Portland’s new City Council held its first-ever meeting of the Climate, Resilience, and Land Use Committee last Thursday. After a presentation from city staff on the Climate Emergency Work Plan and how Portland will meet its carbon emission reduction goals, City Councilor Sameer Kanal (D2) made comments that raised eyebrows among some transportation reformers.
Portland Bureau of Transportation Planning Group Manager Kristin Hull told committee members that in order to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, “We absolutely need to shift more trips to biking, walking and transit. It means changing the behaviors of individual individual Portlanders… it is absolutely the most critical thing we can do to reducing vehicle miles traveled.” Hull’s comments leaned on work that PBOT does to gently incentivize more people to consider options other than driving a car; things like improving transit and biking networks, charging more for car parking, hosting events like Sunday Parkways, and so on.
When given a chance to make a comment, Councilor Kanal responded directly to Hull’s comments. “There was an approach about trying to use incentivization of individual Portlanders’ decision making as the primary methodology for reducing transportation-related carbon emissions that was kind of concerning to me,” he said.
Then Kanal added, “I don’t think PBOT’s approach addresses the time needs of individual Portlanders,” and that he feels the “bike focus” is sapping urgency from improving transit service. Here’s more from Kanal’s response:
“Portlanders generally do the climate-friendly thing as long as they’re aware of what that is, and they’re able to do it without a substantial cost of time or money. I think that the bike focus for folks who might need to make a trip that will be 20 minutes while driving but an hour while biking, is a way of getting around the conversation about actually investing in public transit.
And that’s not to say that bikes are bad. I’m not saying that at all. But they’re not necessarily the only solution. Same thing with walking and all that. So I was pretty concerned about why we’re investing so much effort into that [biking and walking], as opposed to public transit, which will get you from places in District 2 or District 1 — and frankly all over the city and downtown — a lot faster than say, ‘Hey, bike this entire way,’ especially when we’re also building those bike lanes on major thoroughfares and creating the safety risks associated with that.”
What began as a concern that transit gets short-changed by the City of Portland (keep in mind TriMet owns and operates transit, not PBOT), morphed into what appeared to be an effort to frame transit as a faster and safer way to get around the city than cycling.
For the vast majority of trips, cycling is actually faster than transit — not to mention much more flexible, reliable, and inexpensive (in the long run). According to Google Maps, an eight-mile trip from Peninsula Park in Kanal’s District 2 to Portland Community College’s Southeast Campus in District 1, is 55 minutes on transit compared to 50 minutes by bike. On an e-bike, that trip could easily be just 35-40 minutes. An even easier-to-bike trip of 3.3 miles from Overlook Park in north Portland to City Hall downtown would also be faster by bike, according to Google.
In response to Kanal’s comments, PBOT’s Hull said, “I think we are in an all systems go approach. It’s not one or the other.”
Watch the exchange below:
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Councilor Kanal sounds pretty naive about this. Portland will never have a transit system that works with a a network to support walking and biking. That has never been the goal. Transit is pretty bad in Portland and it should be improved (tunnel under downtown!, reliable during cold/hot weather, faster headways, etc) but it is not productive to think of the transit network and bike network as competing for resources. The biggest safety and climate challenge within our transportation system is way too much reliance and infrastructure for SOV drivers. Too many lanes, too much parking, too many highways, too fast.
I am curious about your use of naïve? Can you explain your criteria for him to move from where you judge him into the territory of not naïve? What would that journey look like? What lived experience should he have to live up to your standards?
Would have been great to have PBOT to admit that transit service is not to the level of service it should be instead of getting defensive and gaslighting people. That same trip they mention from Peninsula Park to PCC SE takes half the amount of time driving even during peak hours.
If the fastest non-driving option is biking for a long distance trip, then that is just poor transit service.
Hi. If you listened to the video and if you read more closely you would see that PBOT didn’t get defensive at all. And they didn’t gaslight anyone. And I am the one who shared a few trip examples, not PBOT.
What would this accomplish? Are you thinking this would put fire under Metro’s feet?
” … 55 minutes on transit compared to 50 minutes by bike …”
Dodging traffic for nearly an hour every day is not every 20 and 30-something’s idea of a food time — much less every 40 to 60-something.
This 50-something chooses to dodge traffic on a bike every day instead of being stuck in it in a vehicle.
It sounds like you are advocating for a safer, lower-stress bike network, and I agree with that!
How many miles on your commute? Is it cross town as noted in the context here. Or is it from say Sellwood, on a trail and then over a transit bridge to OHSU and yes, I know that involves the doge traffic risks you endure, but should be eliminated in the future.
Oh now we’re gatekeeping bike commutes? Sorry, JBee, you may 50-something but since your commute isn’t a 15 mile schlock cross town from Parkrose to Swan Island, your perspective is less important 🙁
Shoutout to Swan Island! That’s my destination and riding there, especially in the dark, is f***ing terrifying for this experienced rider.
10 minutes by car, 20 by bike and up to an hour by bus (almost as quick as walking).
Your commute from parkrose to swan Island is nearly the same length as my bike commute and the City Commissioner made a point that is reflected by your commute. I can guarantee that a car could make your commute in a third of the time it would take the bus commute. Commissioner was also making a point that because our bodies are all built so differently there’s very few Portland citizens who could make your bike commute from parkrose to swan Island and back so yes you win a prize for such an extremist commute and that was the point of the city leadership
1. Cycling is unambiguously less safe than riding in transit but so is cage driving.
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2. Cycling is slower than transit when someone does not live in or close to twee central PDX.
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3. The incredibly cratering of transportation cycling Portland since 2014 has modestly increased carbon emissions.
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4. Transit mode share has not cratered as much as cycling and, importantly, has markedly increased since the start of the pandemic. Thus, it makes some sense to EMPHASIZE transit when it comes to climate crisis mitigation. Unfortunately, this is not happening in PDX.
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5. Transit is the primary alternative mode for people who drive less and live in communities of concern (e.g. not in twee central PDX).
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So while Kanal got a few things wrong (at least by degree) he is correct that Portland should emphasize transit when it comes to climate crisis mitigation and to transportation equity.
In summary: rose lanes, BRT, and city subsidy of Trimet >> new bike lanes.
Who says Portland isn’t doing that already? Remember PBOT said no to bikes on Hawthorne in favor of transit? Remember how the Rose Lane transit projects took priority over biking when Eudaly came into office? Remember how PBOT is afraid to prioritize bikes on 82nd and instead is pushing better transit?
One problem with Kanal’s comments is that they seem to adopt a false, bike-skeptical narrative that belies the actual truth and instead sees these options at mutually exclusive. It’s just exhausting that anyone – especially someone like Kanal – would question any spending or priority on cycling in Portland when the facts show that it’s the mode that has the best ROI and most potential to help us fight climate change.
Also soren, the PBOT policy specifically states that bikes are only the prioritized mode for trips 3 miles or less.
I think there are ROI arguments when it comes to human health and to human-centered design but the “climate change” argument is, IMO, greatly exaggerated. Cycling mode share has plummeted from almost 8% to a pathetic 3-4% so in the real world cycling’s contribution to decarbonization has fallen 50% in just ten years.
Even if Portland were to achieve 10% cycling mode share (very unlikely), cycling would have a very small impact on transportation GHG emissions, of which ~50% is not even due to transportation of people.
I think there’s a degree of myopia in how a lot of folks look at this issue. Specifically with regards to the fact that most people don’t care about the city boundaries in their daily life and a huge number of the trips that happen inside the city limits start or end outside of the limits. When you factor in the west hills and the time it takes to climb them on a bicycle I absolutely begin to agree with Kanal.
I don’t read his statement as an us vs them. I read it as a balanced opinion that recognizes the reality that trips don’t always magically end at the city boundary.
He’s absolutely right about doing the right thing, when it’s reasonable to. And that the lack of transit is resulting in the result of that reasonableness equation not coming out the way they want it to. For example I’ve stopped going to shows at the Moda center, even ones I’d really like to go to, because parking there is such severe price gouging and I know that due to the climate priorities the city will never step in to help with that problem. I would absolutely love to get there via some other means, but transit doesn’t come anywhere near where I live. They canceled the bus line that stopped two blocks away over 40 yrs ago and never provided an alternative replacement other than driving. Bike theft issues at a venue like that aside riding the hills at close to midnight (it’s common for shows there to get out after 11pm) is not a viable option. It’s both too time consuming and far too hazardous. Riding home would take me over a hour, the drive is maybe 15min. Riding the west hills in the dark is frankly terrifying, I know because I’ve done it a lot. After several times being very intentionally run off the road by hostile drivers in the dark I stopped doing it. Because I’d rather drive than be dead.
Would cycling be my first choice in a perfect world? Absolutely. Is a bus? No, but I’d suck it up and use it instead of my car for a certain number of trips anyways if it was accessible. I’m also realistic in that there are quite a few areas (particularly in the hills) where it would be incredibly expensive and difficult to add bike infrastructure. Whereas a bus can just use what’s already there. At the end of the day if it gets folks out of their cars isn’t it a win?
This is all true and the correct statement from Kanal would be:
“I think that the CAR and TRUCK focus of our spending and built infrastructure that rewards people who drive for all of their trips under 5 miles is a way of disincentivizing transit, biking and walking.”
But instead, he’s knives out for the crumbs like the many aspirational Portland politicians before him.
I think councilor Kanal’s point is that this city should be investing in transit, which it really isn’t doing to any significant degree (in contrast to its long history of investment in cycling, which is also good). A correct understanding of Kanal’s statment, IMO, would be to voice support for a massive boost in city transit spending rather than the zero sum scenario you all have concocted here.
What exactly does repeatedly referring to central Portland as “twee” add to your argument, or the conversation in general? To me it’s just unhelpfully divisive, dismissive, and condescending.
It’s worse than condescending, it’s also false. Some of the poorest parts of the entire metro region are downtown and Old Town
Also “central” Portland (do you mean “downtown”?) is also the easiest to reach by transit since almost every bus line goes there. So that pretty much kills soren’s argument.
Central PDX = inner PDX. Downtown is a tiny portion of inner/central PDX.
Here’s a list of census tracts in Inner Portland that have median household incomes below the city’s (~$75k):
51.03, $31k (Old Town)106.02, $33k (Downtown)106.01, $53k (western Downtown)52.01, $46k (eastern Goose Hollow)52.02, $66k (western Goose Hollow)56.01, $47k (northern PSU)56.02, $50k (southern PSU)49.02, $41k (eastern NW)48, $59k (south central NW)49.01, $67k (northern NW)11.01, $56k (southern Central Eastside)21.01, $73k (east Burnside river to 12th)23.03, $47k (Lloyd/Rose Quarter)24.02, $69k (eastern Lloyd)21.02, $63k (east Burnside 12th to 20th)20.02, $60k (east Burnside 20th to 28th)I would hardly call this some “tiny portion” of inner/central Portland.
I count 9 census tracts in Portland with median incomes below $50k. Six of them are in inner Portland, three of them are in East Portland. Large parts of “twee” inner Portland have significant amounts of poverty. Sure, there are lots of rich areas within shouting distance of central Portland too (the Pearl, S Waterfront, Irvington, Laurelhurst) but it’s definitely not all like that.
I responded to the above so your response is a strawman.
That being said I find your perennial disregard for the classist power imbalances in this city — where well-off homeowners (and privileged future homeowners) live in resource rich neighborhoods while low-income people and families are increasingly displaced out of Portland or to the periphery — to be utterly repugnant.
Of the sixteen census tracts quoted above, three are in downtown. I am responding to your comment that is specifically about “inner PDX”.
If you compare NW Portland to East Portland, you’ll find similar income profiles but far fewer homeowners in NW than in East. Household sizes do play a major role in this (with NW being in the 1.5 range while East is in the 2.5 range), but it’s not explanatory of everything. Is the typical household in NW (1 person, $45k income, renter) better or worse off than the typical household in East Portland (2 person household, $70k household income, homeowner)? [income data here, household size here]
There is ample evidence of displacement from many Portland neighborhoods, but that is still specific to certain areas and not universally true. It is especially relevant in inner N/NE (Albina) where household incomes have more than doubled since 2010. But your simplistic view of the structure of income and class in Portland leaves a lot to be desired, even if it is true in passing. Rent is lower in NW, Old Town, and Downtown ($800 to $1,500 per month) than it is in East Portland ($1,200 to $1,800 per month) [data here].
Reducing Portland to “rich people near the city center, poor people in the periphery” is just not accurate. You are producing no specific sources! I am aware of the general pattern of displacement you describe, but I do not think it is a universal truth which applies to all places equally. Even within inner Portland, there are significant differences between areas. Saying it’s all homeowners or “privileged future homeowners” when it is demonstrably primary renters, many of which are demonstrably poor is flat wrong.
Sigh. I guess my off-the-cuff “twee” has now morphed from being “false” to “true in passing”.
I could have pointed out the many neighborhoods in central/inner Portland with median incomes in the $150,000-$220,000 range but these kinds of anecdotes are utterly irrelevant to a comment that more about creating cherry-picked “gotchas” over the meaning of a single word.
Being true in places is different than being true. I am saying that there is a range of experiences and nuance in describing central Portland, something which is not disproven by Irvington existing. You are wrong to call it “twee” as a catch all describer
Soren: “Gentrified NE Portland.”
Blumdrew-esque logic: This is FALSE. Whatabout census tracts in Irvington and Alameda?!!??!
Sealioning and whataboutism aside, my use of TWEE is not “false” because I am using it as a signifier of class inequality (rather than something that must be true for every census tract).
