combined. And he’s, well….a dog.
Jonathan, appreciate your update! Had to re-read the lead sentence because it’s impact was completely dulled: “…an effort to launch passenger ferry service to the Willamette River.”. One can’t launch a ferry “to” a river!
Thank you! I guess that why copy editors exist. Fixed it.
It was interesting reading the COW about bias and then this article. Because Portland’s whole public transportation system is designed around the same bias — that people need to get from where ever they are to downtown and then back again (other than the Tram — which is a great example of bucking the bias). There’s all kinds of research on how most car trips are in the 2 mile range and how the commute transit design benefits the White Male members of our community but doesn’t benefit the people taking care of children or elderly, going to the store, working outside 9-5 hours, etc.
This ferry could actually be amazing if it SKIPPED downtown. Or maybe downtown was the after thought. ODOT’s own data showed that something like 70 of the Rose Quarter drivers were only on that stretch of freeway for one or two exits. Let’s give people a way to get from N to S and not have to traverse downtown. (This solution would completely not help East Portland, but we’ve got to start unbiasing our solutions somewhere).
From a perfectly selfish POV, I used to commute from Sellwood to Univ of Portland. I could drive and it took anywhere from 25 to 120 minutes. I could take transit and it took 90 minutes, usually. I rode my (ebike) and it was a reliable 45 minutes. Transit took SO long because all of my routes involved crossing the river twice for no reason that would benefit me. If I could have taken a ferry and bypassed downtown you bet I would have done so. Yes transit isn’t designed for one user, but we keep designing our transit for the SAME user group instead of thinking differently.
Is there sufficient demand for this pattern that it needs a whole new transportation system? I sometimes see the #70 bus as I pass through Ladd’s Addition, which travels a N/S route on the eastside, bypassing downtown, and I rarely see more than 1 or 2 passengers*, and often zero.
It’s especially fun to ride behind in it’s diesel plume.
*To be fair, there’s sometimes 3 or even 4 riders.
This is a little bit of the same “I never see anyone using the bike lanes” argument. That route 70 is packed with students to/from school once you’re S of Ladd’s. :). And Sellwood is an example of bad N-S connections — once upon a time you could catch the bus on SE 17th and get to SE 11/12 at Division. Now the only way you can get to that part of town via transit is a long walk to the Max, Max to Clinton, and then a long walk to SE 7th & Harrison (using my prior workplace as an example). OR you can take the 70 and then transfer. However if I’m going downtown there are several bus or train options. And I really don’t see a deep dive into the actual demand analysis because I suspect it’s mostly based on the bias assumption that the majority of people are traveling to-from downtown. Same biases that we get from looking at established road connections and then assuming people travel that way because they want to, not because that’s the only choice now.
I’m actually not saying the Ferry is the solution to this problem. But it’s an interesting look at the Ferry rather than just focusing on the get to/from downtown lens.
It is true that one or two buses per day are full when they serve the function of a school bus. It does not suggest high demand for N/S travel outside of that specific case, and hardly justifies running large, polluting empty buses along a major bike route day and night.
The reroute of the #70 was unfortunate, in my opinion, driven by TriMet’s desire to be seen “just doing something” in the wake of the death of Sarah Pliner. I don’t know what ridership was like before the change, but they could have solved the UPRR delay issue by permanently rerouting the bus over the MLK viaduct, and continued to serve 12th & Division and the employment corridor along 11th.
Zooming out a bit, I do agree that one of the fundamental problems TriMet is having now is that their system is designed with the downtown focus, and travel patterns have become more varied post-covid. Buses don’t work well when origins/destinations are more diffused. I think a ferry would suffer the same problems — it might work in an environment where lots of people are making similar trips (whether to downtown or not), but that’s not the world we’re living in right now.
This is inaccurate in my opinion. There’s a longstanding desire for TriMet to serve Cleveland HS better, and the real reason was extreme delays from UPRR. I strongly agree that MLK is a better choice, but I think a much better solution (albeit contrived) would be to replace the service hours on the #70 with a North Portland bus to/from downtown along MLK and to reroute the #6 to go to Milwaukie via Milwaukie instead of over the Hawthorne Bridge (this scheme does require more total service hours though – since it’s an extension of the #6. But the #70 uses a lot of service hours on the relatively sparsely ridden parts of NE 33rd so maybe it’d be okay).
This is essentially a consolidation of inner eastside crosstown service to Grand/MLK, and a restoration of direct service to downtown on either the former Williams or Alberta streetcar routes that have seen cuts and cancellations over the years. Given the financial and fuel efficient nature of the #44, N Williams stands out as a corridor sorely lacking in quality bus service. I’d say either use the #70 service hours after a #6 crosstown consolidation to boost service on the #44, or better yet create a frequent Steel Bridge -> Williams -> Alberta -> NE 33rd bus route (allowing the #72 to head straight down Killingsworth – saving tons of service hours and making bus drivers everywhere happy).
