The fate of a handful of MAX stops in inner Portland—and the nearly year-long debate over whether or not to close them—presents a tension that could continue to pop up as Portland contemplates new large-scale transportation projects.
TriMet’s Board of Directors voted Wednesday to close three MAX stops in March 2020: downtown Portland’s Mall/SW 4th Ave and Mall/SW 5th Ave stops (permanently), and nearby Goose Hollow’s Kings Hill/SW Salmon stop (for a year-long trial period). The vote was the final chapter—for now, at least—in a debate that began last September, when TriMet first announced it was considering closing a few MAX stops.
These closures shouldn’t, in theory, have much of an impact on people who use the MAX to commute to other locations within central Portland—in each case, there’s another stop within a few blocks of the one being closed. And TriMet staffers believe the closures could go a long way toward speeding up lengthier, cross-town MAX trips.
“This region is growing and becoming more complex,” said Doug Kelsey, TriMet’s general manager, at a June board meeting. “Reducing travel times through downtown has a transit equity consideration we should not underestimate or overlook.”
Reduced travel times would be helpful for people who live on the outskirts of Portland, or in Clackamas and Washington counties (you know, the other two counties that make up the “Tri” in TriMet), and might even encourage suburban commuters to ditch their cars, or at least leave them at a park-and-ride. And for people who live outside the city center and rely on TriMet to get around, shaving three minutes off a cross-town MAX trip could make the difference between catching an early bus transfer and waiting 30 minutes for the next bus to come by.
Yet TriMet faced vocal pushback from downtown residents, businesses, and nonprofits who say they rely on those specific stops to commute and attract customers. That resistance was what prompted TriMet to make the Kings Hill/SW Salmon stop’s closure a trial period, and to leave the Skidmore Fountain stop—originally also on TriMet’s chopping block—open for at least three more years.
TriMet board member Ozzie Gonzalez was the lone “no” vote on the Kings Hill/SW Salmon stop’s year-long closure. Gonzalez’s district includes Goose Hollow, and he made no secret of the fact that he was voting in the interest of people he represents. (Gonzalez is also planning to run for mayor of Portland next year, and this vote is likely to be popular with Portland voters.) He said the issue presented a conflict between two of TriMet’s goals: operating an efficient centralized transit system in dense downtown Portland, and serving the broader tri-county region. In Gonzalez’s view, it shouldn’t be a “this or that choice.”
“What’s become very clear to me in the process is, we can’t have one tool doing all those things,” Gonzalez added. “What we’re doing to make downtown less convenient to make the regionalized system more convenient, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a tug-of-war.”
But if the closure of a few extraneous MAX stops can prompt this much debate, what’s going to happen when TriMet and other regional agencies try to make more drastic changes to our transit system?
In June, TriMet and Metro (the regional agency that governs land use and transportation issues in the tri-county area) announced they were eyeing a major development project: building a subway MAX tunnel through downtown. The tunnel would probably cost at least $1 billion, and is still in the very early planning stages (the planning before the planning, if you will). It’s not yet known how this would affect above-ground MAX operations, but it’s possible that a tunnel project could result in significantly fewer downtown MAX stops, period.
“Slow travel times through the Central City, coupled with frequent delays, reliability issues and overcrowding are major problems today,” reads a Metro document on the tunnel. “As the region grows, these issues will become even more critical. The purpose of the proposed project is to increase regional mobility and capacity by improving transit travel times and system reliability to and through the Portland Central City.”
With that in mind, we can predict that if the region does end up considering a subway tunnel in earnest, the project would likely exacerbate tension points brought up by the MAX stop closures: People who live and work downtown would mourn the loss of a stop they’ve used for years (or one that unloads passengers directly outside of their business), while more regionally-minded folks would applaud the tunnel for cutting travel times through downtown by an estimated 15 minutes.
“Speeding up transit is important to our goal of increasing ridership,” said TriMet board member Lori Irish Bauman at Wednesday’s meeting. “But at the same time, we’re in the customer service business, and we want to keep folks happy.”
Irish Bauman was talking about the recent MAX stop closures, but she could have just as easily been referring to the tunnel.
Beyond the tunnel, the area’s transportation future will be shaped in no small part by a multi-billion dollar 2020 transportation funding measure put forth by Metro. The greater Portland area continues to grow—last year, Metro expanded the urban growth boundary to allow for more suburban development—and Metro is tasked with crafting a measure that balances the interests of Portlanders and suburbanites, cyclists and drivers, transit-dependent folks and people who’d much sooner pay for a $40 Lyft before stepping foot on a bus.
The committee tasked with identifying projects for the measure includes people from all these walks of life, and they required a three-fourths “yes” vote threshold when selecting roads to prioritize and recommend to Metro Council. Metro doesn’t want to put a measure on the ballot that won’t pass, and that means compromise needs to be baked in from the ground level.
But in the context of climate change, ever-worsening rush hour traffic, and a disquieting failure to reduce traffic deaths in Portland, some transit advocates are calling for bold change, rather than nominal progress. Metro’s own polling indicates that voters who live in the suburbs are more likely to commute by car, and favor big spending projects that are more car-oriented, like widening freeways. Increasing TriMet ridership among this population could help lower carbon emissions and improve traffic in the region, and a splashy, actually-faster-than-driving subway tunnel through downtown could be just the project to entice these potential riders.
A MAX tunnel is far from the only way to speed up transit through downtown Portland—rapid bus transit, for example, could be a cheaper and more flexible option—but if Metro and TriMet do proceed with the tunnel plan, we can expect to see more of the dichotomy that was evident during the MAX stop closure debate.
“From my perspective, we’ve done a pretty good job of balancing the regional and the local,” said Bruce Warner, TriMet’s board president. “But it does point out, we’ve got to work on this.”