This is grossly misrepresenting the point that I am making. At no point am I referencing census tracts in Irvington and Alameda, expect to say that the existence of them does not disprove the fact that poor people live in central Portland. You haven’t brought up “Gentrified NE Portland” except in this comment (or by implication). I am not challenging the idea that NE Portland has been gentrified in the last 30 years.
If what you really mean by this …
… is that cycling is only faster for the specific richer parts of central Portland, I think that’s wrong on its face. Cycling is no better or worse on speed in Irvington/Alameda/Laurelhurst than NW/Old Town/Downtown.
But I interpreted your original comment as all of central Portland is “twee”, as did seemingly everyone else responding to you. This is wrong, and it’s not because there isn’t class inequality in central Portland (or Portland more broadly), it’s because there is ample evidence that significant parts of Central Portland have lower incomes and lower home ownership rates – both indicators of “not twee”.
Yes….by my comments and by repeated implication I am using twee as a rough cognate for the parts of Portland where there are concentrations of gentrifiers and the landed gentry.
Considering that you yourself have participated in many exchanges where I express my utter disdain (I would use far stronger language in person) for the economically comfortable class, your stream of comments come across as bad faith.
Cycling is a faster option if one lives in TWEE inner/central Portland than if one lives in outer E or N Portland. That was the subtext of my comment.
And it’s also a faster/more practical option if one lives in a not twee part of inner/central Portland than it is if one lives in a twee rich, suburban part of the area (like the Forest Heights subdivision just west of Skyline). Imagining that cycling somehow serves the interest of the rich while transit serves the interest of the poor is deeply wrong. Either can serve rich or poor, depending on how the investment is approached and the context of the project.
Gentrification and the housing “free market” have made cycling less accessible to lower-income and middle-income households that have not been able to afford TWEE and increasingly TWEE neighborhoods in inner/central Portland. So, yes, I think that cycling infrastructure and cycling advocacy in Portland is biased towards serving the interest of economically comfortable (TWEE) Portlanders.
I have the same question, why “twee”? What are you trying to say? Please be clear.
I feel the same way about reading swearing here. I’m glad we finally agree on something!
This is simply flat out wrong.
From Beaverton to Clackamas it is *VASTLY* faster to cycle than ride transit.
A pure transit trip from 11635 SW Center in Beaverton to 12402 SE Jennifer st in the morning requires:
4:30am Leave home
4:42am Get on Red Line
5:29am Transfer to Green Line at Gateway
5:51am Arrive Clackamas Town Center
6:23am Board line 30 to Estacada
6:40am (ish) Arrive office.
(do not believe for a second that you can take the 5:12 red line and arive at CTC at 6:20 and actually reliably board the 30 at 6:23 – and the 30 is a once an hour bus)
OR: Get rid of the 30 and ride 4 miles from CTC and arrive office 6:10am.
Only real issues are crossing the slip lanes on Sunnyside, dealing with right turning movements from cars coming off 205 at Sunnybrook, dodge all the big trucks parked in the bike lane on 98th place, deal with the cars that don’t stop for peds at the slip land from 212 onto 224, cross Jennifer at 122nd (which can be dicey).
Oh, and slow down going under 205 – the one time I forgot that is when there were debris in the path and I crashed. Still recovering.
OR: Deboard the red line in Goose Hollow and ride around 15 miles and arrive around 6:00 – 6:05. Not much of a time saving, but you are no longer at the mercy of a TriMet issue causing you to miss the Green line transfer. Switch from the town bike to the trike and arrive at the office at 5:55.
Dicey parts – Columbia down to 1st, but only due to potholes that can damage tires. Harmony to 82nd. Skip the Sunnybrook issue by going down 93rd and using the light there to cross. The rest is the same as from CTC
OR – Ride the trike from Beaverton to work in 1:20 (avg, as low as 1:10 when everything goes my way and I’m in really good shape).
We won’t even discuss some fo the dicey things in this trip (taking a trike down Taylor’s Ferry at 30mph at 4:30 🙂 ).
As you can see, replacing the last segment with a bike is the biggest time saving, but riding the entire way saves another 20 minutes or more over that.
This, BTW, is a 57 year old without e-assist. Add even a low power E-assist and take 10 minutes off the longer trips, maybe 15 off the 20miler due to the modest hills in there.
Huh? Transit ridership is still MARKEDLY DECREASED in Portlalnd as compared to pre-pandemic.
Public transit ridership in the Portland metro area still low as fares set to increase – Axios Portland
This is easily disprovable. Per the census, in 2023, 6.2% of workers commuted by transit compared to 3.7% by bike. That works out to 22,500 and 13,400 workers for each mode, respectively. In 2019, 13.4% of workers commuted by transit compared to 5.2% by bike. That works out to 49,100 and 19,000 workers for each mode respectively.
So transit commute share is down 54% while bike commute share is down 28%. I don’t think commute share is the end all be all of metrics, but it’s kind of the only one available for comparing bikes with transit directly. Do you have any evidence to support your narrative to the contrary? Even using the peak year of Portland cycling (2014) shows a 42% decline – still less than the transit decline quoted above.
Trimet ridership data:
2014: 76,816,384
2023: 56,145,366
73% of 2014 transit ridership
Bike mode share:
2014: 7.2%
2023: 3.7%
51% of 2014 mode share
PBOT cycling trip counts show an even more pronounced drop. And their analysis of off-peak cycling trip counts show that this is not a “commute” effect that can be explained away by “work from home”.
The reason I am using commute mode share for both is to make a like-to-like comparison. Between 2014 and 2023, the largest shift in commute patterns is clearly the rise in work from home and while that affects TriMet’s overall ridership, it’s less severe than the impact to just commuters.
And for what it’s worth, PBOTs cycling trip count shows a 32% decline in cycling trips since 2019. TriMet’s ridership was down 34% over the same time period (from 75M to 49M – you are quoting 2024 ridership numbers as 2023 ridership numbers). I see no evidence to support your point that “transit mode share has not cratered as much as cycling”.
Quoting myself:
I think it’s very amusing that you are linking to the PBOT cycling trip count presentation that (in slide 1) shows a ~40% drop in cycling trips since 2016. You will find this drop is even larger since 2014 which emphasizes my point that cycling trip counts have shown a larger drop than transit trip counts.
In contrast to cycling, I fully expect transit trip counts to recover to 2014 levels in the next few years,
I see roughly comparable drops any way I slice the comparable data between cycling and biking. The 2014 counts weren’t quoted in my brief look, and I feel like a pre/post pandemic analysis is more relevant anyways.
I’m hopeful for transit ridership to increase, I ride the bus a lot. I would be very surprised if ridership increases over the pre pandemic levels based on how strong the office worker commute aspect of ridership has been historically, and the general lack of good transit supportive land use planning outside of the downtown office core. I think the service changes that have happened and that are planned will help, but it’ll be a long road back.
In either case, having transit and bikes compete for scraps is bad policy. It should be clear that this was not the case from 2014 to 2019, when cycling and transit ridership both dropped significantly. We can and should have transportation policy that favors both
Would it surprise you to know that I agree?
One of my points in multiple comments was that transit has seen less investment (and focus) from the city and that investment should be dramatically increased. I never once stated that investment in cycling should “compete” with transit.
As for my challenge of the “climate argument”, it’s my very strong opinion that the climate crisis will not be address by a few things that a few individuals do but rather by systemic socioeconomic change (that I think may be an impossible struggle in this hyper-individualistic society).
Is it? Or is it the lack of safety than many feel and see when they use public transit in Portland? Got to make it safe, clean and convenient to get more to use it.
https://www.kptv.com/2024/06/03/teen-sues-portland-says-man-who-stabbed-him-max-train-should-have-already-been-jail/
Surely it’s not a coincidence that 20,000+ riders stopped commuting on transit while 60,000 more workers started working from home. 30,000 fewer workers drive in, and 10,000 fewer works bike/other to work now too. A 200%+ increase in work from home is definitely the biggest shift in commute patterns since 2014.
Lack of safety on transit is an issue, but it’s ridiculous to imagine marginally lower safety on transit is the reason for a widespread drop in commuters using it when there is a similar drop in commuters cycling, and a not insignificant drop in commuters driving. If it were just transit, the latter two would presumably see increases as those folks would still have to get to work somehow (indeed, if you look at commute patterns in Portland during the “bike boom”, at least some of it had to do with a shift from transit to bike during the financial crisis era transit cuts)
Of course work from home reduced commute trips. But auto trips bounced back quickly, while transit is still in a huge hole. That tells me that as (some) folks returned to the office, many former transit users started to drive. Safety may be a part of the reason for that shift, and it’s likely keeping riders with options away.
But regardless of the reason, once the transit habit is broken, it can be difficult to reestablish.
This is true generally, but auto commute trips are still down from the 2019 high (at least for residents of the City of Portland). It’s probably also true that some former transit commuters who have returned have started to drive, but that kind of granular data is very hard to come by.
I think it tells me that auto trips of all kinds are very convenient for most people, while transit generally isn’t, and that commute trips were relatively higher than other trips (that is, if 13% of Portlanders commuted by transit, less than 13% of Portlanders used transit for grocery shopping or whatever). TriMet is self-consciously pursuing a strategy to court more every day trips. I think the jury is still out on how successful they will be (though 2024 ridership numbers are genuinely promising considering how down commute trips still are)
My e-bike ride from Milwaukie to downtown Portland runs from 25-30 minutes, door to door. There’s no way for me to beat that using transit, even if I assume the train comes on time. (THE TRAIN REGULARLY FAILS TO COME ON TIME!)
Don’t get me wrong: I love jumping on the Max when I’m going home from work and the weather is crappy. But my employer docks my pay for tardiness, so I cannot afford to be late for work because the train just never comes.
“THE TRAIN REGULARLY FAILS TO COME ON TIME!”
And, worse, the electronic signs at the station actively lie about when the train is actually coming, or if it’s even coming at all.
The signs lying or frozen or simply blank were a hilarious game to play in the dark days before I had a smartphone and could then double check. Of course, the website didn’t seem to be connected to on the ground reality either. People (customers, bureaucrats and politicians) who say transit is fine clearly haven’t actually relied on it to be somewhere at a specific time.
I haven’t had any ghost MAX trains on my commute for over a year now, but I ride Blue/Red between Beaverton and Hillsboro. Trains have been pretty reliable, it seems the dark days of the operator shortage have come to an end (at least for now).
I had one on New Year’s Eve. The thing about ghost trains that most bugs me is not that sometimes a train is missed (though that can be infuriating if you depend on it), it’s that TriMet tells you one is coming until… poof, it’s gone. Outside of sudden failure, they know well in advance when they don’t have a driver for a train (or bus), so there’s no excuse for telling folks that the next train is due in 10 mins when it never left the depot.
If they gave riders accurate information, we could make better decisions and the problem would be partly mitigated.
Outside of the microscopically niche world of the experienced cycling enthusiast, distances over ~8-10 km per trip are not viable for most people — and this is true even in European cycling paradises.
You are always dismissive and condescending to people who are trying their best to avoid burning fossil fuels by biking. We need both policy change and better personal choices. Why talk down to people who choose to bike for cleaner air, water and soil? Do you tell vegans that they aren’t making a difference too? You can push for policy change, let others ride their bikes. You’re not helping the cause by discouraging people from biking by telling them they aren’t doing enough.
While all true (I think, I’ll grant it), investing in cycling is practically free no matter what it is, while transit is expensive. So if we invest in better transit (we should be), we can do both and not try and pit them against each other. They are not opposed.
Haven’t seen you on here in a while, glad to have you back!
I am curious about this supposed normal everyday trip within portland that takes an hour to bike but only 20 minutes to drive, I guess maybe a trip that used the freeway at a time of day that doesn’t have freeway congestion? It does not seem like the average trip.
You can really tell that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when he starts favorably comparing travel times of transit to cycling though. I know multiple frequent bike commuters who started biking specifically because it was faster than transit, especially if you have to transfer cycling is going to beat the bus on almost any trip you come up with. I just popped in a random trip I might take to use as a baseline, my house to cinema 21 around noon on a Wednesday is 20 minutes by car (doesn’t count parking time) 40 minutes by bike, and an hour by transit. Shift that to the evening when I would be more likely to go that way and bike/transit times are the same but driving goes up 30 percent to 26 minutes, at which point by the time you park and walk to cinema 21 you are going to be pretty similar to biking. I’d love for transit to be faster but anyone who is starting from the premise that transit now is faster than cycling probably doesn’t bike or use transit all that much.
That’s my bike commuting story exactly. Both the Max and the bus are slow enough routes from downtown to NE Portland just shy of 82nd that transitioning to bike commuting was a sensible choice.
For many destinations, if the choice is between public transit or biking, biking is the first option. The idea that transit is optimally faster than biking in Portland perhaps suggests that this is a theory spouted by someone who does neither.
It would be fantastic if Tri-Met incorporated more frequent headways or the city got serious about dedicated bus lanes. It just doesn’t seem productive for a city councilor to propagate a tired narrative that PBOT investing in bike and walking projects and infrastructure is an impediment to transit aims by somehow removing resources and focus from transit. The concern seems misdirected, if not misguided. As others have noted, public transit is ultimately controlled by Tri-Met and not PBOT, so if the purpose is to improve transit service, perhaps Kanal should direct their challenge to Tri-Met .
