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Great video, it's also relative, Portland public transit seams like a dream compared to Las Vegas where public transportation equates to "die on the street".
This guy needs proper coaching on the name of the Willamette River…..
I prefer Denver and Dallas light rail to Portlands, they use theirs as more of a true rail rather than a tram.
wuh-LAM-it
OK a couple things WE pronounce it Will am ett not Willa met or as you did, I actually never heard that one before. The people in Portland are too cheap to approve more light rail. A couple years ago they put a bond measure up for a vote to put a new line out south toward Wilsonville and it was voted down very soundly. Trimess as I call it is (because it's a mess) is run by idiots that never came up in transit jobs they are just book learned how it should be (in) suits that get paid way too much and because they are so incapable and treat their workers so poorly at present they have a 300 operator shortage. They need to stop treating workers like they are the problem but because the city is so woke nobody (operators included) can say or do anything for fear of being canceled. There is NO FARE ENFORCEMENT because the woke crowd played the race card because too many people of color were being ticketed and most trains now are giant rolling homeless shelters where addicts shoot up and drag their junk from place to place. Last point because I could write a book on everything wrong with the system here is that the WES runs on tracks that are also used by regular train services that move lumber and other products so they have to compete with regular services to run WES and you can't put a MAX train on the WES tracks because they are not the same size between the rails and same for WES the width is different. Gonna leave it there, come on up to Portland and look at all the camps along the freeways and downtown on the sidewalks and see if you want to move here. It was a wonderful place to live before the incompetent Mayor and District Attorney got into power now it is a sewer.
I drive for Amazon and the stretch of I-5 between Portland is a nightmare 90% of the time. So many people work on the other side of the border than they live and having it served by mainly busses does next to nothing to help. Sadly, the two cities are being driven apart by politics more and more so transit cooperation is getting harder and harder
not william ette it's pronounced wil lam ette river
There's actually a non-profit organization called "Friends of Frog Ferry" that for the last five years has been trying to get a public-private ferry route started that goes from Cathedral Park to downtown. But they haven't gotten any public agencies interested because some of the people behind the nonprofit have been accused of shady business practices and the ferry they want to use would make the trip take twice as long as an equivalent bus route.
Hopefully somebody new comes along with a better proposal soon.
5:00 Do you need a mobile to pay fair in Portland?
You've said it twice. For someone who claims to visit Portland more than Seattle, I would have thought that you would learn the correct way to name Portland's central River.
It is NO said, "William-ette", but "Will-AM-ette". It never had "William" in its name. It is named after the indigenous peoples who lived here several hundred years ago.
Look closely at the word, There is no way to say "William" as part of the word. It is spelled, W I L L A M E T T E.
It's pronounced "Will. Am. It. River" FYI
You show street car footage quite a bit when talking about max at 9:55
Portland has Open Payment! I have used it plenty of times! Just tap any credit card or Apple Pay.
Hi, I'm another long term Portland resident. Thank you for doing this video but I'm surprised you didn't bring up one of the biggest issues I have with the MAX, and that is that most of the newer stops are in places that are completely unwalkable. Especially the Orange and Green lines, being dropped off at the side of the highway or behind the back parking lot of a strip of big box stores is a useless stop for me. Often there isn't even any transfer to the bus system just a MAX stop all by itself. I need a light rail system that allows me to travel to walkable destinations, not the back side of car centric stroads.
Portland has become a dump. Deal with drug and homeless first.plenty of place for homeless to sleep if you open at night
Only one ‘i’ in Willamette!
Great analysis!
Green mile traffic light systems for tram cars like implemented in Amsterdam would solve this longer car and faster transit issue. Subterranean rail reduces ridership and is suboptimal imo.
Portlands transit service is continuing to get worse year after year
Thanks, RMTransit, for creating & sharing this!
Hah, what a coinsidence. I was born (and still live) in Portland on June 23rd.
Love your work. Keep doing what you do.
Also, please come to Memphis and evaluate our laughable "transit" system. Our light rail system consists of a tourist trolley that runs north and south through downtown and east and west from downtown through the medical center terminating just past Cleveland Avenue in the middle of a block. The majority of the rubber tire gasoline powered buses begin downtown and fan out. Several major historical headways have been renamed and the frequency is horrible.
The system doesn't adequately service the suburbs in the tri-state area, thus, making it unattractive to riders.
I'd be curious to get your opinions on the Memphis Area Transit Authority or MATA.
Wow! You can't unsee those weird tiny little blocks.
I'd love if you talked about Dallas' transportation network as it's somewhat similar to Portland's. Similar LRVs (we call them SLRVs down here), a large network (93 miles of light rail), 3 AM to 1 AM services and quite a few quirks. We've got quite a few transit projects brewing such as the D2 subway through Downtown to alleviate congestion through the CBD Transit Mall, the Silver Line that links north suburbs to DFW Airport, and a few miscellaneous ones such as an orange line extension into South Dallas towards Masters Dr.