This is true. But the service change they made was not the one the CHS community said they wanted. And anyway, I question whether TriMet should base its service on school needs; it might make more sense to run a few school-specific buses that can better meet the needs of the school community without degrading service for everyone else.
I’m not a TriMet planner; I have some insight about their thinking from personal and professional contacts, but I think ultimately, the ridership, cost, and pollution numbers speak for themselves.
This is only not possible because the 70 was rerouted to 21st/Division. Does it really matter that one corner of Division is less accessible from Sellwood if the next corner down is now more accessible? I’m not crazy about the #70 route change away from the logical route on 12th, but I don’t think this really matters. Also, before this change to the #70 it alternated between 13th and 17th, so you’d have half as many options from 17th as you do now.
I just typed this all out in my pointlessly long response to Watts, but the #70 primarily functions as a dense crosstown route with lots of transfers (north of Powell). In Sellwood, it takes on a slightly different character in my opinion (as the route between Powell and Sellwood once was oriented downtown, and it is heading that way), and there are fewer transfers. The northern leg is also a bit like that where it’s less transfer oriented and more “serving as an inter-neighborhood link” so to speak. So between Powell and the MAX, it’s a route where relatively more people ride it a shorter distance, and elsewhere it’s a route where relatively few people ride it a longer distance (that’s my experience anyways). Of course, school service changes this significantly, and it’s a school-heavy route so that’s probably significant. I’ve boarded with dozens of high schoolers from Grant at Broadway/33rd (an area that usually is pretty sparsely used relative to other portions of the route).
The #70 averages north of 2,500 rides per weekday on 45 trips/direction/day (90 total trips). That’s 55 rides/trip, with the busiest stops being at transfers in SE and NE til the MAX. About 100 riders/weekday/direction board or deboard at Powell, Division, Hawthorne, Morrison/Belmont, and about 150 do so at the MAX and Burnside. While you may anecdotally see empty buses in Ladd’s Addition, it’s an unambiguously somewhat busy portion of a minor but important route. Also, based on these numbers, the average bus going through Ladd’s Addition
I ride this bus very frequently – it’s my most ridden TriMet route. The number of times I ride with fewer than 2 other people is a very small portion of the trips I take on it. Sure, it’s rarely packed to the brim (excepting school let out), and few people ride it for a significant distance. It’s a crosstown route with a lot of transfers, and the Ladd’s segment is a slowly and slightly out of the way part. I reckon I see lots of people using it south of Powell and north of Hawthorne, but not as many people riding it between the two.
If I seem fired up about this, it’s because the #70 provides such useful service to me personally, and it has a horrible schedule. I’ve had to run out of the house at 7 pm on a Saturday to get the last trip of the night. I’ve had to leave parties and hang outs early to get the last bus home on a Friday. On all of these “last runs”, I’ve never been the only person riding. Saturdays tend to be especially busy around 7 pm, and it really needs more service extending into weekend evenings (an issue with the TriMet network writ large).
Also, based on the numbers in this ridership report, the average bus at Ladd/Division heading northbound has about 8 people on it (based on summing/subtracting ons and offs). There is probably pretty significant variation by time of day/trip for this, but I think my experience with riding the bus + the math doesn’t line up with what you constantly write about this bus.
With 45 weekday buses per day in each direction, those ridership numbers don’t look all that impressive to me, especially as school boardings push the daily average ridership numbers way up.
I don’t know if the data you supplied (thank you for that, by the way) supports it, but I think it would be interesting to calculate what the emissions/passenger mile are for this line, or the cost per passenger mile. My intuition is that they are worse than drive alone with our current vehicle mix, but my perception could be colored by what I so often see. I know CO2 and diesel emissions are only part of the story, but, for me, they are the most important part.
One thing we’ve established is that you are more tolerant of crappy service than I am. I simply wouldn’t take the bus if it meant leaving a party early. I’d likely be on my bike, or just enjoying a late evening walk. That’s not a judgement, just an observation.
School is an important thing to serve, but it’s also probably like ~5% to 10% of daily rides (something like a few hundred)
We can do some calculations to estimate emissions/pax mile. With 6,347 passenger miles/weekday and 5.1 pax miles/revenue mile, we get 1,250 or so revenue miles. With the rides/revenue hour and rides/passenger hour we can assume that for every 1 vehicle mile, there’s about 0.72 revenue miles, meaning about 1,740 total vehicle miles/weekday. This report from Penn State gives a fuel efficiency of a little under 5 mpg for a Gillig Hybrid Bus on a typical urban route (ouch, way lower than I expected to be honest), and about 8 mpg on a commuter route. I also found a blog post quoting 9 to 12 mpg for non-stop driving (will use this for the deadhead miles, since there are no stops).