If the city was really serious about supporting public transit, be it TriMet, C-Tran, or any other service, they would remove on-street parking on all public transit streets and put in dedicated transit-only lanes on Division, Burnside, 82nd, 122nd, and so on – as well as re-purpose any “second lane” on both sides of all 4-lane stroads to be transit-only. The city would also give bus drivers the same technology and access as fire trucks for signal priority in traffic.
Comment of the week
Yep – David makes good sense here. The rose lanes have been really great for bus riders, esp the one going up the hill to Hillsdale in SW. We used to sit in traffic for 20-25 minutes and now we zip right up the hill to Sunset. Great!
And after you all booted Eudaly out of office the pace of rose lane installations cratered. This speaks to my understanding of Kanal’s point which was that PBOT should ALSO prioritize transit investment.
Agreed David Hampsten, and I don’t know of any bike commuters who would have a problem with that. The VAST majority of people I know who bike are also very pro-transit.
It also makes no sense to suggest–in a climate, resilience and land-use committee meeting no less–that transit should come at the expense of one of the least polluting and most versatile modes (biking) rather than at the expense of the most polluting and least versatile mode (SOV driving).
That was also my commuting story exactly. In fact, when I factored in the slightly extra distance of walking between home and the bus stop, and between work and the other bus stop, plus arriving 5 minutes early at the bus stop to avoid missing buses that were slightly early, it was faster to WALK than ride the bus.
Plus, if I missed the bus, it was a half-hour wait (or an hour later in the day). Walking or biking, I could leave exactly when I wanted. If I missed the bus, it was as fast or faster to walk to or from work than it was to wait for the next bus.
Y’all are gonna debate this forever without accomplishing anything, aren’t you.
The street trust and bike loud are gonna create signal chats, chairs, co chairs, and working groups and then loop in the city bike committee and Roger Geller. Stay tuned. Bike happy hour debates to follow. ( I copied and pasted this off the Onion article on the same topic )
I trust the more objective and data driven opinions of Jon Maus on bike advocacy, per my presence on these article comments.
I am skeptical and reluctant to support any policy ideas/demands offered by a group led by Sarah Iannerone and feel that the aggressive nature of hardcore advocates in “Bike Loud” is counterproductive to pragmatic policy as is typically discussed on this site.
By my count we’ve had three councilors throw shade at cycling so far Clark, Zimmerman and now Kanal. Not surprising but not great to have 1/4 of the council make anti-biking comments so soon. That doesn’t include anyone from District 1 which I assume includes one or two reps that aren’t fans of cycling based on general complaints I’ve heard from neighbors and family in that district.
I agree that biking is generally faster than transit here but it probably shouldn’t be in that we should speed up transit. A driver watching buses blow by them in dedicated lanes while they’re stuck in traffic every day would probably do more to get them out of their car then watching cyclists do the same.
Maybe I’m missing something, but someone in good faith (albeit perhaps naively) suggesting a shift in priority from bikes to transit isn’t “throwing shade”.
If he had said something akin to, “I don’t think we should prioritize bikes since bikes are dangerous and annoying”, that would be throwing shade.
Is he wrong about his hypothetical trip being 20 min by car vs 1 hour by bike? For me, he’s definitely wrong. But for a family of 4, gearing up two adults and two kids for the rain, taking a less direct but calmer route, riding at the slowest kid’s pace, and being extra diligent at unsignaled intersections might very well take an hour.
So to you saying bikes are dangerous and annoying is shade but saying they’re slow and sapping urgency from climate change efforts isn’t shade? I’d say that’s taking a big ol’ dump on one of the most efficient, inexpensive and climate friendly modes of transportation.
What’s the point of your example? Most cars on the road are single occupant vehicles not a family of four. Your hypothetical is irrelevant to the conversation.
A car with a family of a four can travel just as far in 20 minutes as a single occupancy vehicle. The same cannot be said for a family of 4 biking vs an individual adult.
Aren’t we supposed to be building bike infrastructure for families and not the “strong and fearless”?
My whole point is that dude is probably wrong, but also probably not as wrong as people seem to think.
The reality is we are not going to be saved nor doomed from “climate change” based on everyone within Portland City limits choosing to bike or not. There are many valid reasons to justify and push bike transit initiatives, even too for ones own values due to their conscious on climate change. Although emphasizing climate change as justification to steer our communities limited tax funds is disingenuous, an appeal to emotion and gaslighting.
There’s no magical forcefield that keeps CO2 generated throughout the world and associated heat energy input from infiltrating Portland. CO2 emission reductions of 100 people scrapping their Prius’s to bike is cancelled out by a single soccer mom in Scottsdale AZ deciding she must have a Chevy Yukon to drive herself to pilates everyday.
This is exactly my situation. Something that was more manageable, if not preferred in years past (for the exercise and reduced stress of sitting in traffic). Now, however, with a young family this is time i lose spending with my 6 month old son everyday and sleep is still at a premium as far needing to get up even earlier for such commute.
Transit is slow because it makes a ton of stops, involves waiting on one end (and perhaps in the middle if you have to transfer), and often doesn’t get you quite the whole way there.
These characteristics are hard to change with the transit technology we currently use.
Dedicated lanes and express lines (that don’t stop at every stop) would speed up transit and are not outside the limits our our transit technology.
Express buses would help a certain set of computers. I didn’t know why TriMet largely avoids them, but maybe there aren’t enough potential riders to make them worthwhile.
TriMet used to have some select rush hour express services, mostly on downtown -> eastside trunks. The 9 and 14 both had more than one per day until financial crisis era cuts. Rush hour peak service is difficult to manage efficiently without excess deadheading, and just a few limited stop express services don’t make that easier. Corridors with really high bus ridership (like Geary and Mission in SF) often have like a local service + a limited stop service, but those are corridors with ridership that Portland will frankly never see without categorically different scales of urban development
In my view the only way to change this is to create mini-cities around the max stops, put a max tunnel in and maybe some viaducts through east portland and gresham. So there could be a large population of people who can be car-less and just ride the max to stuff. I did this essentially cause I hate driving and had a lot of spare time having no kids.
Its being done in a vague sort of way, i guess. But its a long ways off from becoming viable. Seattle is getting there. Their light rail system has alot of density around it. Of course Seattle started off with twice the density.
But population growth would provide a huge impetus for it and there is none.
The densest parts of Seattle are surprisingly poorly served by the Link. The fact that it gets such great ridership is a testament to just how miserable traffic on I5 is up there. The heart of the densest part of Seattle (Belltown, nearly 50k people/square mile) is a full 20 minute walk from the nearest light rail stop. The MLK leg of the Link has population densities no more than a denser Portland neighborhood like Buckman.
Sound Transit is great, but they are much more commuter oriented than an agency like TriMet. King County Metro buses are the core part of Seattle transit, while the Link is a Frankenstein light rail commuter line which is great for regional trips but has limited local utility. I think this is fine by the way, just it’s more dependent on feeder bus routes + park n rides than adjacent station density for ridership.
I’m not a right-wing troll, but it’s ‘equity’, not commuters, that drive transit design in King County/Seattle. And a lot of the less dense parts of the Link system serve major destinations (the airport and UW, e.g.).
I’m not sure about that. Sound Transit is pretty explicitly oriented around regional trips and has a strong commuter focus (especially historically). They run good enough service on most of the commuter-type services (especially express buses on the I5 corridor that will be gradually replaced as the Link is built) that it’s not explicitly about commuting, but that is still a primary driver in system design.
The fact that the first part of the Link system being built is a 60+ mile spine from Everett to Tacoma mostly via I5 (serving the suburban parts of King, Snohomish, and Pierce County most likely to commute to downtown Seattle) rather than a more urban-oriented project focusing on the densest parts of Seattle (Belltown, Queen Anne, Central District, SLU, Ballard, Fremont) is evidence of this. And again, this isn’t the worst thing in the world, as there is clearly enough demand to justify the I5 spine approach, it’s just that the direct areas served then are more like mid-century malls (Northgate), suburban strip mall downtowns (Lynnwood), or bus/park and ride hubs (Mountlake Terrace) rather than historic urban neighborhoods. Cap Hill to U District is a minor exception, though following I5 ironically would have better served Eastlake instead of just passing beneath Montlake with no stop.
I think all regions interact with the dynamic of commute trips versus equitable access for transit dependent/reliant areas. Seattle does a good job of striking a balance. Regional agencies like Sound Transit rely much more on commuter promises for funding/political backing, while local agencies like King County Metro tend to be more rooted in more local needs (and thus better serve transit dependent/reliant areas). I am of the opinion that good transit needs both. Without good regional service, longer trips are brutal on transit. Without good local service, relatively few get to use transit (or rely on cars for access to transit, thus minimizing the potential use cases to be mostly commute hours).
Thanks for the comprehensive and interesting reply! It’s much more involved than my snarkish comment (troll) deserved. You say that a focus on commuters disfavors the “densest parts of Seattle” and provide a list of neighborhoods that are perceived as the favorites of privileged whites (‘twee’ in Soren’s parlance). I would counter that the focus was on a different set of neighborhoods: the Central district, International District, Beacon HIll, Rainier Beach/Valley, and Columbia City, which are perceived to be favored by and accessible to historically marginalized groups. The desire to serve these places took potential service from the more nordic/aryan coded places. I think this analysis has explanatory power vis a vis the route choices as well as yours. Specifically, I think when weighing development in the central city (between Lake Washington and the Sound), historical ties to marginalized groups in the political narrative are more important than density or actual measures of wealth/income. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but I think in inhibits our transportation discussions when we leave this elephant in the room unacknowledged.
The time for the Max to navigate through downtown is absurd. Despite having zoo season passes, even my very green minded wife cannot justify taking the Max. She/we always drive.
Trimet *has* to find a way to get the downtown tunnel built.
Found another Kotek voter who is upset that the Trimet board she controls is not interested in system improvement.
Market urbanists love to fantasize of a better world (e.g. large train systems) while voting for the status quo party.
“Throwing shade?” Last I heard was that Zimmerman was shopping for an e-bike. And Clark? Not sure at all what you are talking about. She got funding for the Tillikum bridge. (Maybe the bridge casts some shade, or all those cyclists on the bridge …)
Both of my examples of these council members making questionable comments about cycling came from this site. Zimmerman commenting about doing things differently in different districts and the mayor taking that to mean less bike lanes in his district. Clark’s dismissive responses to Jonathan mentioning cycling infrastructure in their shed interview weren’t great.
I don’t think shopping for an e-bike makes anyone an advocate for bicycle commuting or infrastructure. Getting funding for a transit bridge that also has cycling with a very poor connections to the network is hardly a resounding endorsement of bicycle infrastructure and sounds more like we’ll tack on cycling as an afterthought. Kind of like the 102nd bike lanes that are making East Portlanders hate cyclists even more.
Yes the mayor could have interpreted Zimmerman incorrectly and yes I may have read into Clark’s responses too much but considering the decades of council members claiming to care about cycling and voting on master plans that supposedly support it their follow through has been abysmal. All I’m saying is it’s not a great start. Kanal however is without a doubt throwing shade at bicycle commuting and from a place of ignorance.
I’m curious why you feel a call for reflection on the decay of transit is throwing shade at cycling? I did not see that. But I know it’s easy to feel that way. Just wondering if you could reflect more.
No where does TriMet get any of their money from the city of Portland.
Other than sharing the streets, the City shouldn’t be providing any money for transit purposes.
PBOT, and all the city bureaus, need to get back to basics. Get their maintenance backlog taken care of first and foremost, plan for ongoing maintenance in the years to come, and then and only then do they start talking about aspirational additions. If that can all happen now, then awesome, provided the budget allows for it.
If budget doesn’t allow for nice to haves, then table them until there’s actual budget for not only the project but the maintenance of said project.
I’m so sick of our politicians wasting our tax money on those “nice to haves” without any consideration about the maintenance of them.
In years past, PBOT would contract with TriMet to run the Portland Streetcar service as well as the Pill Hill gondola. Who currently pays for those services?
The streetcar is 75%% real estate boosterism, 24% tourism boosterism, and 1% transit. In other words, a transit facility that is slower than walking (or rolling) is not a facility that in any way functions as modern people-focused transit.
Besides the streetcar, Portland also has been a partner on most TriMet capital projects. I think we issued bonds to pay for the Orange Line. It’s good that the city participates in making transit better within the city, why wouldn’t they? Better transit service (especially on non-city owned streets) takes pressure off the rest of the system
So you are fine with crumbs for transit? Nice to know, blumdrew.
.
Oregon, metro, and trimet used bond proceeds to provide matching funds for the Orange line. Please provide evidence that the City of Portland issued bonds to fund the orange line.
Where do I say that? I am saying that Portland should partner with TriMet on transit projects
I guess it was just local match (~$60M) on closer inspection. I might have been thinking about the Sellwood Bridge bonds.
I expected more from Kanal, whom I voted for. My patience is absolutely gone for representatives that jump into transpo policy with their gut feelings, personal experience or half-baked ideas without putting in the effort to think these things through. He promoted himself as a policy wonk, but here he is saying stuff that is inaccurate and could easily be analyzed.
“He promoted himself as a policy wonk, but here he is saying stuff that is inaccurate and could easily be analyzed.”
He should be posting on Bike Portland!
Hey we get wonky here too, just say the word “property tax” and I’ll write a dissertation
Speak for yourself, Watts. 🙂
Ouch. He got your vote, huh? That’s gonna be a long four years.
Ha ha… to be fair, a lot of people got my vote. RCV!