Being from Dallas myself, I'd love to hear someone else's opinion about it that isn't from Dallas, or Texas for that matter.
Great video as always, looking forward to more transit network videos like this one.
Thanks!
Excellent analysis and proposals on the shortcomings of the MAX system. You hit all the major points besides the rail yards, where there is not capacity to deliver more service which becomes a “but we can’t” reason for everything. I think TriMet / Portland wrestles with trying to build out a solid transit system vs. being a mid-sized city in hokey Oregon where we don’t have the economy or draw of a city like Seattle or Vancouver
Wil-am-et (Willamette) river
What I don’t like about some of the streetcars in most city, including Portland, is those miserable loops.
Man, i thought Portland was known for being a shithole
Coming from S.F. I’m impressed with the traffic signal management in Portland. Rarely do the trains dwell at stop lights and often the trains are given right of ways. This means trains run at a pretty decent average speed. In SF it’s been over a hundred years of losing the battle against cars meaning super slow avg speeds. Portland has some impressive urban infrastructure that I couldn’t imagine in SF. S.F. is cooking up the new $600M train control project that could finally give priority to our metro system. Lines could see increased speeds of 30% or more and run at increased frequencies if it all goes well.
Hi, first time viewer here. Overall, this is a good and well-researched video, but right at the end you said something which is just confusingly wrong. The MAX has regular night service; all lines run every 15 minutes 24/7/365 and have for as long as I can remember. (Though in the last 1-2 years they have been having trouble running that many trains due to operator shortages and basically every night there are some that are just missed entirely. I would know, I get text messages for every significant delay on any MAX line. That is unplanned though, and not the kind of thing you were talking about.) I'm really confused where you would have gotten the idea that the MAX doesn't run overnight, or why nobody else seems to have mentioned it in the comments.
As a MAX operator I think our over night service is adequate since from the hours of 1am to 3:30am we mainly transport folks with no place to go. I also really don't like having to go to work at 2am.
Oregon owes a lot of its design strengths to rail infrastructure including the Red Electric Railway, Oregon Electric Railway, an intricate streetcar grid, an expansive trolley network, abundant ferries etc. Most of this infrastructure was unfortunately destroyed for the racist idiocy of Robert Moses carcentric (sub)urban sprawl. The further we move away from the logical layout provided by streetcar grids and electric commuter interurban railroads the uglier and less livable the city and its suburbs become. An intelligent coastal city would take advantage of this limited time of people crowding in to install city assets that will benefit us for generations such as a rail route beneath the Willamette so that the light rail system isn’t shut down when the circuit is broken every time that the Steel Bridge is raised along with rail going between Vancouver and us. It makes perfect sense to build the full Southwest Corridor (Purple) Line with railway stations on Marquam Hill and at Portland Community College Sylvania Campus, for example, and zero sense not to; doing so will also complement WES connecting to it making it easier and more likely to use. It could extend down to Salem and run more often, making the service much more dynamic. They also need to finally build the Frog Ferry as well as revitalize Murnane Wharf and make it a ferry stop or station along the Willamette.
As much as I would love longer trains, I don't think it would be possible given the short downtown blocks, and some of the stops further away from Downtown. I live down the street from an Orange Line stop, and a lot of the Orange Line is actually above grade. One end of the stop is a bridge over traffic, and the other is an intersection. Same thing with other stations in some of the other suburbs and cities surrounding Portland, being crammed in-between roads and intersections. There is no way (at least what I can tell) that TriMet will extend train cars. I could see them increasing service frequency, or ordering longer single unit trains. Part of the reason why each train is coupled is because the 1st gen LRT were only accessible by stepping up into the vehicle, making individuals with disabilities hard to use the system. When the 2nd gen LRT vehicles were delivered, they had to pair them with the 1st gen, which is why many of the cars are so old looking. Oh, and it's pronounced Will-AM-Ette. Thanks for the video! Love hearing/seeing public transit being discussed as better option in the future.
What's strange about the MAX is that 2019 per-mile and total ridership was comparable only to San Diego's Trolley, despite Downtown Portland having a much larger share of metro-area jobs than Downtown San Diego does.
Yet Portland is praised for being LRT city while San Diego is bashed for being Autodysptopia. Portland acts like it invented light rail (when ironically the Trolley was the first postwar US light rail).
While Portland does have plenty of non-transit problems to tackle regarding housing and urban decay, I think there is definitely a need for many of the improvements you outlined here. The biggest one is really the rail tunnel project, because if you are going through Portland but not into it, you waste a lot of time on the surface level tracks in the city center. It takes me 1.5 hours to reach the airport, with about 20 minutes of that being just between Goose Hollow and 7th Ave. Bringing that time down to 5-10 minutes would be one improvement, but the other time loss on my end is that I have to transfer trains as I'm out on the further part of the Blue line. Thankfully the Better Red project is going to fix that transfer issue next year, so with that and a tunnel the time to the airport could be an hour or less with even just slightly higher line speeds. Still, hour and a half and $2.50 on the train beats 40-80 minutes of driving and $50-100+ in airport parking.
