Proposed TriMet bus route changes

I DO NOT like combining the 70&6.

I really don’t see improvements in any changes that Trimet makes to routes.

All I see is attempts to maximize labor by increasing routes and decreasing layovers.

This company suffers from the same affliction that most of the rest of the world does,

USE YOUR LABOR FORCE AS YOU WOULD USE YOUR MACHINE,

never give it a break, use it till it falls apart then replace it!

When I was a kid (in the early 1970’s) the bus to downtown was the 6 Sellwood, which roughly followed the same route as the 70 does today, except it (1) didn’t go all the way to Milwaukie, and (2) it took a left turn and went downtown via the Hawthorne Bridge. Once it got downtown, it became the 6 Union Ave. bus and continued on to Jantzen Beach. We would occasionally go all the way through and visit the Jantzen Beach Shopping Center.

So there is a history of the two routes being paired.

That being said, I think (just from the number of people I see on the bus) that the current 6 MLK Jr Blvd bus gets a lot of traffic to downtown. It seems like it would be a real hassle for folks who live up that way to all transfer to the MAX train to get downtown.

I would want to see some good facts showing that many #6 riders go to Lloyd Center before I am ready to accept that this makes sense.

First of all, a couple years ago I got to go digging through the drawer-ful of old schedules in the TriMet library (I hope to go back and scan them in sometime) and one of the things I found was a 6-Sellwood schedule. Thanks for the explanation of that.

Second, most people on the 6 going downtown could also transfer to the 14 on Hawthorne or another bus, though they might have to take a detour over to 11th/12th.

I would gather that a ton of people on the #6 go to Lloyd Center. The transfers to the MAX at Convention Center for the #6 are heavily used. Often half the bus will get off right there. But they rarely transfer to MAX for downtown, but instead head for Lloyd Center. Most of the riders that do this are kids/teenagers. But they still make up about half - or more sometimes, of the ridership at various parts of the day.

The commuters however ride all the way in and sometimes transfer to MAX. It does seem though that those people would want to be able to get downtown.

However, and increase might be received by increasing north south service. It is an area where TriMet just doesn’t have a good grasp right now even though a demand is there. If that is the case, inconveniencing a few people so that more people can ride would be a good trade off - from an efficiency, environmentally, and economically sound decision viewpoint.