LOL. Luv ya SD. You’re too busy (job, kid) but advocacy involves holding those electeds close. I’m not talking about you, but up-thread. Advocates have got to help their reps, bring ‘em up to speed. It’s not like you elect them and then kick back and hope. Getting someone with potential into office is just the beginning, then the fun starts.
“Advocates have got to help their reps, bring ‘em up to speed. It’s not like you elect them and then kick back and hope.“
An interesting view on elected leadership. If they don’t know how to do something and don’t appear to know how to learn how to do something then why vote for them?
Very good point, Jake. I voted experience, I think D4 stands out as a District with representatives who bring expertise and experience to the table.
But even a qualified, competent representative will have knowledge gaps. Transportation is a steep learning curve, if you sense your rep could use some help, well help them.
I just got off zoom call in which Eric Wilhelm talked about giving Mitch Green a bike tour of SW. Don Baack has walked with all our reps. I gave EZ a stormwater tour. Reach out to your rep, they might appreciate it.
Mr. Kanal’s bio shows that he’s a good networker– he went to UW as a transfer, then worked in retail and then government. Why would you expect anything from him in the way of being a wonk?
There’s nothing in his bio to suggest that.
I used to hang out with a long time and current San Francisco councilman, Rafael Mandelmen. He went to UC Berkeley law (Boalt), which is harder to get into than any law school except Harvard and Yale. He’s smart and empathetic and highly functional and keeps getting re-elected.
In Portland we have our one-termers who everyone is like “Man that person sucked, total disappointment”..then next election its “Bring on the next, mediocre resume, virtue signaler, who cares if they’ve achieved nothing in their lives–they CARE”
Do you know what the term “policy wonk” means?
It may be cynical of me, but the tone he’s using makes me suspect he’s trying to score political points, in a low-key culture war way. Taking cheap shots at cycling as a mode, and people who ride bikes as a demo, is an easy way to get certain people on your side. He brings up relevant points, but doesn’t make the actual points honestly or effectively, because it’s not even close to zero sum: cycling infra is mad cheap to put in and doesn’t take hardly anything from other modes. It’s quick and cheap and low hanging fruit. It would be very bad if cheap ass politicians and other string pullers were trying to use cycling as a way of avoiding the political and dollar costs of actually improving public transit — and it’s something I can easily imagine happening — but I don’t see it happening here and now, and I don’t believe Kanal sees it either or believes it. That’s why I distrust his motives for saying this.
I don’t have a lot of love for yuppies either, and I don’t think we should collectively invest in their convenience at the expense of other things, but using “twee inner Portland professional class Lycra lifestyle cyclists” tropes is a transparently disingenuous — or else actually ignorant — rhetorical move.
Yes! There are very few Portland politicians that haven’t dabbled in bashing “cyclists” over the past 20 years. Oddly, many of those same politicians have not hesitated to pander to people who bike in small settings. It works for progressives and conservatives. Cutting a bike project’s throat and leaving it bleeding on the floor is a rite of passage for people who want to advance in local politics, both in elected positions and advocacy. This statement says more about Kanal’s ambitions than his principles or ideas.
“Yes! There are very few Portland politicians that haven’t dabbled in bashing “cyclists” over the past 20 years.”
Almost like all those politicians took the cyclists and alternative transportation folks votes for granted. For 20+ years. One day maybe those people will be ready to vote for someone regardless of party who actually would be beholden to the community’s continuing support to be elected to or stay in office.
I’ve explored a fairly large number of real trips in the past 6 months, and almost without exception, driving is fastest, transit is slowest, and biking falls about In the middle.
Biking is obviously the cheapest, transit is the most expensive, and driving falls somewhere in between (if you have access to car).
These were all real, practical trips for me, and may not reflect your situation.
How is transit the most expensive? It seems like that would only be the case if you were gifted a free car and also either did zero maintenance on it or that was also paid for by somebody else.
When we owned a Chevy Spark EV I did the math and driving to work was cheaper than the bus fare for an approximately 10 mile commute. That was an exceptionally cheap car to own due to the low lease rate but it is not surprising that for many cars the “marginal cost” of a trip can fall below the cost of bus fares especially if you are travelling with 1 or more other people.
“How is transit the most expensive?”
I already own my car. A transit trip from my home to, say NE Killingsworth, costs me $5.60. A car trip costs much less. A bike ride is (nearly) free.
Driving does incur a small maintenance and depreciation cost, but that, plus fuel, is much less than $5. It does not impact the cost of buying the car in the first place.
I chose a cheap, reliable, efficient car. If you owned something stupid like a Jeep, your evaluation might be different.
Just Empty Every Pocket.
And cheap, reliable cars tend to cost less for insurance and pretty much all costs. Depreciation isn’t as much a factor if one plans to keep the same car for as long as possible, using it to supplement transit and cycling (as you’ve mentioned)rather than using it as an outward manifestation of one’s body parts.
Transit maxes at $1200/year.
The average cost of full coverage insurance in Oregon in 2020 was $1030 (per a report by Farmers Insurance Group).
For 50% of the people with paid off cars that leaves only $170 for fuel and maintenance. And if my co-workers are typical, the cost of maintenance on a moderately high mileage car is a lot more than that.
You also absolutely have to amortize the original purchase cost of the car (less any money realized from selling it) over the total miles. To do otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
“amortize the original purchase cost of the car”
That’s what depreciation does!
Other fixed cost of owning a car do not factor in to my cost structure because I’m going to own a car regardless for reasons independent of travel around Portland.
If I drove, my commute would be 18miles each way. With vacation and holidays that’s around 8,500 miles per year. I have that commute because I have a below market rate apartment ($300-$400 below).
Earning a month pass each month on TriMet = $1200.
That’s $0.14/mile
Okay, let’s make this worse for TriMet: I only use it sometimes. A single trip replacing an 18mile car trip is $2.80 or $0.16/mile
Now,
Let’s assume that someone just gives me a new car with great mileage. A Ford Fusion Hybrid gets 41mpg city. 2024 average gas price in OR was $3.88.
That’s $.095/mile
Insurance: OR Average for minimum is $71/month. (quotes for a 58 year old maile with no accidents are actually higher on a 2015 Ford Focus – I figured a new Ford Fusion would be higher still and full coverage doubles that).
That’s $852/year, or $0.10/mile if I only commuted in it. I’d have to drive it over 14k miles to get the per mile cost of insurance down to $0.06.
But, if I only use it sometimes and bike or trimet others that cost goes *UP* on a per mile basis.
So, the car is still more expensive than TriMet on a per mile basis – before maintenaces ($1100/ 5years is average for a new Ford) and cost of vehicle (for those who don’t have a fairy godmother gift them a modern car).
Low mileage driven does improve things. The closest I could come to a per mile insurance quote had me near the $.06/mile mark (daily rate + 36 miles at the mile rate).
This is all before such considerations as: In over 10 years I have never seen a fare inspector between Beaverton and Goose Hollow in the morning (use that information as you will – I’m not saying I ride to Goose Hollow without paying then ride the bike …. I wouldn’t do that).
My per-mile gas costs are about $.10; my depreciation is about the same, and my maintenance is… heck let’s call it the same (though it’s probably lower). 30c per mile is my cost of driving. For a 5 mile trip (almost all my in-city trips are shorter than this), that’s $3 round-trip. I already have insurance, so my trip adds nothing to that cost.
If you add in the cost of my time for mickey-mousing around with TriMet, it increases the cost significantly, but even ignoring that, driving costs about half of taking the bus. If I take a passenger, it cuts the price in half again.
Your situation might be completely different. You may not own a car, or own an expensive, inefficient one; you may not pay bus fare, or get the geezer rate, or have a bus pass for whatever reason; you may take longer trips, or shorter ones; or you may have an EV that has lower costs. If your situation is anything like mine, you’ll come to a similar conclusion. If your situation is completely different, you may arrive at a different answer.
That said, I do think that my situation reflect that of a lot of Portlanders.
$0.1/mile depreciation is pretty low. Typical lifetime mileage is 100 kmi for a car, and the typical price of an auto is more than $0.1/mile x 100 kmi = $10,000, especially if you are paying somebody to borrow money for the purchase as many of the people clogging our roads do. I suppose you could tack trade-in value onto the $10K.
Typical values are irrelevant to me when they can vary so widely.
I just priced my car, and currently, it would be worth about 10K less than I paid for it if it had 100K miles on it. There’s no way of knowing what the future will bring, especially with the transition to EVs, but 10c per mile isn’t obviously wrong.
You can’t yadda yadda the insurance. The only thing driving more miles does is decrease the per mile cost of it.
The simple fact is the cost of a trip is:
Bike – Lowest
Transit – Middle
Car – most expensive
For speed it’s
Car – Fastest (usually)
Bike – middle
Transit – slowest (usually)
A bike, particularly with even a modest e-assist represents the single best time/money option for working class and lower SES people.
The usually are there because I can beat cars on certain trips or segments of trips. For instance the run to the store is faster on the bike because of the walk time from the car to the store entrance.
I sure can. I have the insurance. It’s a fixed cost which is already paid for. If my insurance costs $1000 per year, what is my incremental per-mile cost?
You can compute your costs your way, and get a faulty answer, but my methodology is sound.
If you are going to consider the sunk costs of the car when comparing the trips then you should include the sunk costs we all pay to subsidize transit which is about 10 times the fare on Trimet. That of course does not make any sense when considering how someone approaches the decision of what mode to use for a specific trip. I am a big supporter of transit, but the current fare structure in our city nudges people towards driving for many trips, just one more reason why we should consider replacing the fare with a monthly utility fee of around $10/household like Corvallis has done and remove the fare from the equation.
I agree with the caveat that cars seem cheap because the marginal cost of a trip is mainly the subsidized price of the fuel. A very modest fraction of the total amount we spend on private cars would afford pretty incredible transit.
At times when my commute was by either transit or bike, transit worked fine if I was on schedule but once late, only the bike would let me clock in on time. The transfer time lag is the weakest point.
I’m curious how transit rates the most expensive. Did this not consider car ownership, licensing, insurance? I’ve done some math and it’s something like $100 a month for my car, which get’s under 5k a year of use, to sit in front of my house during drier months.
most drivers do not pay for insurance by the mile so there is no marginal insurance cost, there is some depreciation cost associated with additional miles but if you lease there is no cost at all as long as you don’t exceed the maximum number of miles allowed by your lease, similarly license plates in Oregon are an all you can drive for 1 price so no marginal cost there either. These are certainly policy choices that if changed could nudge people out of cars instead of into them but currently everything is designed in a way that once you decide to have the car it is often the cheapest and fastest way to travel on any given trip.
For car owners, they assume the car is already bought and paid for, tires don’t wear out, parking is free, etc.
If you already have a monthly transit pass, guess what the incremental trip cost is going to be? Zero.
I do not have a monthly transit pass, so, to me, that doesn’t factor in to my cost evaluation. If I had one, transit would be the cheapest mode.
Though, even if free, I would still see transit as a mode of last resort because it is slow, unreliable, and I find it somewhat unpleasant on average (ie some trips are fine, some really suck).
When I’m comparing the cost to take the bus or drive for a particular trip, choosing to drive does not increase my insurance or the other fixed costs of car ownership, so they didn’t factor into my cost comparison.
I only consider fuel and mileage-based maintenance and depreciation.
You’re avoiding Chris I’s (salient) point that some people experience no marginal cost for transit. It’s the same argument you make with the modes reversed. It’s bogus in both directions but gets at an important dynamic in transportation choice.
Every generality has exceptions.
If you live at Gateway and work at Lloyd Center, transit is going to provide you the fastest commute, hands down. That does not invalidate the idea that transit is generally the slowest mode. There are plenty of people with a transit pass and no car, but they are dwarfed by the number of people with a car and no transit pass.
Everyone is making evaluations based on their personal needs, and we can see the result. Many people driving, some people on transit, and a few hearty souls riding bikes.
The point is that the per-trip marginal cost is not a good quantity to use to predict the behavior we’re discussing. If liability insurance costs increased by two orders of magnitude, a bunch of people who now drive would start riding the bus even though all marginal costs are the same. This confusion can lead to a subsequent confusion in our policy preferences. Yes, the per-trip cost of the car is small, but, if the fixed costs were high, people would switch. Looking at why people keep cars despite the cost illuminates why it is difficult to shift mode share. In the contemporary US there are a lot of things that are very difficult to do without a personal car. I think this is much more of a ‘driver’ of habitual car usage than the cost of transit. Once you take it as a law of nature that there will be a personal auto for your use, then your analysis applies — and this sets a very high bar for transit design, since, as you have pointed out, cars are fast and convenient.
This is exactly the problem. In today’s America, auto availability is a “law of nature”, as it has been for many decades.
The only thing I can see disrupting that is automation.
When you say parenthetically ‘if you have access to car’, I assume you mean you did not include purchase price and maintenance (including insurance) of the car in your analysis (but did include the cost of fuel). That significantly undercounts the cost of driving for infrequent drivers. I would get reimbursed more than the trimet fare for longer transit trips if I expensed them at work as car trips, so the cost is debatable, IMO.
“I assume you mean you did not include purchase price and maintenance (including insurance) of the car in your analysis (but did include the cost of fuel)”
Correct. I was considering the variable costs of driving, which, for my situation, at least, are quite low. I am an infrequent driver.
Your work probably pays you the IRS rate, which is quite high, and bears no relation to your actual costs.
You’re probably right about the source of the rate. It is related to (by the identity) the actual cost to my employer and hence relevant here.
