Just in time for summer fun, there’s a new transit option to the Oregon Coast — and if you book your tickets in advance, you can even take your bicycle along with you.
The North Coast Express is a new shuttle service that will depart Friday through Sunday mornings from Sunset Transit Center in Beaverton. There will be two routes to choose from: a northern route that makes stops in Seaside, Cannon Beach, and Astoria; and a southern route with stops at Rockaway Beach and Tillamook Creamery. Round trip tickets cost $49.99.
The service will be operated by Ecoshuttle and is funded through a mix of Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants, as well as funding from Travel Oregon, Travel Portland, and other tourism development agencies. Set up as a pilot project, the goal of the new service is to demonstrate how popular and effective a shuttle bus can be in reducing single-occupancy vehicle travel. If all goes according to plan, the agencies behind the ride hope to solidify the service as a long-term option.
The buses are equipped with free WiFi, charging ports and restrooms.
If you want to bring your bike, make sure you book a “large items” ticket and do so in advance because there’s limited availability to store large items on each trip. If you book a large item ticket, you can bring a bicycle that weighs up to 50 lbs (which excludes almost every e-bike) and measures 70 x 41 x 8.5 inches (what North Coast Express calls a “regular size” bike). Also note that you will be responsible for loading your own bicycle in the storage area.
The North Coast Express launches Friday May 23rd and will operate Fridays through Sundays through the end of August. Tickets and more information here.
CORRECTION, 5/14 at 9:30 am: The North Coast Express website and press materials incorrectly stated that part of the funding for this pilot was provided by ODOT. That is incorrect. ODOT has not funded this pilot, because they already fund an Oregon Coast transit service called POINT.
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I’m excited for this!
I keep thinking about visiting Astoria and leaving my car at home but trading a two hour drive for a four hour bus trip isn’t seeming that attractive.
Anyone have recent experience taking a bike on the Point bus to Astoria? It’s definitely less money. It’s also a milk run with multiple stops but there’s an earlier departure (8:30AM from Union Station) with arrival in Astoria before lunch plus an evening route option.
If you own a car it’s cheaper to drive yourself. And faster. And it’s not like once in Astoria it’s hard to find a place to park anywhere. I used to take the Astoria/Portland bus often. Ride out to Astoria, stay the night, maybe ride back or maybe take the bus. I never had any issues with having my bike and the bus is never full.
I did an overnight bike camping to Fort Stevens using the Point Bus last summer. It was fantastic. We left Saturday morning and got off in Warrenton (right before Astoria), ate lunch and got a few grocery items in town, then rode our bikes a few miles out to Fort Stevens. They have lovely bicycle trails. And we used the bike/hike sites, so we didn’t need reservations on a busy summer weekend.
It was easy to load our bikes. We had two bikes and tons of space below the bus. If you had a couple of bungees you could probably even lash your bike upright below the bus.
Is the round-trip day-of only, or can you go out on Saturday and return Sunday (for example) without buying another ticket?
They have this in the terms and conditions:
“4. Ticketing and Refund Policy
Tickets are valid only for the date and route listed and are non-transferable. Tickets may be canceled for full refund up to 24 hours before your trip. No refunds are given for missed departures, rider error, or no-shows.”
Based on that. I think no, you can’t use the same ticket to return on a different day.
I didn’t see it written anywhere, but when you choose your tickets, you choose multiple dates, and for each date you choose outbound or inbound. The price was $50 for the scenario you described. So it seems that that’s the price for two tickets basically.
They could make that more clear.
I hope you can take boards that are longer than 70″ in August.
Is this in addition to the two buses that already go to the coast? The Amtrak bus goes to cannon beach and north while “The Wave” goes to Tillimook. Both of these have bike space.
I personally prefer leaving from a more central location downtown but if this new bus gets people from the west suburbs to try it out, that is great.
Great to see a new transit option out to the coast. Notable that LinkLane, providing service between Eugene and Florence, will cost you $10 for a round trip.
