By Randal O’Toole
March 2026
Executive Summary
In 2024, the Oregon legislature Senate Bill 5701 (Section 503) directed Metro to study the Portland area’s 200 miles of freight rail corridors as potential regional passenger or commuter-rail lines.
Metro’s study found that regional rail has “high operating costs,” would often require “significant infrastructure improvements,” that many of the rail lines are already congested with more than 30 trains a day, less than 20 percent of the land in the corridors has “high ridership generating land uses,” and that “some corridors” are not going to attract many riders.
Despite these negative findings, Metro didn’t rule out regional passenger rail, instead calling the rail lines “a potentially underutilized passenger mobility resource.” Metro recommended that policy makers “consider connections to areas outside of the Portland region” such as Salem, “prioritize projects with key near-term opportunities,” and “build ridership . . . to prepare for passenger rail.” Metro also recommended that the region consider “a MAX tunnel through downtown,” “replacing the Steel Bridge,” and “increasing density” along potential rail corridors.
Metro appears to be recommending against regional passenger rail at the moment but proposes activities aimed at creating a future when such rail lines will make more sense. In doing so, Metro betrays a flawed understanding of the characteristics of rail transportation as applied to a modern urban area such as Portland.
Randal O’Toole is an Adjunct Scholar at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. He is a transportation and land-use policy analyst and the author of several books, including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. He writes from Central Oregon.
Dale R Winke
Recent commentary from the Cascade Policy Institute, including arguments advanced by John Charles and Randal O’Toole, raises legitimate questions about cost, infrastructure requirements, and ridership potential of regional passenger rail. Those considerations deserve careful evaluation. However, the conclusion drawn from them — that rail should therefore be dismissed in favor of buses alone — rests on an overly narrow understanding of how transportation systems function. Around the world, the most effective mobility networks are built not on a single mode, but on complementary layers of transportation. Rail often serves as a high-capacity regional backbone linking major centers, while buses provide flexible distribution to neighborhoods and destinations beyond the rail corridor. Over time, this layered structure encourages transit-oriented development — residential, commercial, recreational, and civic — that strengthens both ridership and regional economic vitality. The experience of regions such as Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in Germany demonstrates how rail and bus systems can evolve together into durable regional mobility networks.
The deeper issue is not rail versus bus, but freedom of movement. Transportation systems dominated by any single mode — including the automobile — inevitably create forms of dependency. When a private vehicle becomes the only practical means of participating in daily life, individuals must assume the financial and logistical burden of ownership simply to remain mobile. A more balanced transportation system expands personal independence by providing several reliable options: rail, buses, walking, cycling, and shared-vehicle models. In such an ecosystem, automobiles remain an important tool, but they are no longer the only viable path to mobility. Transportation systems are not built for spreadsheets alone; they are built for the people who rely on them every day — to work, to learn, to visit family, and to participate in the life of their community.
Transportation policy must also recognize that infrastructure shapes the future as much as it reflects the present. Energy security, economic development, personal independence, and system resilience are not competing objectives; they are interconnected outcomes of thoughtful infrastructure planning. People may rank these priorities differently depending not only on the lens through which they analyze policy, but also the circumstances through which they live. Supporting Metro’s effort to thoughtfully evaluate regional rail is therefore not simply a question of mode preference, but of responsible stewardship — maximizing the potential of past, present, and future transportation assets for the benefit of the community, the general public, visitors to the region, and individuals of every age who rely on the ability to move freely through it.
Dale R Winke
In thinking further about the discussion surrounding the Cascade Policy Institute’s critique of regional rail, it is worth returning to the central concept of freedom. If the debate is truly about freedom, it must also be about the conditions that allow freedom to exist. A society in which people have only one practical means of transportation is, by definition, a society with limited choice. When mobility depends entirely on a single mode, individuals who cannot access that mode are effectively excluded from full participation in community life. Expanding transportation options — whether through buses, rail, shared vehicles, walking, or cycling — strengthens freedom by giving people the practical ability to move through their communities in ways that fit their circumstances.
It is also reasonable to acknowledge that we operate within an environment of constrained resources, particularly financial ones. But scarcity should not narrow our thinking; it should sharpen our focus on maximizing the utility of those resources for the greatest number of people possible. When infrastructure investments are planned thoughtfully and used well, they often generate mobility, economic activity, and opportunity that expand the very resources we initially believed were limited.
Arguments that buses alone represent the most cost-effective form of mass transit may hold true in some contexts. Yet that conclusion becomes incomplete if it leads to the exclusion of rail as part of the solution. Rail can provide a high-capacity backbone that allows buses and other modes to function more effectively within a regional network. The goal should therefore not be to choose one tool at the expense of another, but to assemble a multimodal system that uses each mode where it performs best. In doing so, transportation policy can expand freedom of movement while also making the most responsible use of scarce public resources.
A transportation philosophy, plan, and system that expands choices strengthens freedom; one that narrows those choices deserves careful reconsideration.