Recently, I’ve been deep in a rabbit hole of creating transit isochrones (times of equal travel). What started out as an innocuous attempt to quantify how well some places in my capstone project are connected to the transit network relative to each other has blown up into a full-blown obsession. So much so that I had to get my code into my GitHub (check it out here!). But that wasn’t enough – so I also wrote an analysis of the 2040 Metro Plan through the lens of jobs and homes accessible in 45 minutes by TriMet to each regional center in the plan in 2013, 2019, and 2025.

I had been hoping to get pre-financial crisis GTFS data to show how that era of cuts affected things – but to my chagrin there seem to be no archived versions of TriMet’s GTFS pre-2013. If anyone happens to have a 2008 or 2009 era GTFS for TriMet – send me an email, I will pay you cold hard cash for it.

I was planning on writing a long post on this blog about it – but was forced to host in on GitHub pages. The key cool thing I made is an interactive map (works better not on mobile, but I did do some bad mobile formatting in CSS so maybe it’s not awful) of the isochrones and a few charts showing the number of jobs and people in the buffer in each year. Maybe the embed below works, but I think WordPress doesn’t allow custom HTML with an iframe unless you pay more.

Which is annoying! I’m a very inadequate web developer, but I would like to show of the kind of interactive maps I like making in Mapbox directly on this site. Maybe I’ll wind up doing that in the future, and I’ll bite the bullet on paying more to host. But that just feels wrong to me. I like WordPress well enough – it’s easy, and it has some features I could never implement very well on a fully custom website (like comments), but I would prefer something more pro-open source.

Anyways, give my piece on GitHub a read and let me know what you think. The big takeaways for me is that the last 12 years has basically seen no real improvement on the regional transit access picture, despite three major capital projects being completed. I’m sure I’ve previously written about the flaws in the Orange Line, but it’s crazy to see that you could get further into Clack Co in the PM peak on transit before we spent the better part of $2B making the trip between Northern Clack Co and Downtown Portland faster.

I think that Portland’s transit history in infinitely fascinating, and I really am a fan of Oregon’s land use system, but doing all this work has led me to feel that our land use regulations are far too pro-sprawl still (as evidenced by the massive rise in population + jobs at the fringes of the UGB in Washington County) and that our transit investments have been just not up to the task of getting people riding. I promise I wont’ turn this into a rant about the Heat Death of BRT, but pivoting from LRT to BRT only works if you actually build BRT.

Anyways, thanks for reading! Til next time.