One of my first forays into transit advocacy came during the TriMet Forward Together plan in 2024. I was in grad school, had time on my hands, and wanted to express some of my thoughts on a few subtle flaws with a handful of proposed changes to the improved future TriMet network. That work was published in BikePortland and got TriMet to rethink a few of the changes they had proposed (albeit temporarily). I was proud to make an impact (however small), but looking back on this article, the only thing I feel now is sad.

TriMet, for the unaware, is facing steep cuts that are sure to cause a transportation mobility crisis once they finish them. Something like 31% of service will be cut by 2031, with MAX trains coming every 20 minutes and “Frequent Service” being redefined to be every 17.5 minutes.

My original piece was predicated on preserving service at a time when TriMet was hoping for service expansion. Now, it’s hard to imagine how bleak things will be in just a few years without intervention. To make matters worse, even Portland’s progressive city councilors have panned using any city funds for supplementing TriMet invoking a “structural deficit” as a reason to not provide emergency funding in an emergency.

I’m not a Portland resident these days, so I haven’t weighed in much on the cuts, but I find this kind of talk just absolutely junk. The way to address structural budget issues is to fund services better, and if Seattle can find a way to make supplementing King County Metro service to the benefit of Seattlites, I am 100% sure Portland could too¹.

But enough about bad politics (for now). I’m bringing this up mostly because I’m spending a day in Portland this weekend and Clark and Angie happen to live just outside a bus stop on the northern reach of the 17 that is set to be cut in a week from Sunday (yes, the 17 is replacing the 70 on 33rd, but there will be no service on the NE 24th/ NE 27th leg). This was what my original piece was about back in 2024, and my sadness for the loss has only deepened since Angie has become a closer friend since then.

On 24th, this will be the first time since Portland was developed that there won’t be transit service of some kind. The 17 replaced a trolleybus which replaced a streetcar that was built to develop the area. While I’m less inclined to get teary eyed about this sort of development now than I was then for reasons mostly relating to the banality of celebrating the colonization and settlement of any place in the US, it’s still something that we shouldn’t even be considering. Places that have always had transit service probably need to retain it if we are going to meet any sort of future goal for livability or climate.

But I want to stress that public transportation provides more than just a climate solution or even an “alternative means” to get around for “livability”. It represents the literal framework that thousands of Portlanders rely on to navigate the city. It means getting to school, to work, to dates, to friends’ houses. Without good bus service, places may as well not exist. Even though this particular cut may be the least bad option, service planners at TriMet should not be in this situation in the first place.

And what the cuts mean for me personally beyond a mild inconvenience when visiting Clark and Angie is that every trip to Portland will be worse than the ones before. The 70 being truncated at the Rose Quarter is particularly devastating, as more than any other bus in Portland it’s the one I’m most fond of. Staying with Clark and Angie will still be lovely, but it won’t be as lovely without a short walk down Ainsworth to catch the 70 to see friends down in SE. And as much as I love Portland and occasionally dream of moving back, how can I justify it when TriMet is looking at bus service ending at 9 PM on most lines?

My time in Portland convinced me unequivocally that I do not need a car to be happy. This alone changed my life in so many profound ways – it surely set me on the path towards grad school and eventually to Seattle. Will any current Portlander look at the transit network and conclude that they can and should live without a car? I have a hard time seeing it, though I don’t doubt that thousands will still try.

Of course, tens of thousands of Portlanders will continue to do just that despite being utterly abandoned by their elected officials who have categorically failed to deliver any modicum of relief to TriMet. I already felt a certain degree of social marginalization by trying to rely on the bus – not because my friends look down on the bus, but because they mostly were not constrained by it – and this will only make things worse.

Returning to the politics of it all, I sincerely believe that every person deserves to have quality public transportation that serves their needs and our society has a duty to fund this need. And when I lived in Portland, it seemed to me that it was a place that sincerely believed that as well. Time will tell if the OR Leg and the Portland City Council get their heads out of their asses or not and decide to fund buses instead of giving a subprime auto lender billionaire $600M in public funding², but until then my visits to Portland will be tinged with melancholy for the days when riding a bus was a little bit easier.

And if you’re a Portlander who is sad, worried, or just unhappy about TriMet service cuts – get in touch. I don’t know how much help I can offer, but I know for a fact that folks in the Seattle Transit Riders Union will try to help if we can. You can reach out to me via email (andrew@city-hikes.com) or you can send me a text. And if you just want to complain, know that I am always happy to hear a complaint from a friend 🙂

Thanks for reading, ’til next time.

Footnotes

1. And before you invoke a budget crisis, just remember that Seattle’s support for King County Metro was born out of recession era service cuts and a failed county-wide funding measure. A better world is possible, but it won’t come if we wait around for the perfect funding structure. ↩︎
2. Seriously, I would rather see the Trailblazers move to Pyongyang than see $600M in public funds going towards a billionaires pet project that will not improve anything in the city. Something that bothers me about all of this that I don’t see reported is that the result of luxury-oriented bullshit like this is higher revenues for the Blazers at the expense of every day people. It will be $600M spent on making the experience WORSE for normal people! I will never respect any politician who gives this kind of hand out to a sports team, and I am broadly supportive of sports. But more on this later. News article for context. ↩︎