It’s discouraging to see transit framed as in opposition to bicycling and walking, when in fact reducing or eliminating private motor vehicles would actually enable public transit buses to move through Portland faster. And Jonathan’s observation that bicycling is often faster than transit certainly proves true; I live within a block of two major bus lines, but for me to take transit to work would require more time each way than bicycling even if I made the connecting bus that runs so infrequently (every 40 to 60 minutes) that a missed connection would basically double the length of commuting time.
But there is another calculation Kanal is missing. I am healthier because I bicycle, to work, to run errands, and to get to recreational/social activities. My coworkers who “save” time by driving seem to struggle more with health issues; these are expensive, time consuming, and reduce their quality of life. So even if the bus stopped at my front door and went directly to my workplace, I would still think of bicycling as preferable, because my health is valuable and being healthy “saves time” in all sorts of ways. (I realize that bicycling = better health is a bit of a generalization, but the biologists I work with concur, as so all the health studies about how regular exercise improves short- medium- and long-term health.
“transit framed as in opposition to bicycling”
For me, it is. Speaking personally, I hate biking when there are buses around. Getting stuck behind one is super frustrating and exerting myself in the diesel exhaust plume is a major bummer.
That’s funny. I feel a lot better biking when busses are around. I trust the trimet drivers a lot more than all the amped-up cagers driving around like they are late for their wedding. I feel like bus and bike are birds of a feather, trying to fly through an atmosphere clogged with private and commercial vehicles that render the streetscape a dangerous place. Point taken about the diesel, though. Why can’t we electrify busses??
“Why can’t we electrify busses??”
TriMet promises that, by 2040, they’ll have electric buses. Of course, other cities have them today.
You’ll have to ask TriMet about their lack of urgency. I think it’s criminal.
Every day I curse the folly of the state legislators in granting an exemption to Rose City Transit in the 1950s from their obligations in maintaining the trolleybus network on cost saving grounds, only for them to turn around and dismantle the system overnight in 1958. If Portland had maintained trolleybus service, we’d have electric buses already with no real need to pay a premium on scarce, overly expensive, and unreliable BEBs.
TriMet insists that the capital costs of building and maintaining a catenary system for a trolleybus network isn’t worth it, but I think it’s silly to ignore a 100+ year old technology that works in tons of other places just because BEBs offer an easier but less reliable option. Modern trolleybuses with small batteries for limited off-wire service offer the best of both worlds. With a smaller battery, weight and wear on the road is decreased, and costs are lower but you aren’t solely reliant on the sometimes fickle trolleybus wires. And there’s no need for dedicated charging stations/infrastructure, since they can do that en route. If I could find the old King County Metro study about the benefits of them maintaining their trolleybus network vs. converting to diesel routes I would link it.
When TriMet studied bus electrification in 2018, they didn’t even mention trolleybuses, which I think is criminal. Sure, there’s only a handful of places in the US that have them, but if Dayton, Seattle, and San Francisco all think reinvesting in their trolleybus network makes sense surely they are worth studying in some depth.
Of course, hydrogen fuel cell tech is five to ten years away, like it has been for the past 50 years, so it makes sense to bet on that too (/s).
Cambridge, MA recently dismantled their trolley bus system, and replaced it with battery buses. I can’t find good info on why they did that, but I presume there was a good reason to incur the costs of transitioning from a system you consider great to one you consider unreliable.
The world is moving to battery powered vehicles, a trend that seems inevitable and unstoppable.
Tell that to Italy, Mexico, and China – all of who have opened trolleybus lines in the last 10 years. There are actual advantages to a trolleybus system, many of which are inherent to the fact that you don’t need to lug a two ton battery around.
A US city abandoning a trolleybus system is not evidence for it being a good idea. When have you known American transit operations to be in line with reality?
Battery electric buses face severe operational issues that cannot be waved away by future technology. We cannot just wait around for battery technology to maybe progress far enough. Dual operation trolleybuses are just BEBs with en route charging, we just need to pony up the modest sum required for the overhead catenary.
Ok, you’ve rejected my thoughts about why TriMet is ignoring your preferred technology… what’s your theory?
I mean I think agencies don’t implement trolleybuses because they view them as broadly anachronistic, and because they require a relatively high dollar amount invested up front. Why TriMet didn’t study them when our peer PNW cities (Seattle, Vancouver BC) both have them is beyond me, but I suppose it’s more of the anachronism side of things.
I hear tell that China is going big on “hybrid” trolleybus systems, with smaller batteries that recharge when connected to the catenary and are only needed for short segments where it’s hard to get the wiring in place for whatever reason. Such systems can have the buses running continuously—no need to be garaged for charging.
That’s generally how all trolleybus networks are trending from what I’ve seen. San Francisco is doing the same thing with their next fleet purchases. I feel like battery/trolley dual mode is the ideal situation operationally (plus it’s easier like you say)
You don’t have to sell me on the Seattle electric busses. I rode them frequently when I lived there and thought they were great. Anecdotally, an important point in their favor (that helped keep them around politically) is that they are compatible with the tunnels under downtown in contrast to ICE busses. I would love Portland to have an underground transit system downtown, but I’m not optimistic I will ever see one.
The old bus tunnel definitely played a role in Seattle. But it’s also at least partially to do with hills (where trolleybuses really shine), and fixed-route funding from the FTA (I did find that KCM study) making the lifecycle costs of trolleybuses about 25% lower than those of diesel-hybrid. Of course, they already have the wires, so that plays a big role. Based on the fact that it’s costing Dayton ~$50M to fully rebuild their trolleybus network to modern standards (5 lines I think), I feel like we could do a similar project here for our 18 frequent service lines for maybe like $300M? Probably more than that to be honest, but it’s a ballpark. Obviously that’s a lot, but with 25% lower lifecycle costs for buses, it may be worth it on those grounds alone.
Thanks for the link to the King Co. report. Interesting!
I hear you, very well put. With people like Kanal and Prozanski who have great potential as allies maybe we could get out front of the discussion by offering them model legislation instead of just opposing their latest half-formed thought. I can absolutely understand a parent reacting to a nuisance, or a perceived danger to their child, with a ban on the offenders.
I’ll be a bike partisan all my life, and a rider for most of it. I don’t really expect a biking nirvana to manifest itself. It seems more likely that the near future of biking infrastructure holds a succession of civic half measures and activists’ forlorn hopes. I’ll remain a bemused spectator, from the saddle, of what last century’s DOT thinks is fit for bikes.
In alignment with Kanal I’d like to see the City of Portland put the weight of its planning power and taxing authority behind making the way straight and smooth for transit operation. Properly understood, transit has the capability to carry people of all ages and abilities quickly over a wide area in vehicles that are optimally quiet and efficient. A complete transit network (as opposed to what we have) is not in opposition to biking, it’s actually complementary.
The transit option costs more than capable bikeways but sometimes a grandiose plan can more be more politically palatable than one that is merely sane and reasonable.
Also, biking is more fun than other modes.
Right on, Micah! That’s what this reductive conversation is missing.
I would ride a bike even if it were way slower than transit.
It might be worth noting some of the dollar values tied to these things. Looking online it appears that TriMet has a budget for FY 2025 of 1.84 billion dollars, I don’t think we’d particularly notice the difference in Trimet travel times if the city moved all the money they were planning on spending on cycling over to Trimet, we just aren’t actually spending much on cycling infrastructure compared to other modes. It is mostly paint, flexposts, and hanging up signs that say an existing street is a “neighborhood greenway”.
I agree. A lot of what PBOT could be doing to help transit use and speed are relatively “cheap” policy changes and adjustments to lane striping rather than new construction, such as prioritizing bus lanes rather than car parking, reconfiguring 82nd to prioritize transit and walking while they are rebuilding it anyway, signal prioritization, and making pedestrian crossings safer and easier – stuff that incidentally will likely help bicycling too – but focused more on public transit instead of “bike lanes”, at least for public consumption and PR.
This article touches upon something largely ignored – investments in transit are competing for investments in bike infrastructure. Yes, they are both competing with investments in motor vehicle transportation, but that does not mean they are not competing with each other. And in many ways they function together. What all three have in common is that they depend upon free federal money which in turn depends upon oil. I believe that if you took federal funding away, it would be very clear that bicycle infrastructure is a better investment than transit, and both are way better than investing in motor vehicle transportation system. Most active transportation activists look to the feds as a salvation. I view them as a curse.
It is hardly “free”. That is our, and others, tax money. There’s nothing “free” from the government except lies and statistics.
Very good insights, and questions. Good warning about the curse of feds and their dollars and obedience that comes with it. I would trust that in some city layouts cycling could be a better investment, but that lacks context. – Not everyone can hop on a bike option, everyone can take transit. – And some might say that the long transit trip time excludes them from using that method. But if we are talking about being able to measure the greater number of car trips removed per dollar spent on bikes or transit, I would have to see that data and know a city where that is true, and go there.
Let’s assume this this unicorn city existed, where bike project budgets got more cars off the road than transit project budgets. I really doubt most cities have the hills, river, weather and other factors that make the unicorn city have that option.
I personally view the federal funding as a neutral factor – the value of federal funding relative to everything else has been falling for decades – and most funding these days is actually from states and local sources. Federal funding tends to be released very slowly – there was an earlier article on BP that only about 20% of Congressional highway funding during the Biden administration has actually been given out – and this was about the same rate as for all previous administrations too, including Trump 1 and Bush.
Federal roadway design policy, on the other hand, I view as “progressive” relative to many states and localities, Republican ones as well as many Democratic ones (though a few states like Oregon and Virginia are even more progressive), pushing for roundabouts, complete streets, and Safe Routes 2 Schools. It’s amazing how conservative small communities even in Oregon are about infrastructure design, and often state DOTs and the Feds find themselves having to push for sidewalks and safe crossings in rural backwater areas.
There is far more Federal funding for transit than bicycling (a crying shame really), but both are small potatoes compared to car infrastructure funding, alas.
Ouch. BikeLoud sent out questionnaires to candidates during the election, and somehow did not get responses back from Councilor Kanal, even though he and his Chief of Staff did attend the BikeLoud candidate rides. That’s unfortunate because I think that questionnaire gave candidates an opportunity to do their homework before they were in positions of power.
We probably don’t need to debate the functioning or prioritization of transit at this time, but it would be great if someone helped tutor Councilor Kanal on this.
Not everyone is an expert on urban transportation issues, and there are some prominent transportation advocates in Portland who get attention, and are all in on transit, even though they themselves ride bikes. It can be hard to listen through the noise.
People advocating for transit often seem to forget that pretty much every transit ride starts and ends with walking. People won’t ride transit if they can’t walk safety to or from it.
Or how about waiting for the bus? I have the fortune (sarcasm of course) of standing at a bus stop that has no bus shelter, no trees, and no buildings nearby. It was wonderful standing at it this morning, in the wind and rain, waiting for the bus. My outside was thoroughly soaked.
I consider myself fortunate as I do have a complete rainproof outfit, so I stayed dry. But I see so many riding the bus with just a hoodie that doesn’t keep the rain off and get quite wet. What about them Trimet?
If you were on your bike you would still be out in the weather.
That’s one reason people like their cars. They’re warm and dry in winter, and cool in summer.
Thankfully he’s not on the transportation committee. Seems like he should hear from his constituents with a lot of the good arguments being made here.
Yes, and as Lisa has pointed out, his constituents both in his district and citywide (since he represents both) should go talk with him, including, not to put too fine a point on it, yourself.
After biking around Portland for 20 years, I am still surprised by how fast it is to get places on a bike. And, how driving is usually not much faster, and many times slower than expected. Especially when accounting for “door to door” time.
My general rule of thumb is 5-6 miles in 20-25 minutes. This radius covers a large area of Portland. Many of the places that feel far away, are usually not as far as I think, but seem far because they are surrounded by asphalt hell-scapes and car sewers.
For example, I thought Delta Park must have been 10 miles away and take forever to bike there, but it turns out it was closer than many places that I think of as being really close.
I would urge all of our councilors to use math, when it is applicable. People will be impressed.
I *hate* this kind of rhetoric! No one ever, ever questions devoting 95% of our transportation infrastructure to cars and trucks, yet bikes are always being played off some other constituency (transit, scooters, homeless people, you name it).
Clearly we need space for ALL modes. And that’s that. [mic drop]
Portland will benefit from both better transit and bike infrastructure. Period.
As long as TriMet keeps mismanaging their operations it never will be better.
An example, before Christmas a window in a bus shelter at Parkrose TC was broken. As of this morning it still hasn’t been fixed and there’s still pieces of broken glass on the ground. With that amount of incompetence over what should be a simple and routine task, how can we ever hope to have a functional transit system?
I think that there’s a widespread gap between the level of investment people think bikes get and the amount bikes actually get. I know the greenway buildout wasn’t free, but those projects were all pretty minimal compared to the cost of rebuilding a road like 82nd.
I ride the bus a lot and I bike a lot, but I’ll echo what most others are saying here: I often bike specifically because it’s faster than the bus. And it’s not just long crosstown trips. I can bike from my apartment to PSU in 10 minutes at full speed, the bus is more like 20 minutes without any delays (partly because neither of my two local routes serve the southern portion of downtown, necessitating a transfer or 10 minute walk). I obviously live close in, so this is a marginal point but even in the situations where transit is most convenient and competitive, I mostly take it so I can write comments here or do some reading rather than pedal my bike
Councilor Kanal is 100% correct to ask us all to reflect, be honest, and act for change. I have the data and the stories. I have the qualitative numbers, and the qualitative lived experience as a 12 year bike commuter and Trimet customer. I’ve asked Jonathan to let me speak, but he does not reply. He enjoys the profit of his white perspective journalism, like the one above. This is a form of Tech white silence, funded by affluent Tech people like Mike Perham.
