More Park & Ride for Cedar Mill?
by Bruce Bartlett, CPO 1 Chair

Ask any resident of Cedar Mill who wants to take a mid-day ride on Tri-Met’s light rail system (the “MAX”) where they go to get on the train and you will get a quizzical response: “I would like to use the Sunset Transit Center (STC) but it’s always full. There is no other convenient place to park.” This is a familiar refrain for residents north of Hwy 26 living in unincorporated Washington County.

Tri-Met Bus Lines 62 and 89 serve the Cedar Mill area throughout the day and the new Line 50 now operates during the morning and evening commute times. While this is reasonably good bus service within Cedar Mill, using one of these lines to connect with MAX adds considerable time to the trip, enough time to make most potential riders choose to drive a car instead. And then there is also the issue of, “Where can I park my car to catch the bus to get to MAX?” In pursuit of a solution, Citizen Participation Organization #1 (CPO 1, see www.cpo1friends.org) invited Tri-Met Capital Facilities manager, Young Park, (parky@trimet.org) to their December meeting to discuss the current transit situation.

Would-be TriMet users throughout our area have the same problem. The obvious solution is to create a new Park & Ride (P&R) lot, of which there are two kinds: dedicated and “shared-use”. A dedicated P&R lot is constructed and owned by Tri-Met, such as the Sunset Transit Center. A shared-use P&R lot makes use of a private parking lot, at a church, for example, which is “underused” during the work day. The lot at the Cedar Hills United Church of Christ is a good example.

Presently Tri-Met maintains 31 dedicated P&R lots and 30 shared-use P&R lots within its overall service district. Mr. Park estimated that a single parking space in a dedicated P&R lot costs approximately $30,000 to build and maintain. All of the dedicated P&R lots located at the major transit centers closest to downtown Portland are fully used – Sunset, Millikan Way, Gateway, Parkrose/Sumner, Barbur Blvd., and Tualatin. The dedicated P&R lots located further from Portland are less used, in part because commuters find it most time-efficient to drive to the lot closest to their destination, rather than the lot closest to where they live. Most of these riders want to avoid downtown parking fees, not because they're trying to do without cars.

Mr. Park explained that the dedicated P&R lot at the STC was built as part of the Westside MAX project and funds were not available at the time to make it larger or to construct it so that it could be easily expanded in the future. We learned that Tri-Met hoped that more P&R capacity would become available when land around the STC (owned by the Peterkorts) is developed, but that development has been slower than expected and there is no money available for Tri-Met to accomplish it independently.

A shared-use P&R lot seems at first glance to be a good alternative for our area, but establishing these parking lots takes careful negotiation and cooperation from the owner and, as Mr. Park informed us, only a small handful of the shared-use P&R lots are fully used due in large part to the relative inefficiency of making connections. The better the bus service to the lot, the more it is used.

We learned that issue was central to Tri-Met’s decision to not pursue establishing a shared-use P&R lot at the Cedar Mill Bible Church. While the church’s officials are willing to consider offering part of their parking lot for a P&R, Tri-Met concluded that bus service was not sufficient to overcome the burden of the extra time required to get riders to the STC.

It looks like there will be no solution to this issue in the foreseeable future. However, the new Line 50 is gaining ridership and all concerned are satisfied with its progress. Tri-Met will report on Line 50 at the CPO 1 meeting on January 5th, 2010.