As for nighttime service, that's another frustration of mine. The services seem to operate 19-21 hours of the day, yet the morning gap in service means that reaching the airport for any flights earlier than 8:30am is impossible as the earliest train gets me there at 7am. It'd be nice to have trains even every 30-60 minutes during that gap just so there's at least something to get me over there. Hoping that will come in time, same with all-day and weekend WES service.
william-ette river lol
A circle line that goes from University of Portland to OMSI (somewhat the path of I-5) and/or one that goes from expo center to the airport to Clackamas Center to Milwaukie (somewhat the path of I-205) might help Portland's Transit system. Something even more extreme would be getting rid of I-5, I-205 and I-405. Replacing it with future corridors for high speed rail infrastructure.
If Portland is one of the best examples of light rail in North America, does that mean that Calgary is setting the standard for light rail? When it comes to ridership, Calgary blows Portland out of the water (228,000 weekday trips vs 64,000 in Q4 2022 respectively). And thats with the Portland metro having a million more people than the Calgary metro area. I know ridership isn't everything.. but it should be the top thing right?
I know the video is about Portland, but I don't feel that Calgary's LRT gets the love it deserves for how well it punches above its weight. I'd love an updated deep dive video in the same model for a video 🙂
I’ve waited 5-10 minutes for a “driver” change. If the system is not punctual, the ridership will go down. No one seems to be interested in a “schedule”. I ride my bike when I can, and would take trains more often if they were more consistent.
Your comment about Vancouver's opposition to light rail might be out dated. Right now the preferred design for a new Interstate Bridge includes light rail and within the city a majority of residents support it. Most of the opposition comes from rural Clark County. There is also a new Max line in the works to Tualatin.
Well researched video, but you committed the cardinal sin I'm afraid of mispronouncing "Willamette," I literally cringed every time you said it in this video. It's Willamette damnit!
On a different note, I'm curious if a transit tunnel was built under downtown, would it connect to the existing tunnel underneath Washington Park for the red and blue lines? Surprised you didn't mention this bit of tunnel already exists, especially since from what I've read it is one of the deepest transit tunnels underground in the whole US (particularly the Washington Park/Zoo station claims to the be deepest underground transit station in the US at 260 feet below ground).
The slow pace of trains through downtown, as well as the lack of service to some of the fastest growing regions of the city in the SW Portland suburbs (Tigard, Tualatin, Sherwood, and Wilsonville) and the Vancouver metro keep the MAX system from truly being considered "world class" in my mind. You did nail these flaws in the system, and the fact that the WES was a completely useless boondoggle. For the money they wasted in WES, they could have started a SW line connecting downtown to Tigard and Tualatin instead.
And I do prefer the LINK in Seattle, the trains are much cleaner and quieter than MAX and faster since they don't travel as much on existing roadways, but use an elevated track.
20:15 this is PAINFULLY true to me personally. I commute daily between Portland-Vancouver for work and desperately wish for a transit method that isn't an hour and a half. If it existed, I could eliminate over 90% of my car travel and almost certainly go from a 2 car household to a 1 car household.
16:46 the thing to understand with Melbourne, is that the level crossing removal project is a road project first and foremost. They had an opportunity to have quad tracks, especially out east towards Pakenham where the line is very long, but also has to provide express and local services, then has to contend with with Cranbourne trains joining at Dandenong, AND to top it all off, leave capacity for V/Line regional services heading further east towards Sale and Bairnsdale.
shhhh don't give them ideas. the 5$ fares are amazing!!!
I couldn't agree more with most of this video. Portland may be just a medium sized city to those from LA and New York, but it's still a top 25 market with 3 million people living within about an hour of downtown. It's also a 2 state metro with the service to Clark County, Washington being pathetic in my opinion.
Came here to help you with pronunciation of Willamette for future reference, but it looks like a bunch of people beat me to it.
Downtown Portlander currently trying to move out after a decade. The crime, drugs and high taxes are strangling the place. Office leases aren’t being renewed because of a combination of work-from-home-itis and problems mentioned above. Until they cut taxes, enforce the law and clean up the drugs, storefronts will continue to rot. You can’t build enough private equity owned luxury rental buildings subsidized with tax dollars when there is no economic activity- sorry socialist dumbshits. You pissed away a great city on empty ideological bullshit.
TAP in Los Angeles also allows for contactless payments
The new bus line recently opened, FX2, goes miles along a very busy street that reaches throughout the city. Plus, Portland has started using double-car buses!