I’m going to pull cycling rank on anyone without 2+ years of all year, long distance commute experience. ( this long distance is what Kanal was targeting, 9+ miles one way to work. ) That’s the context here. Car commute trips that go more than 9 miles are currently , nearly impossible for the average person to convert to a bike commute. Transit trips are nearly double the car commute time.
We should be reflecting with Kanal? Who of you has biked cross town the last 12 years? I do 10 miles one way to work, and back; that’s 100 miles a week. 30,000 commute miles, I go through the tires and brakes to prove it. Talk to the shops. I’m a cat 2 racer and my Ebike commute is 33 minutes, car commute 25 min in the morning and 44min in the evening, often better. The transit commute is 60-70, and often longer and never, ever less than 60 minutes. There is no way in hell I could use transit, and there is no way in hell anyone but the one percent could do my commute and not end up in hospital. We are 30 years away from a city that could make that commute safe.
Portland transit needs a full overhaul now , and that will get cars off the road, and that will trickle down to cyclists like me. It will shorten that 30 year bike plan to 15, but transit must come first. And don’t get upset, bikes are still along for the full ride, just not in the front of the agenda.
Our transit routes are so inefficient we could have DOGE teens or monkeys randomly draw better routes and we might be better off with 50% of those plans. Our trip times are horrible. I documented to PBOT it took 7 minutes to cross the Moda transit center on foot to exit the 35 and walk to the yellow line. Only after endless email battles did the signals get changed to put more burden on cars, and less time after hitting a beg button.
Before Jim Howell passed away he targeted the horrible design of the Hollwood Transit center rebuild. RIP. He was a transit engineer and halted the Mt Hood Freeway and so many other freeway expansions with large and cooperative groups. The key thing is that back then groups had a vision and less ego, now we have no vision from the Street Trust, Oregon Walks and Bike Loud, We have lots of ego that will marginalize anyone who ask questions like Kanal. The best evidence of this is the car centric SW Barbur Max proposal voters killed (thank goodness. ) Had transit thought leaders packed up their ego we could have had something like the AORTA proposed Max Purple line. We could still have it soon if people worked together.
I grew up in Chicago and took transit 4 years to high school cross town and one year to UIC as well. I rail commuted SF to San Mateo on Caltrain for years. I lived in SF 10 years. I bet my bike and transist work commute miles are higher than anyone on the top 10 awards for flooding us with the most comments. Even mr Knuckles. All those transit systems I used are so superior because their routes are laid out much better.
I have spent many summers in NYC on their transit. Portland transit is about as good as Houston’s transit in the 90’s, and yes I worked there, and both Houston and Portland Transit do not support long commutes.
I would say most people who have lived outside the Portland bubble would agree Portland need to reflect long and deep on our lack of vision and unrealistic expectations that bikes can meet the climate reduction goals that bike advocates parade around. And most people outside the bubble know Portland is all talk and very little action.
The comments here reflect the never ending white bike egos and blindness that decayed the BTA into just 1.5 staff. ( Yes you Rob Sadowsky and Sarah Iannarone) The bike bus thought leaders like PPS Coach Sam Balto post racist Tweets that Black Civil rights leaders “ratF’ed” Sarah. I know Sarah would have won as mayor if you worked on coalition and stopped kissing up to cops. And Balto used the full F word. . Now we have another bike Bus Leader posting social media that he hopes birds cause plain crashes, and the bro thinks he can have a chance at school board. There are so many examples of how the bike community is unable to work outside their bubble and build a robust transit system that does not have bikes at the front of the agenda.
Build with me and Kanal. Did you donate to him? I did. And for this exact reason.
Peace! Joe
This somewhat reflects my experiences with mix-mode (bike+MAX) commutes from St. Johns to Hillsboro. I made that commute two days each week for about nine years before COVID changed my commute habits. It was a solid three hours of cycling when I rode the full way morning and evening, four when I took Trimet through the tunnel. If I just rode Trimet alone it was four-plus an unpredictably variable amount of wait time between trains and buses (on average about four-and-a-half hours round trip). The worst was a four-hour trip home when Trimet was having trouble staffing the trains a few years ago. I gave up. Average round trips by car for my trip take about 75 minutes. If we want transit to attract the SOV folks, it needs to get a lot faster.
There’s no one stopping you, or anyone, irrespective of their skin color to start a forum for discussion such as this.
I definitely don’t agree with what is always said here, but I wouldn’t stoop so low to claim it had to do with the owner’s skin color. Remember, not every interaction on this planet involves the skin color of the participants.
That’s a new one for me. Isn’t the whole point of “lived experience” that it’s not about the quality of the experience – just that it’s YOUR experience??
Can you provide specific examples and how you would rationalize TriMet routes? I have plenty of small gripes with a lot of bus routes, but I feel like inefficient routes is really not the primary issue facing our transit network. I think we need vastly improved local bus service in Portland, but that’s a funding/resources/priorities issue more than a route efficiency one.
And comparing transit in Portland to San Francisco, New York and Chicago is a bit ridiculous. They are very different places. The least dense parts of San Francisco are as dense as the densest parts of Portland, and Chicago is sui generis for anything involving railroads (and by extension rail transit). And New York is sui generis for all things American city. It’s nonsensical to think that we will have world-class public transit in a place where prevailing population densities are like 5,000 people/square mile. Portland’s pre-Covid transit ridership strength revolved heavily around regional land use policy that centered office jobs in downtown Portland. So yes, we could use an overhaul but there are no quick and easy solutions. I think TriMet’s current plans have many flaws that are worth critiquing, but they are broadly reflective of the changes that I think we need in spirit.
This is ahistoric and frankly absurd. Anti-freeway activism in the 1970s had plenty of ego and some truly despicable people came to power as a result of that (like the future mayor of Portland who I will not name, but you know the one and what he did). What they did have that we don’t was broad social mandate for change, at least partly as a result of the 70s oil crisis (alongside air pollution and community destruction). There is no comparable, tangible threat to organize around. Yes, there’s climate change but that’s not threatening in the same way. We aren’t short on potential leaders for change, we are short on community consensus that a change is actually needed.
The inefficient route pathways are just one of many factors contributing to the dysfunction of Portland transit…. Somewhere in this thread there was an excellent comment about low-cost Transit fixes including removing parking from several key arteries and making uninterrupted bus lanes that cross town and provide frequent Transit at all hours.
So many tools such as transponders to give a bus the green. Division has this between 12th and 82nd for the green line. Go observe how the lights at ladds and division and 20th give a fast track to the FX busses .
I forgot to post this very affordable and cost effective proposal
https://youtu.be/6LEbnK9md6U?si=_ZdgJ6S_sLzClmSx
I just don’t think inefficient route pathways are an appreciable problem for Portland transit (outside of frustrating historical anachronisms like the 72 going down Alberta in absence of an Alberta-Downtown route, or things inherent to the wacky Portland street grid)
Yes, we definitely should do some small-scale projects to improve bus service. Stop consolidation and an aggressive bus lane policy would be great. Transit signal priority is more expensive than those, but I agree it’s needed in plenty of spots. I’d rather start with the essentially free options like parking removal and stop consolidation.
I think the AORTA Purple line proposal is cool, though I do question the choice to run over the UPRR tracks (based mostly on proximity to places people go and the ability to fit under the existing bridge viaducts)
I’m so over politicians that are framing transit in opposition to cycling. Besides being uninformed rhetoric, the absolutist logic simply doesn’t jive with how many Portlanders utilize multiple commuting modes in their lives. Roughly half of the people I work with at a small business in the Central Eastside don’t use an exclusive way of getting to work every day. Some days people ride a bike or scooter, other days they may drive a vehicle and still others they may take TriMet.
For me personally, in spite of living two blocks from a TriMet line that drops me off a block from where I work, the reality is riding my e-bike to work during rush hour is always the quickest way to get the 6.8 miles to work. It usually beats a bus ride by about 10 minutes and a vehicle by 5.
I think most cyclists don’t realize that 95% of the public can’t hop on a bike or evoke to ditch their car commute… But most people, given a bus trip that is faster than a car, would gladly not commute by car. Cycling is not the silver bullet most cyclists claim it to be.
The combination of bikes + transit as a mode unto itself is one that is often overlooked. TriMet is a greatly enhanced service if you have a bike you can load on board. It might seem obvious to some people, but I’ve lost count of how many people only put two and two together after I discussed the concept of combining modes with them. Like everything in this country, we’re conditioned to think in “either/or” binaries.
It doesn’t have to be ‘Hey, bike this entire way’ – I get it, biking is significantly less appealing as a standalone mode in the outer parts of Portland, but combine it with reliable and frequent transit and it becomes much more viable. More FX lines will help with this, given the greatly increased space to bring a bike on board.
I never plan a trip that includes bike+bus and only put my bike on the bus in emergencies.
The chances are too high that the rack will be full and TriMet headways are way too long.
Bike+MAX is my usual combo.
Plus, the MAX allows my trike (I have a hanger on the boom so it hangs in less space than an upright).
Great point, John. I have a dream of a transit system with stops spaced two miles apart. The trains and buses have just a couple of seats but huge doors so everyone can get a bike on board. The bus routes are like spokes on a cheap bicycle wheel (there are a lot of them), and they run every 15 minutes all day.
In this system, no one needs a car since you can always bike one mile (or less) to a stop where a bus will meet you minutes later and take you quickly to a point where you can bike to your next destination or transfer to another bus (yes – I know the downsides of hub-and-spoke systems but we have one now and it’s a BAD and SLOW system).
Who’s with me here??
“Who’s with me here??”
Not me. Why would this be better than a system of small vehicles with just a couple of seats that could take you door-to-door on demand? With that we could skip all the buses and eliminate the coordination problem.
Because it’s far more efficient and faster to get the passengers to line up along a straight road than it is to wind around neighborhoods with door-to-door service. A cab service is fast if it’s just you, but add three or more people to it and you will be significantly slowed down by deviations to get them to their door.
The service you are describing both doesn’t exist and likely never will. If automated pod type things ever take off, they will reinvent the fixed route bus if they ever try to make it efficient for more than a few people riding at once. Now sure, an automated taxi fleet wouldn’t be subject to these pressures, but based on what I’ve seen for Waymo fares versus Uber fares, there are no cost savings at the current level of technology so we have hardly arrived anywhere near a mass transit solution – even before we get in to the various ethical and legal issues that automated cars face.
“The service you are describing both doesn’t exist and likely never will.“
https://dor.wa.gov/education/industry-guides/auto-dealers/ride-sharing-vehicles-car-or-van-pools
I don’t know about down there, but up here we have something very similar to what Watts is (and has been for what seems like a long time) describing. The van/car pool vehicles are very popular at my work and all kinds of varied political persuasion find them handy and essential to their ability to get to and from work. I realize that this is mainly geared towards commuting, but it subtracts a lot of cars from the road and provides a way for people without a car or access to transit the ability to get to work.
People have been trying to make vanpools work as serious mass transit for like 60 years. They are fine for commuting, but that’s about it from what I’ve read.
Tell that to Lima, Peru (and probably a hundred other cities that rely on van and microbus transit).
The truth is that none of the established transit systems work all that well for a city like Portland.
Ah good call out, I forgot about the pesero. I don’t know if the economic conditions of any US city (outside Puerto Rico) are conducive for Latin American style minibuses based mostly on car ownership rates and labor costs. Though I guess the New Jersey jitneys do exist for a cheaper ride into NYC, I feel like that is getting out of vanpool/pesero and into the quasi fixed route world
You made an overly strong statement that something had never and will never exist. When given a concrete, real world example you attack it by saying it’s only good for commuting and given your track record of incorrect authoritative statements I suspect there are examples to disprove your statement. Also, even if all it’s good for is reducing congestion during commuting hours, isn’t that a good thing?
Maybe get out into the world and see how it works rather than basing your authority only on things you’ve read of other people/cities doing?
I think vanpools are good when they work, I just am not convinced it’s coming to replace fixed route buses on productive routes. It’s great when they are sold as practical solutions for commuters, less great when they are sold a solution to a fixed route which is too productive to run with vans
And I do try to travel to see the world, but it’s much cheaper to read a book than buy a plane ticket
“on productive routes” is a significant modifier; Some routes get a lot of ridership, many do not. The routes that are working well should continue to work well; less popular routes create an opening for different solutions because providing conventional bus service is disproportionately expensive.
You are not kidding about reading versus plane tickets! Serious question, but have you ever thought about Direct Commissioning or going through Officer Candidate School for the Air Force or even Space Force? You are clearly a thorough thinker, organized, fit and communicate well with others. It’d be a great chance to travel all over the world and with the Air Force you’d actually go to nice places as well. Also, as an Officer you’d be in a position to directly influence young and old (relatively anyway) on the benefits of active/alternate transportation.
Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out for you and I won’t bring it up again.
Thanks for the thought! I’m not really interested in being involved in the military in any capacity (partly political, partly because I don’t do well in rigid hierarchies). But appreciate the kind words
It may be more efficient for the provider if passengers line up along the road, but significantly less efficient from the passenger’s viewpoint.
Then use 3 cabs, and parallelize the service.
The service I describe exists today, and you’ve probably used it in the form of Uber or Lyft. It’s currently a fair bit more expensive than a bus (though dramatically cheaper than WES!)
