This week, cars driving along NW Everett Street are learning to share.
Over the weekend, Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) crews transformed one of NW Everett’s two traffic lanes into a bus-only lane, spanning the distance between where NW Everett intersects with NW Broadway and the Steel Bridge. The new lane is expected to speed up trips for buses that use NW Everett’s Steel Bridge connection to cross the Willamette River—namely, TriMet’s 4, 8, 16, 35, 44, and 77 bus lines, which combined provide over 27,500 daily rides. (Editor’s note: A previous version of this story reported an innacurate number of daily riders on these lines.)
Maybe you noticed NW Everett looked a little different this morning. Big thanks to PBOT crews for working over the weekend to install the NW Everett bus lane!
This is the 2nd #centralcityinmotion project PBOT has installed this summer. https://t.co/Xh4SatyA5i.#pdxtraffic pic.twitter.com/J9pSzGEj8s
— Portland Bureau of Transportation (@PBOTinfo) August 12, 2019
The project is part of Portland’s Central City in Motion (CCIM) plan, a slate of 18 projects meant to ease congestion in downtown Portland and the city’s inner east side that were adopted by Portland City Council last year. Other CCIM projects include making the Better Naito bike lanes permanent, and creating a bus-and-bike-only lane on SW Madison in May 2019.
“Transit is one of the most efficient, equitable, and sustainable ways to move people in cities,” reads a PBOT press release. “Improvements like these on NW Everett Street reduce congestion and make riding the bus more convenient and reliable, encouraging more Portlanders to leave their cars at home when traveling into the Central City.”
Though the new bus lane (technically a “Business Access and Transit Lane,” meaning cars can still use it to make right turns) only comprises about seven blocks, PBOT and TriMet say they expect the change to greatly improve Portland’s entire transit ecosystem. Buses have slowed as congestion has worsened in Portland’s core—for example, PBOT says Line 4 buses are 14 percent slower than they were 10 years ago—and eliminating the chokepoint near the Steel Bridge will hopefully have a ripple effect on the rest of downtown traffic.
Recent data from the bus and bike lane on SW Madison backs up that theory. Line 2 is one of TriMet’s most populated bus routes, and it uses the SW Madison bus lane to reach the Hawthorne Bridge when headed eastward. Since May, TriMet has observed that Line 2 buses are 20 percent faster during evening commute hours. Line 14, another route that includes SW Madison, has become 60 percent more likely to be on schedule.
This is one of several PBOT projects meant to improve traffic congestion in downtown Portland. PBOT has plans to install a bus and bike lane over the Burnside Bridge either this year or next. In June, Willamette Week reported that City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who oversees PBOT, has a plan to add more bus-only lanes throughout the city. The full details of that plan have not yet been made public, but it will include painting those bus lanes red to keep drivers out—something PBOT also plans to do for the SW Madison and NW Everett bus lanes, once it receives approval from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The FHWA has recently approved red bus lanes in San Francisco, among other cities.
TriMet is working closely with PBOT to see these changes through—the TriMet board voted to contribute $3 million for bus projects in July. A TriMet staffer said at the time that there was a “ripeness within the city” for red paint lanes to be enacted quickly.