Anyways, based on all of this, I calculate that the #70 uses about 350 gallons of diesel fuel per day (310 on revenue service, 60 on deadheading). In terms of passenger miles, that’s 18.2 passenger miles/gallon – not exactly excellent fuel economy. Here’s a spreadsheet going over every route in turn, with a handy chart seeing how closely correlated this all is with passenger mile/revenue mile (TLDR: multiply that by 3.5 to get approximate fuel economy. This is directly correlated with the MPG assumptions, so bump that up/down proportionally if you don’t like the 5 mpg assumption). The best performing route is the 57-TV Hwy with about 40 passenger miles per gallon, while the worst is the 97-Tualatin/Sherwood route with a little over 2 (ouch). There’s a roughly linear relationship between level of service and fuel efficiency, with some exceptions. Both the 77 and 44 get 30 to 60 minute service but do better than higher frequency routes like the 14 and 6. Overall, the system gets about 23.87 pax miles per gallon, so not too far off the typical car in the US
There are some signs that my beloved #70 is a poorly managed bus though. It has the highest ratio of deadhead hours of any bus with comparable ridership stats (at 28%) and it is the second-least fuel efficient route of buses with more than 2,000 daily weekday riders (beating only the 48-Cornell). The deadhead hour note is of particular concern, given that the Center Street garage is about 5 blocks from the route – indicating TriMet’s quite inefficient operating procedure of having almost all buses start from the start/end points of routes exclusively (the 9-Powell is an interesting exception, where some runs end/start at 205 near the Powell Garage). This feels like a fixable thing to do, just have partial runs for vehicles entering and leaving service. Reducing deadhead miles to be in line with similar central city routes would bring it up to 20 pax mpg. Looking pre-pandemic, the #70 got closer to 25 pax mpg on a more efficient route in terms of deadheading (25%), but I feel like this is getting a bit in the weeds now (like it wasn’t before)
But back to emissions: I don’t think it’s a straightforward comparison between a bus pax mpg and a car mpg, especially given the presence of the MAX as a transfer option for lots of riders. Someone riding the #70 to transfer to the MAX might only get the equivalent of ~18 mpg on that segment of their ride, but once they transfer to an electric train and go 4 more miles it’s going to be up in the 50 to 60 mpg range. Something similar happens between more and less efficient bus routes too, and given the #70’s place in the network topology as a dense transfer route, it operates less efficiently so that other buses may be more efficient. At least that’s how I think about it.
Still, this all presents a fairly compelling case for bus electrification for purely environmental reasons. It’s just not very efficient to use diesel, and arguably the proliferation of diesel buses in the mid-century era at the expense of the much more efficient trams and trolleybuses they replaced is a problem the US really needs to solve. Battery Electric Buses offer one option, but have operational issues in full revenue service. I’m still an advocate for returning to trolleybus and streetcars, but I’m admittedly a Luddite.
I didn’t expect you to do the calculations, but you did a very comprehensive analysis (based on relatively limited available data). And you showed your work, so bonus points for that :-).
My only comments at this point is that it sounds as if you are using a systemwide average trip length, though you suggested that the #70 is biased towards shorter trips, which would push the passenger fuel economy down (perhaps significantly). Also, the comparative data you linked to for vehicle mileage ends at 2016, and, with electrification, fleet averages are climbing rapidly, especially in Oregon. That said, I was unable to find a good, current number.
Of course, getting more passengers to ride the bus would be the best way to improve per-passenger fuel consumption. And we agree fully on the need for TriMet to quit their diesel habit and get moving on the project of electrification, whatever form it takes.
PS Saw the #70 again this morning with a single passenger as I was riding along 21st.
Well, I like to procrastinate what can I say?
I would assume that the 5 mpg cited for city routes in the Penn State study accounts for normal stopping patterns, and I found that TriMet reported 5.2 mpg in an NTD dataset for 2022. It’s hard for me to get much more granular than that without a better working knowledge of the topic though. Certainly, the worse traffic is on a given route the worse the fuel economy should be. To that end, I think the 70 is pretty average
On the topic of cars though, since the average age of a vehicle in the US is something like 12 years, the raw number in 2016 is probably a good approximation for current info. The rise in EVs may be substantial, but so could the rise in larger trucks and SUVs. Either way, it’s roughly comparable.
55 rides per trip across an entire route is a paltry amount of riders for a 40ft bus. They could probably run this with a small shuttle bus.
The rides are not distributed evenly across each trip (much lower ridership north of Lloyd, differences in time of day), and the route is busy enough during peak times that a shuttle bus would be impractical. It would pointless and wasteful to have multiple different types of buses on the same route depending on the time of day too – those buses have to come from depots, etc.
It’s generally best to have the largest bus you’d need for a given day of service and my experience on the #70 is that it’s usually busy enough during a weekday afternoon to justify a 40 foot bus (most seats taken, maybe a few people standing on exceptional days). Plus, minibuses and shuttle buses just are a worse rider experience, especially for wheelchair users.
They don’t have to be:
https://www.sunsetvans.com/electric-minibus-low-floor/
Would be great if it would go to the new Baseball Stadium too.