Robert Palmer is literate. Smoetimes.

One thing I entirely omitted from my prior Portland post (that’s PPP, with PP at the end, even) was our fantastic experience with TriMet, the regional transit operator in Portland.

TriMet puts San Diego MTS to shame. This may be due in large part to the fact that TriMet gets three times the budget than MTS ($741m versus $239m), yet serves an area half the size, with half the people.

Also, Portland has a well-planned street grid. San Diego’s street grid was designed by a drunk six-year-old monkey playing SimCity 2000.

Anyway, our experience was great. We bought an all-day pass for $4.25 on Thursday. We took one bus from our hotel to Washington Park, and the driver was the most adorable old lady. We got on, and she said, “nobody gets on my bus downtown during the week. You must be tourists.” So we got the grand tour of everything on her line, and she even picked us up again when we were done at the park. We took MAX back from the park to downtown.

MAX is Portland’s light-rail system, uses similar Siemens/Avanto cars to San Diego’s newer S70 cars. MAX cars, however, don’t try and cram 225 people per car, and have fewer larger seats. The announcements are clear, in English and Spanish. Each car also has two bike hooks where bicyclists can hang their bikes safely. Outstanding.

The bus system is similarly fantastic. From downtown, no matter where we wanted to go, we only had to take one bus to get there. No transfers. The line numbers were the same in both directions. There was a great service they offered, too, where you could call an automated system with your stop number, and a text-to-speech engine would read the next bus arrival times. Some bus stations had LED signs, and buses themselves had signs onboard showing the next scheduled stop. Text-to-speech announcements, too. This was because their budget allowed them to put GPS transmitters on every bus and train. Amazing.

So if you’re staying in downtown Portland, don’t hesitate to rely on TriMet to get to interesting parts of town. It’s much better than renting a car.

3 months ago