My point here is that the service described in Fred’s post offers significant disadvantages over what’s currently available. Buses and trains work because the driver/passenger ratio can be quite low, keeping labor costs (sort of) manageable. They offer few other advantages (and many disadvantages) compared to an electric Uber.
We simply don’t know yet what the economics of autonomous taxis will be. They’ll likely be cheaper than human driven ones (or they won’t exist), but beyond that it’s really too early to tell. I believe they’ll be cheap enough to siphon off a significant number of today’s transit riders, but that’s just speculation.
Not necessarily, since the “line-haul” portion of the route is also much faster this way. I’d prefer to walk 5 minutes to the stop rather than sit on a bus making 5 minutes of deviations on side streets to pick up passengers.
Great, I love it when my mass transit option requires a vehicle for every person. That’s a great way to save on capital costs (/s if that wasn’t obvious).
Yes, and it always will be more expensive than a bus for the reasons I outlined above. And WES might cost TriMet $100/ride to operate, but they only charge $2.85. Getting everyone on WES an Uber to/from their stop probably may be cheaper when its all said and done, but it would definitely be slower.
In the long term, it’s possible that an autonomous taxi will be less expensive to operate than a human driver. Currently, it costs a consumer about $10 to Uber from my apartment to City Hall. A ride on the 14 gets you 95% of the way there, with just a short walk to and from the stops. It costs TriMet something like $4.50 per ride on average on the 14 (though a trip that short is probably less). I have no idea how much of that $10 is labor costs for Uber, and I don’t know how much labor an autonomous taxi service may still require. I do think it’s unlikely for it to be significantly more efficient than a human driver, based on the sheer amount of technology required to do autonomous stuff as of now. Those LIDARs can’t be cheap.
They aren’t, but then they’re not really being mass produced.
Automation may not pan out. In that case, the tech companies are out a bunch of money, but we’re no worse off than we are today.
But if it does, it will be cheaper than a human driver (because that’s one of the criteria for “panning out”). And it seems likely that the more we do it, the better we’ll get at it, and the cheaper it will become. Transit, on the other hand, will continue to become more and more expensive to operate (unless it too is automated).
Play the tape forward 10 or 20 years into the future. Do you see catenary-bus service replacing private cars, or most Portlanders riding bikes everywhere? If not, what do you see?
I very strongly disagree that we will be no worse off. Lots of hype for automated cars gives political reasoning for transit cuts, which lead to falling ridership and then further cuts. Not to mention the opportunity cost for that funding.
I am of the opinion that absent a serious crisis involving extremely high oil prices, basically nothing will change travel patterns to the extent we all desire.
No one will cut transit because of the possibility that automated vehicles will materialize in the future.
And probably not even that; transitioning to EVs will minimize that threat, and if oil prices start to rise, EV adoption will increase accordingly.
So, if you agree with my assessment of the future, why not welcome the one thing that has the potential to disrupt a great many of the otherwise intractable urban problems of the past 50 years?
I’m going to comment on this part as well. You wouldn’t get them an Uber to and from a transit stop, you get them one to and from their ultimate origin and destination. That would probably be faster if you include the time to get to and from the station on either end, and any buffer time required to ensure you don’t miss the train.
So better and cheaper (and probably faster)… and if you used EVs, probably more environmentally friendly than a heavy diesel train chugging back and forth.
Why are we spending our money on WES?
The WES is a wacky bit of the transit ecosystem, and a fair part of the ridership is on intercity trips (especially to Salem). Ubering between stations would be less expensive if a quarter of riders are heading all the way to Salem.
Eh, I don’t see a convincing argument that the WES is bad on environmental grounds. DMUs are pretty efficient and adding a few hundred rush hour trips to 217 would incur some amount of traffic impact. On cost, sure, it’s basically always on the chopping block based on that. It was a bad project for TriMet to prioritize, and it should be extended to Salem and offloaded to ODOT
I’m not making that argument, but I am suggesting the possibility that a fleet of electric vehicles may emit less CO2 and particulates than a heavy rail diesel train.
The continued willingness of TriMet to pay $100 per person to operate WES makes it harder for me to take their other budget complaints seriously.
As someone who thinks abandoning service on WES isn’t the worst idea in the world (though I do not support it), I think they probably don’t consider abandoning it for political, image, and potentially funding/legal reasons. On the political and image route, it would look bad and probably frustrate the cities/areas that do have the service. On the funding/legal front, it’s common for FTA funded projects to have some longer term commitment to provide service (or some minimum service requirements over some set amount of time). TriMet is pretty risk averse, so I’d imagine that both of those factors play a role, no matter how much money it loses.
And ironically the easiest way to improve per passenger costs might be to run more service. I think that number is inclusive of maintenance, and since we only have one weird suburb to suburb DMU service, the cost of maintaining the fleet is just on the 12 daily trip WES. Running something like hourly service all day would be only a handful more in operating labor, but would (hopefully) garner more ridership and reduce that. Is that a good use of resources? I’d say probably not, but that’s why I think it should be extended to Salem and run by ODOT (with a distance based fare)
Small, light, 2 passenger autonomous electric vehicles (ALEV’s) operating in operating in lanes designed for them (narrow, barring standard motor vehicles) might just work out.
I’d want them to use low range capacitors and automatically find a charging station between trips (inductive charging pads?).
I have power tools that use ultra fast charging capacitors instead of LION cells and I just swap them back and forth during long projects. Way more effective use of raw materials than current, huge, EV batteries).
Get them under 1,000 lbs dry weight and we might just have something – way less damage to roads, less space occupied traveling/idling and relatively low power consumption compared to anything but a ULV (ultra light vehicle – think <100lbs dry weight)
“In this system, no one needs a car since you can always bike one mile (or less) to a stop“
I guess people who physically can’t bicycle Should just stay home and pay the extra taxes for their delivered items? Or should they just be euthanized and save the young and able the bother of their existence?
Stops 2 miles apart are way too far apart. Still, the general idea of having good enough transit so people (of all ages and capabilities) can live car-less is sound.
I strongly second this. My partner works in Hillsboro off of TV Highway and I’ve had to pick her up from work a few times. I can get to her office in ~45 minutes on a bike + the blue line, while it’s closer to 90 minutes on transit alone. I also used to commute from SE to Tigard, and my bike + bus time was ~40 minutes compared to the 75 minutes on transit alone.
I will say that FX lines aren’t strictly necessary for improving bike capacity on the buses. King County Metro has front bike racks which hold three bikes, and we could theoretically buy articulated buses for (some) normal routes with no changes. The 14 and 12 come to mind as higher ridership routes that could probably be done in an articulated bus with no other major changes.
“King County Metro has front bike racks which hold three bikes”
So does every TriMet bus.
TriMet bus bike racks only hold 2 bikes and the FX buses only have two interior racks.
You are right! I thought we had upgraded years ago, I guess we didn’t.
I have only ever seen bike racks on TriMet buses that hold two bikes
There are evidently a couple of places where a three inch difference in turning radius is a make-or-break for the route (the triple racks are surprising compact).
Either that, or TriMet hates bikes.
John, I agree with you. Out here in north central North Carolina every city has their usual public transit service (some better than others), but we also have Amtrak service (5 trains/day each way between Charlotte and Raleigh, bikes carried for free) as well as a regional inter-city public bus service called the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation (PART) which connects many communities that don’t have train service to those that do, as well as various hospitals and universities, all for $2.50 per ticket, each bus equipped with the usual bike rack – I’ve used the PART bus to connect from Greensboro to Winston-Salem and to Chapel Hill, as neither community has train service.
There’s an awful lot that bugs me about Councilor Kanal. In this case, it’s his combination of smug certainty he is right and his ignorance of how local government works that he routinely demonstrates in Council meetings.
Take it up with TriMet, Kanal, and leave bikes alone.
Keep your eye on this guy.
On a 7-speed town bike I can ride from Columbia and 5th downtown to the Main St. stop in Milwauikie at the same speed as the Orange line at 4am (so nothing slowing that train down).
This is not including time waiting for a train which adds 5-10 minutes to any transit trip without transfers.
Once you have to transfer add 10 or more minutes to the trip as well.
If you have to go out into SE from CTC transit center, add way more. TriMet does *not* schedule trains and buses to connect in an efficient manner. I have an injury that has made me transit dependent these last few weeks, and I have a 30minute wait time at CTC because trying to get rid of it means missing a once an hour bus by about 30seconds.
For those who are willing to do it, biking provides cheaper, faster travel over distances up to 10 miles than transit. (that bike has a lifetime cost of approx $1000 over 6 years and 12,000 miles)
Good. It’s long overdue that the conversation shift to speed and convenience instead of “What’s good for the (insert cause here).”
If transit was faster, people would choose transit. If biking was faster, people would choose biking. For Jonathan’s hypothetical trip from Peninsula Park to PCC, the drive is only 20 minutes. Assume 45 for 4 pm on a Thursday.
Will transit ever compete with that? Depending on how imaginative we are, it could. But biking… won’t. Ever. And spending 2 hours a day commuting – on a bike, on a bus or in a car – is nobody’s idea of a good time.
So if we want to get people out of cars in our urban area that stretches 40 miles end-to-end, or in our city that is roughly 15 miles wide, we need to get them into something else fast and convenient. That’s never going to be a bicycle beyond a 3-or-so mile radius.
Actually, I think biking two hours a day is a LOT of people’s idea of a good time. Healthy. Inexpensive. Enjoyable…
Strange “LOT” = 5% (approximate ridership) hmmm that’s quite the new definition for a LOT.
Uhhh.. reality check. Even if cycling commutes became faster or equal to cars very few would make the switch to cycling, it’s just too deadly and wer and cold.. I can tolerate the wet, cold, deadly designs and deadly drivers , but I’m an extremely skilled cat 2 racer.
But as evidence in Chicago NYC shows , people will pick transit when the trip time is close enough to a car trip. That’s the point of city leadership.
Bike commute peeps tend to be exaggerating the potential outcomes if we build an Amsterdam network in an American city.. You can’t change a generation of people and their abilities in the same way you could spend a lot and make Portland Amsterdam..
I feel like this is the worst part of this quote to me. If Kanal is against having bikes on major roads because of the “safety risks”, the issue is that cars kill people not that bikes might exist. Whenever the Sandy project begins, there will be a political fight surrounding bikes vs. transit, just like there was on Hawthorne. I ride the 14 a lot and feel very strongly that the new sections of Hawthorne did little, if anything, to improve the transit experience. I’ve had more buses than I can count delayed by cars passing the bus in the turn lane, or cars refusing to yield when the bus is in a stop that pulls out of the roadway. Does anyone seriously believe that the bike lanes on Foster make the 14 slower?
I chock this up to a design which favors cars and parking first, and leaves transit to fight for scraps with bikes and pedestrians. On Sandy, the roadway is generally wider than on Hawthorne. There is room for a median running busway, bike lanes, and two travel lanes wide enough for trucks on most of the road. Why can’t TriMet, PBOT, et al. design a center running busway ala Eugene where constricted sections involve a “single track” section for buses? It’s not like we would ever run buses frequently enough to schedule around that anyways.
But I digress. Kanal’s framing that bikes get in the way of high-quality transit is delusional. Cars get in the way of high quality transit. There are no places in Portland where bike traffic meaningfully delays buses. There are countless where cars do. Either/or is not a good way to consider bikes and transit, they both need to be prioritized over cars. Every single road in the city of Portland is wide enough for buses and bikes to peacefully coexist, but very few are if you commit to not altering car travel patterns at all.
Sandy Boulevard is a huge opportunity for a diagonal bike route that mixes well with transit while having minimal impact on actual car throughout. Motor vehicle drivers in the current design may reach 35 or 40 mph top speed but that runs up against light timing that brings them to a full stop.
Unfortunately we’re probably going to get a design that puts the priority on two lanes for cars + parking on a route that parallels a 6 lane freeway.
Hollywood is a fascinating district. It’s interspersed with some wonderful businesses and amenities as well as lease signs and empty storefronts. It can feel vital, but still underwhelming. There’s the potential to be a fantastic, vibrant spot, but there’s a lingering, simmering sense of atrophy . How can a neighborhood business district with the popular Hollywood Theatre (or pick your favorite spot) feel like it’s immersed in a malaise?
And it seems you could argue that it feels like this because of the district’s relationship with Sandy Boulevard. It’s a cut through, both physically and metaphorically. A transit redesign of Sandy, especially between 39th and 57th, could be transformative. I don’t have any specifics. I hope Kanal and co do.
Sandy is overrated, I lived off Sandy for 3 years. It has limited potential for a cyclist network. It’s not like the potential of Market street in SF or many of the diagonals in Chicago. The Portland Greenway Network plan here in Portland has so much potential but it’s barely implemented.
28th avenue in southeast has so much potential but the luddites in our local transportation department try to push bikes to the margin on 30th or whatever route they made that I never take.
What’s wrong with riding on 28th?
If you aren’t bold and fearless (or are no longer), riding in traffic can be rather intimidating.
“Riding in traffic” covers a whole range of scenarios, from riding on Sandy, where you are mixing with potentially high speed vehicles, to NE Glisssn, where there are high speed vehicles about, but you have a dedicated lane, to streets like 28th, where traffic is slow and bikes take the lane, to greenways and other back streets where speeds are low and you negotiate every interaction to some degree.
You probably do need to be bold and fearless to ride on Sandy, but you can’t really ride anywhere at all if greenways are too much.
I’m not sure what the “luddites in the traffic department” should have done to 28th besides put the bike route there. Had they done that, riding on the street would have been exactly the same as it is today.
