- Harry Lau
When voters nixed the $125 million TriMet levy this past November, the public transit agency erased its plan to fix 300 bus stops around the city.
But the group that most vocally pushed for those bus stop improvements—OPAL—is moving ahead with a project to chronicle the worst bus stops in Portland and suggest ways to fix them. Today, Metro regional government announced the recipients of $533,000 in federal “regional transportation options” grants it controls; OPAL won $63,000 to pinpoint and document the city’s crummiest transit stops. The bus stop assessments will focus on East Portland, where the transit advocacy group will survey 1,000 residents about their transit use, ask about problem stops, and how they can be improved. Over the summer, OPAL volunteers and paid organizers completed about 100 bus stop assessments around town, finding bus stops that were hard for people to use because they lack sidewalks, shelters, or even benches (some photos of bad stops here).
Though OPAL protested TriMet’s cuts before the election, they’re working on this project with TriMet’s (non-financial) support and partnership. “There’s times to poke and there’s times to hold hands,” Ostar told me today. The $63,000 grant adds significantly to OPAL’s $150,000 operating budget from last year.
Metro also granted federal funds to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and Community Cycling Center, among others. Check out the full list of monies below the cut.
Regional Transportation Options grants:
RTO partner agencies, Cash for Commuters incentive program, $60,000
Lloyd Transportation Management Association, Lloyd Links, $30,000
Community Cycling Center, Communities in Motion: Increasing Capacity for Active Transportation, $34,086
Housing Authority of Portland, Regional Work Source, Transportation Mobility Counseling, $60,000
OPAL Environmental Justice of Oregon, East Portland Community Bus Stop Assessment, $63,000
Bicycle Transportation Alliance, Bike Commute Challenge, $27,500
City of Forest Grove, Forest Grove bicycle parking shelters, $45,000
City of Tigard, Downtown Tigard walking map and way-finding system, $25,000
City of Wilsonville/SMART, Wilsonville Sunday Parkways, $53,414
Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation, trail and way-finding signage, $60,000
Well, they could always do what smart cities do and sell a contract to a bus shelter advertising company and let them maintain them, having to live up to SLAs to keep their contract.
Bus stops aren’t always bus shelters and the problems with them may have to do with things like access due to sidewalk conditions, access and safety issues related to street configurations & cross-walks, crime / safety issues related to lighting or nearness to hiding places for would-be attackers, just to provide some examples. Any shelter contracting model would need to include requirements to keep up lower-traffic (= fewer eyeballs per time unit) shelters equally with those that advertisers would like better, and still would involve monitoring costs to check on fulfillment.
Oh, and congrats to OPAL!