What do you do if you find that gasoline prices are rising in the Portland Metro / Southeast Washington area? You either:
- Drive less
- Buy less gas
- Take public transportation
Even if it is sort of a, “Well, duh!” story, O Live has a story about the surge of riders taking public transportation (love the packed MAX pic!). They did have some good info in the story, such as:
“Portland-area ridership on TriMet’s buses and MAX trains jumped 2.6 percent - adding an average 48,000 more rides per week on the system - in the first three months of this year, compared with the same time last year. That’s the biggest quarterly jump in at least four years, not counting when 2005 ice storms and a new North Portland rail line in 2004 boosted ridership counts.”
I think all of us can personally attest to seeing our daily rides on TriMet’s public transportation lines (MAX, bus or streetcar) becoming more & more crowded. While not necessarily a bad thing (at all, actually - love the mentality to take public transportation), TriMet needs to step up their game and make sure they’re enforcing rider rules, fare inspectors need to be more & more present to take those taking a ‘free ride’ and, as some changes have already been seen this year, tweaking some schedules around to accommodate bus routes that are more popular with riders.
5 comments ↓
Definitely noticed a change. On the 44/54/56 from Hillsdale to DT there was standing room only on a few commutes last week, that was the first time I’d ever seen that…
Wonder how much of that is gas prices vs. job growth downtown? I’m personally part of that 2.6% statistic, not necessarily because of the high gas prices but rather because I wasn’t working downtown six months ago.
Justin - where did you work before and why didn’t you take the bus?
I lived and worked on opposite ends of Vancouver, and mostly didn’t take the bus because a) the stops I needed on both ends of the commute were about 1 mile from my destinations, b) because driving cut the time in half and c) parking was free.
With my current situation, ‘a’ isn’t a problem (I drive to the park-and-ride at the Expo center and I like my 10 minute walk to my office), ‘b’ is a push (takes me about the same amount of time to drive as it does to MAX), and with ‘c’, well, parking downtown daily is much more cost-prohibitive to me than the increasing gas prices.
[…] Good news! More & more people are taking public transportation (most likely due to the soaring gas prices) these days! And TriMet has the numbers to prove it - they just had a record-breaking April: […]
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