On Wed, 8 Mar 2023, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Ridership on all mass transit has fallen and is stagnant. The original dream was they would get all of the middle and upper middle class people riding it when the Freeways like I5 and US 26 were overcapacity. For 4 decades highway policy in PDX has been to encourage congestion in order to force people out of cars into transportation Alternatives.
Ted, In 1973 I was living in east central Illinois (Urbana) when the arab oil embargo hit. The politicos in DC urged eveyone to use public transportation which was readily available in the Boston-DC corridor but not in flyover country. Urbana/Champaign had no bus service and few taxis. The railroad passenger train stopped once per day (as it did in Pocatello, ID, too). We had no alternative but drive in our POVs.
I recall in the 1990's literally going 5Mph all the way from Cornelius Pass Road to downtown PDX at 5pm at night. No longer, it's been years since it's been like that.
When I arrived in Portland in 1990 I lived in NE and commuted to an office downtown. Buses took about 45 minutes in the morning and 1 hour or more in the evening. There were no places to park near a MAX stop. It took me about 15 minutes (morning) and 30 minutes (evening) to drive the 3 or so miles. I was told that Portland deliberately limited parking downtown to get people to use MAX or buses, but they provided parking no closer than Gateway (as I learned when I moved to Troutdale), and that lot was small and had high vehicle damage incidents. I wrote to the city suggesting they put a parking structure over I-84 at 42nd Ave which is a hub for bus and light rail. Never received a response. The furthest eastern MAX terminus is about 3 miles from home and it took more than 1 hour each way to commute to downtown so I soon gave up on that. Policies may be nice in theory but have unintended consequences. Rich