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Why we can’t have nice transit
By Virginia Bruce

About a year ago, Mukundan Thirumalai started a Change.org petition asking for better transit from Bethany to the Sunset Transit Center. He and his wife Lata live near Stoller Middle School. Mukundan commutes to the downtown area, and Lata commutes to Gresham. If they want to use public transportation, they can either walk 20+ minutes to catch Line 67 to the Merlo MAX Station and then ride to Gresham, or drive to the Park and Ride at the Cedar Mill Bible Church, park, and catch a bus to the Sunset Transit Center (STC). In either case, her commute is about an hour and a half each way, and his is about an hour.

Mukundan Thirumalai created a petition asking for better transit for the Stoller neighborhood.

Given that there is no direct public transit service to the STC, nor an available parking facility that accommodates people arriving beyond 6:30 am, he currently drives his wife (who has an injured leg) to STC or to Gresham. He has to juggle that trip with delivering his kids to and from school, morning and afternoon.

Mukundan says, “We are requesting a public transportation service, hoping that things will change and produce better livability eventually to the residents of the Bethany area.”

His petition reads, in part: “There is currently no bus service directly from the Bethany area (closer to the Stoller Middle School Area and its adjoining areas) to the Sunset Transit Center. The parking at the Sunset Transit Center is full by approximately 6:30 am. The public transport commuters are forced to either drive to the Elmonica Max or any of the park and rides that are nearly 25 minutes away from the Stoller neighborhood to take a train journey of 40-45 minutes into the Portland downtown area. This roundabout mechanism only goes to increase the car traffic density around the Bethany to Beaverton area, as well as severely reduces commuters' available productive time. Travelers to the downtown area are now forced to rely more on car traffic as a way to avoid the time spent on waiting for buses that would take them to the Merlo station, and onward to downtown by a hop on the train.”

In October, he sent a letter, along with the petition, to TriMet officials and our Washington County Commissioner, Greg Malinowski. Tom Mills, Senior Planner at TriMet, has been the representative to numerous meetings, held in various settings, discussing the problems of providing transit to those of us in northeastern Washington County. Here’s how he responded to Thirumulai’s petition:

“Thank you very much for submitting your petition to TriMet requesting new transit service between the North Bethany/Stoller Middle School area (N. Bethany), Cedar Mill, and the Sunset Transit Center. As we all know, commuting to downtown Portland from your area is difficult because the parking garage at STC fills up quite early in the morning, and traffic is significantly congested along Highway 26, NW Cornell Rd., and W. Burnside St.

“As a newly developing area with a limited population, TriMet hasn’t attempted to serve N. Bethany, however TriMet has attempted to serve Cedar Mill a couple of different ways over the last 15 years. These methods have included a door-to-door shuttle (i.e., the Cedar Mill Shuttle) and traditional peak hour fixed route transit service (i.e., Line 50-Cedar Mill). To date, both methods have failed to attract significant ridership. This is primarily because Cedar Mill, and to a large extent the N. Bethany, lacks a number of the elements that help to make transit successful.

The four bus lines that serve the Cedar Mill, Bethany, and Rock Creek area (47, 48, 50, and 67) miss out on the Stoller neighborhood. The only Park and Ride is quite near the Sunset Transit Center.

“Elements that help to make transit successful include the density of people living within one-quarter mile of the transit line; the mix of land uses; and a walkable environment to allow people to access transit. While N. Bethany has some high-density developments, there are still large tracts of undeveloped land along NW Laidlaw and NW Saltzman Rd. Additionally, Cedar Mill lacks the level of density that can support transit. Also, both N. Bethany and Cedar Mill are predominately residential in their land use, which typically doesn’t support midday or weekend transit service. Finally, both areas lack street connectivity and pedestrian infrastructure (e.g., there are ditches along significant portions of NW 143rd Ave. and NW Saltzman Rd.). As a result, it is very difficult and sometimes dangerous to walk to a bus stop. These issues have made it very difficult for TriMet to attract ridership in the area. And as you can imagine, TriMet doesn’t want to invest in services that don’t attract ridership.

“One solution to the challenge of transit in your area is for residents to drive to a shared-use park and ride and take a short bus trip to Sunset Transit Center. Shared-use park and rides are private parking lots that are available to TriMet riders because they are lightly used during the weekday. Though driving to a shared-use park and ride and boarding a bus to Sunset is less convenient then parking at Sunset, it is likely less aggravating than driving into Portland. Currently, TriMet has a shared use park and ride lot at the Cedar Mill Bible Church at 12208 at NW Cornell Rd. This lot is served by Line 48-Cornell, which provides 15-18 min. service during the weekday morning and afternoon rush hours and is only a five minute ride to Sunset Transit Center.

“This lot is ideally located for a shared use park and ride in your area, however it is barely used. I propose that TriMet commits to promoting the shared use park and ride at the Cedar Mill Bible Church to your community. If this proves successful, then we will pursue additional shared use park and ride opportunities where people in your community can connect with transit service going to Sunset Transit Center.

“Thank you again for submitting your comments about additional transit service to the N. Bethany and Cedar Mill communities. We appreciate your interest in riding TriMet and hope we can develop a solution that inspires people to use transit in the area. Please feel free to contact me directly to discuss this matter further.”

All of this is true, of course, although there isn’t much open land left on Saltzman any more. When I first began observing the lack of transit out here, I realized it was a bureaucrat’s dream: people who need transit don’t move out this way, and so they don’t demand it! But it’s not that simple. There are many places to lay the blame.

In the 50s and 60s, when Washington County began to grow, subdivisions were designed with few externally connecting streets. Everybody drove everywhere. Some of the long-established roads became collectors and arterials without pedestrian facilities (the lack of sidewalks and the ditches that Mills refers to).

Retrofitting older areas with walkways is very expensive. It’s not just the concrete and drainage—you also need adequate right-of-way, which in many cases was not obtained by the county as the area developed. Purchasing ROW can be the biggest expense in a walkway project. The Board of County Commissioners decided this fall to not require dedication of ROW for many new and redeveloping properties.

Density has been a hard sell in the county. Developers prefer to build single-family homes, albeit on smaller and smaller lots, because they know how to sell them, albeit for prices unaffordable to a growing population.

Laying blame, however, doesn’t get us to a livable county. We need to keep on asking these questions of all our elected officials and the management of our service agencies. And we need to keep encouraging them to search for new solutions. Surely this isn’t the only area in the country with such challenges. What good solutions are being used elsewhere?

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