Sandy is also a rare instance of a major road already designated as a Major City Bikeway in the TSP, so if we don’t leverage that to get real bike infrastructure, we never will. Granted, the Major City Bikeway TSP designation is completely toothless on closer inspection (with a pointless carveout for integration with existing modes that no other mode forces upon itself), but the point stands.
Exactly blumdrew. Yeah, that quote is pretty awful/transparent. The “common sense” often associated with commercial streets is that they are inherently dangerous and other modes should be kept safely away. This runs pretty counter to what makes a livable city, i.e., making walking and biking safe and convenient on commercial streets (where people most often begin/end their trips). I also think this has been PBOT’s politically safe strategy for a long time, although they are slowly changing.
I could be mistaken, but the section of line 12 from the Hollywood TC to I-205 isn’t that high in ridership. Line 12 is the highest ridership line in Portland, but that’s due to Barbur I think (can’t find the data). I’m not sure that the bus on outer sandy (i.e., between Hollywood and I-205) needs a bus priority lane (or BRT) other than in places where it’ll get snarled in traffic (e.g., near Cesar Chavez), but that can possibly be mitigated with signal priority at the TC. That entire area is so poorly designed that’s it’s difficult to imagine it being a pleasant place without the removal of the freeway access (which is very unlikely), or freeway covers/separated freeway crossings for transit and other modes.
Yep. And the framing of that argument makes transit riders and people on mobility devices fight for the scraps. It’s another “appeal to common sense” fallacy.
Separated bike lanes on outer Sandy would be amazing. Am I worried that PBOT would build that before Inner sandy and Broadway/Weidler? I’m not sure, but I do think PBOT needs a strategy for where it builds so we don’t constantly end up with islands of infra and a network for the “strong and fearless.”
Yeah, Sandy isn’t a crazy high ridership trunk (check out stop ids 5044 to 5144, page 53), but it’s not all that different from Barbur (stop ids 152 to 211, page 3). The 12 is a pretty solid frequent service route – somewhere in the middle (data from Spring 2024 here).
There are only so many roads in Portland where a dedicated busway is practical. Most of them are former (or current) state highways, where the road is 5 lanes wide, so a busway could be built in a way to still allow one lane each way of traffic, plus left turns, plus right turns (with more flexibility if the design is creative). If we want a high transit ridership future, it’s important to leverage these roads when we have the chance to, and it really should be more than just transit signal priority and bus lanes which barely make a difference. I ride the 14 and 15 a lot in and out of downtown, and I find it consistently annoying that the bus lanes are usually done in a way that they require the bus to merge back into mixed traffic at a light. The 15 stop at 2nd/Alder is particularly bad on this front. The reason I bring this up, is that stuff like this is the inevitable result of a “minimally invasive bus lane” strategy. It gives space to buses where car traffic is more or less unaffected.
And on the “good infrastructure island front”, I think this is why we need a more bold strategy for bikes (especially for funding stuff). If we only go at the pace of when we already have to rebuild roads, change will be too slow and inevitably we will end up in political moments where it’s fashionable to omit bikes (like right now).
Oooh awesome, thanks for the links. Sandy/Prescott is interesting. Seems to show there’s demand, but the freeway-adjacent MAX isn’t meeting that (unsurprisingly).
The data does skew inner Sandy for sure, but certainly higher than I expected for outer Sandy. Street width (aside from some newer bulbouts) seems to hover around 60′, which is still tight for median BRT+SOV+PBL, but possible?
I hear you on “minimally invasive bus lane strategy.” One design I found pretty horrific for all modes was the H st NE in DC. I would much rather see Sandy broken up by medians/physical separation to keep SOVs from illegally passing in the middle lane (something I see on Foster and Woodstock).
This is going to be a semi-controversial statement (and I welcome criticism here), but I think “modal filters” aren’t used enough (ok at all) on commercial corridors. Hawthorne, Sandy and Foster are all streets that could/have benefit(ed) from street diets, but could also benefit from intermittent “Bus Only” filters to keep long-distance commuter traffic from using local streets. PBOT wouldn’t be able to preclude designs that incorporated space for other modes (e.g., bus, bike lanes) if SOV counts were lower.
60′ is a bit tight, but I think having busway design closer to the EmX in Eugene can help with tight situations (here’s a section with a “single track” busway between Agate and 11th). Having a one lane busway in select places isn’t the end of the world and can be handled with signaling. Eugene manages 10 minute headways with significant sections of one lane busway
I think modal filters are an interesting idea on commercial corridors, though I would float allowing delivery vehicles (as in delivery to businesses on the corridor) to use the bus only filter section too (and emergency vehicles too of course). Both for practical purposes and for getting enough political support purposes. Of all the commercial corridors in the city, Sandy may be the most appropriate for a filtered approach honestly. Both the Parkrose -> Hollywood and Hollywood -> Downtown sections of Sandy were superseded by freeways, so most traffic should be more local in character. I’d be interested in seeing a more fleshed out study on that. Other roads are probably a tougher sell
Since this is admittedly a bike blog, we shouldn’t be surprised by all the commenters who find bicycling far superior to public transit use, faster, etc. No doubt we’d get much the same arguments for car driving, boarding, or walking on many other blogs.
However, there are many positive advantages of using public transit compared to other modes, particularly city buses, that no one has seemed to touch on:
_ While you are sitting on the bus or train, you can read a book, your phone, work or play on a laptop, for pretty much the whole of your 55-minute ride with legal impunity (we of course see drivers trying to do this too, even cyclists, but they get a bit distracted trying to interact with traffic too.) Basically you can have a productive commute rather than idly trying to dodge traffic and somehow survive to your destination.
_ There’s no sweat involved aside from walking.
_ You don’t need to worry about parking your 40-foot bus when you get to your destination nor if it will get stolen by some corner chop shop thief.
Nope, just got to put up with:
People playing loud music (1 in 2 train trips), people who smell like they defecated in their pants (yesterday bus), someone lighting up a pipe (meth? fent?), another person telling them not to, the first person then pepper spraying the 2nd, the 2nd beating the ever loving crap out of the smoker and the entire train being cleared out (last Friday train).
But, often you’re right. I like to set a timer and nap. ANC on my headphones helps a *LOT*
Some people would pay a lot to see a show like that!
Though my transit rides haven’t been quite that bad, but pretty close.
Let’s face it, TriMet has totally dropped the ball by letting anyone on the trains and buses. Sorry, but the ones that don’t pay are usually the ones that act out in dangerous ways. Pretty much every trip I have on a bus will have many who just walk on. The bus drivers aren’t allowed to do anything and “security” is a joke.
And the TriMet board can’t figure out why ridership is so down.
They know, I’ve talked to them. What are they gonna do? It would be a huge lift to make it a turnstile system and the plaintiff lawyers in Portland are giving Los Angeles and South Carolina competition for blood-sucking when it comes to relying on effective fare-checking and physical ejection.
So many issues in this town can be traced in some fashion to lawyers. It’s what facilitated all the riots both by Mike Schmidt coming from the Lewis and Clark law reformist tradition and a few other very vindictive and thus nameless lawyers who sued to keep the rioters going.
Trimet is scared of discrimination suits and in general this is a sleeper issue, Oregon is getting hit with huge civil rights judgements. If you want to get rich, which plaintiffs lawyers often do—your target has to be government or large corporations who self insure.
Back in 2023 I was part of a live discussion panel in Charlotte NC where 4 of us discussed a series of transit film shorts, all of which were interesting and provocative. Among them was a German reproduction (by actors) of a similar type of annoying incident, nothing really profound about it or lessons to be learned, it could just as well be in Portland or DC. But it was well acted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2puILtvZgM
Yep, I haven’t stepped foot on a bus in six years, since my last bus ride had a very large and very high and agitated man get on and immediately start hitting seats and walls and yelling at imaginary people. I got off at the next stop. And with that guy getting stabbed in the back and killed on MAX while just sitting there in his seat awhile back, I won’t even go on MAX anymore. And I bet many people feel the same way.
A much bigger council with diversity of viewpoints and agendas. A coming lack of federal funding. Greatly diminished mode share and political clout. Folks – this isn’t looking good and is just a taste of our future. If we couldn’t get a mayor and four mostly likeminded commissioners to go all in on bikes, then we cannot expect to get an expanded council to suddenly be in lockstep on bike issues.
The golden days are over, IMHO. Going forward, we need to find broader alliances and compromise if we want things done. Guilt tripping over climate change and carbon emissions is futile. Screaming about cagers and hating on the trucking lobby won’t get us anywhere. Bike Loud and The Street Trust are greatly diminished and possibly irrelevant under the new system of government. Everything is now about delivering for the councilor’s district. Jobs, sidewalks, retail and business opportunities, homelessness, gangs, drugs, and crime are going to get the attention, not the less than 5% that ride bikes.
I wish that this wasn’t the case, but the world has changed. The calculous changed with the New Year but the downward trend has been evident for those paying honest attention.
We (kids and I) used to have a 5.5 mile commute from our home in Woodstock to downtown. On the cargo bike, it would take about 30 min and we would leave at 7:30am to get there by 8. A couple times, we opted for the bus because I want my kids to have a familiarity with/respect for transit. The problem… the actual time spent on the bus is pretty comparable (31 min), but we had to leave at 7am, a full half our earlier, due to headways at that time (peak AM hour). If we didn’t leave a bit early to catch the #19 at 7:08am, we risked having to wait 28 minutes for the next bus at 7:36 and arriving 12 minutes late instead of 17 minutes early.
As Kanal mentioned, I value my time, but the bus wasn’t a less attractive option because of “those bike lanes on major thoroughfares” (a baffling statement in and of itself–our commute was a zig-zag through neighborhood streets and greenways located a couple blocks off the major thoroughfares), but because of poor headway times.
If the bus came every 5 minutes, it would have been a far more attractive option–but notably, still slower than biking. If we improved headways and added a dedicated lane on, say, Cesar Chavez and Powell, then it becomes more comparable with biking. But that would require taking space from cars, a discussion the bikes-vs-transit narrative is intended to avoid.
Comment of the week!
I spent a dozen years encouraging options to drive along commutes to Swan Island. Biking there from Hillsboro is not for everyone, but a Daimler employee was doing it, and he went from an overweight potential heart attack victim to a guy who just loved his daily ride and was totally fit, to boot.
Another Islander MAXed in from Gresham to the Rose Quarter, then grabbed the 85 bus.
He told me one day that a colleague who lived nearby would leave their neighborhood about the same time by car and they both arrived at Daimler about the same time.
I used to say, we don’t want everyone to bike, use transit or carpool…; we just want them to be viable options. A tough sell when parking is free.
On a separate theme from the other 206 comments, I think that we have something to learn from this — even bike-friendly councilors like Kanal don’t seem to be getting a lot of love from their constituents about bicycling. And love would help!
A few more details:
1) We have a new city council. Let’s not be too hard on them.
2) If you want your issues to be represented, contact your councilors regularly.
3) The Portland cycling constituency really lacks a tradition of basic affirmative comments about the need to support cycling infrastructure and programs.
I’d suggest that the most useful way to follow up on potentially divisive, bickery topics like this is simply to contact your city councilors and say
1) I had a great time riding my bike to the grocery store, keep up the good work!”
2) Here is a photo of my and my kid riding on neighborhood greenways to go to the park, thanks!”
3) Just FYI, I bicycled downtown to work today and saw lots of other people doing it. This is the sort of thing that makes me happy to live in Portland.”
If they got even a handful of these every week they’d get warm fuzzies about bicycling, and maybe we’d get back to the days of the 2000s there city council generally looked favorably on bicycling.
It’s easy, it’s fun, and its useful!
Ted Buehler
*****
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I have abandoned transit as an option partly due to it being slower than biking. I have a car I use for trips that are too difficult for biking. I walk when it’s less than a mile. I bike everywhere else. Biking is frequently the fastest way to get somewhere for me, especially for shorter trips. I have beat my friends while coffee shop-hopping, them by car, me by bike, and I even stopped to pet some cats on the way. I bike to a work gig that would take 47 minutes by bus and takes me 35 minutes by bike. I bike to go grocery shopping – 50 minutes by bus and 25 minutes by bike. Almost across the board it takes me less time to bike than use transit and I’ll keep doing it as long as I manage not to get turned into a flesh-and-bones pancake by a driver.
Youtuber Simon Clark made a video last March about costs of climate solutions and arrived at bicycling infrastructure as the one of the best options.
I dream of a comments section button that hides the top ten People with the most comments on bike Portland. They rarely ask curious questions or fully read what us transit advocates ( distance bike commuters) have to say about our lived experiences. Sigh. The squeaky wheels killed off the BTA turned Portland into a hipster summer of doughnut rides and lit rides that block transit for 55 minutes, aka the bus I was on with my daughter. Now we have a city that just car wait to ride thousands over the Columbia river crossing. Perhaps the route should include the 8 miles of on and off ramps that go 4 miles into Washington State..
Starting now, this city, metro region and state have many difficult decisions to make when it comes to government funding, seeing as how all are saying they need more money and how most people are tapped out on agreeing to any tax increases. I love biking and so do some friends of mine, but as we mostly had to move to the outskirts of the Portland area due to increased housing costs, none of us bike on a regular basis anymore, transit options are slow compared to driving, so we drive everywhere. Faster transit would be great. But given government money woes, and all that needs to be done to repair existing roadways and sidewalks, I think it is time to stop funding any additional bike infrastructure and get back to the basics of repairing roads and sidewalks.