I am so excited for this service, but I’m very confused and disappointed by schedule and routing decisions. The outbound North route is scheduled to take 2 hrs 40 minutes from Sunset TC to Cannon Beach, with no stops in between?? It’s under 1 1/2 hours in a car and the POINT bus takes only 1 hr 53 minutes with many more stops in between.
The return routing is even more perplexing. If you’re in Cannon Beach and want to return to Sunset TC, you have to ride north all the way to Astoria, then back south to Seaside, before finally heading east, for a total trip time of 3 hrs 20 minutes. Why wouldn’t they have the return route start in Astoria, with pickups going south before returning east?
You summed up all the questions I had…We’ve taken the POINT and it works pretty well already. This new service compared to POINT:
1 – takes longer
2 – includes hefty detouring for round-trips from any coastal destination
3 – is more expensive
4 – only picks up in Sunset TC
Can someone explain to me what exactly we are getting here?
NOTE: I’ve corrected the story to clarify that ODOT has not funded this pilot (the North Coast Express website and press materials said they did).
Also Nic and others, to answer your question: This is just capitalism and a free market I guess? I mean, what’s wrong with having another choice? I haven’t done the reporting, but my hunch would be that ODOT has their POINT service already in place, but a group of tourism development orgs wanted their own service so they came together to create North Coast Express.
I don’t think creating a privately operated service that looks to undercut rather than promote existing public service is really ‘free market’ though, right?
I worry that this will undermine POINT’s existing ridership (especially among tourists), and therefore jeopardize future funding from ODOT. POINT is already a service that a lot of people rely on, and getting those few tourist trips included really helped bolster the service.
This new service cannibalizes the POINT bus. If it could have been coordinated, these tourism development boards should have spent the time and effort to promote, improve, and market the existing publicly-funded service so that all it’s existing users could benefit.
I hear you Nic. I clearly need to do more work on this to figure out WTH is going on and why these groups felt the need to overlap w existing POINT service. I regret not bringing in the POINT information into this story.
Someone has gone to the considerable trouble of creating a new bus service. Doesn’t that suggest that the existing options are lacking in some regard? Usually, private entities do not try to compete with a publicly subsidized service unless they think they can do the job so much better that people will pay more to use it.
It is also possible that someone concluded ODOT will not be subsidizing POINT buses forever, and wanted to ensure there was an alternative when they pulled the plug.
POINT runs year-round. Isn’t it possible that this weekend seasonal service might be responding to peak demand that can’t be met by POINT?
(ETA: Bah. This was supposed to be a reply to Jonathan and by extension, Nic.)
“2 hrs 40 minutes from Sunset TC to Cannon Beach, with no stops in between??” Indeed, hard to make sense of this.
Leaves from Beaverton??? That’s not much help as far as I’m concerned. Once you’re in Beaverton, it’s just easier to drive and can’t imagine westside suburbanites will ditch their cars.I can’t imagine this will get much use.
Nobody tell the navel gazers that their Shiny New Thing won’t move the needle.
Maybe we can get the Frog Ferry to run down Fanno Creek and combine these two services.
Leaves from a location from the transit center in Beaverton that is serviced by both Max and local Tri-Met bus routes, is on a local multi-use trail, and has what seems like a fair amount of on site parking. I’m not sure if this would be what I’d select as the route’s start point but I see a certain amount of logic in choosing Sunset Transit Center.
Someone’s trying to offer another alternative to driving to the coast. I don’t understand all the hate it’s generating here.
On public transit to & on the coast: There is a guy who is doing a San Francisco to Seattle trip by local transit only (not Greyhound or Amtrak), and he goes up the Oregon coast, if any of you are interested in seeing what the transit on the coast experience is like: https://www.youtube.com/@AdamDoesNotExist
The first video of the trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OQwA95sMbg
Which led me to another young guy who did (mostly) public transit from Vancouver Canada to Mexico, which I’m currently working through that. He also takes a trip to the Oregon Coast. https://www.youtube.com/@thetransitbandit/videos
On top of being a bike nerd, I’m also a transit nerd, so am thoroughly enjoying these.