By Maxwell Powers
TriMet has a new “road diet” planned for Portland, this time on 82nd Avenue. Working with Metro, TriMet is proposing a transit corridor entirely dedicated to buses. They plan to dedicate bus-only lanes, up and down both sides of the street, shrinking 82nd from a four-lane avenue down to a two-lane road for up to seven miles—from Clackamas Town Center to Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
The project claims that bus-only lanes are only one of the options as part of ongoing conversations, but the most recent Metro mockup on the future of 82nd Avenue prominently prioritizes “BAT lanes” (Business Access and Transit lanes) as the locally preferred alternative (LPA).
By cutting car lanes in half, the bus-only lanes will increase congestion substantially. According to TriMet’s own estimates, adding these lanes would cause up to 25 percent of drivers to divert from their routes to avoid traffic. Those diversions will put more stress on residential streets and neighborhoods, requiring additional safety features and maintenance. In the same document, TriMet states these new bus-only lanes will save transit riders three or four minutes at most. That’s with seven straight miles of bus lanes.
The purpose of 82nd Avenue—also known as Highway 213—is to move as many people and vehicles as possible from point A to point B. What moves more people: a lane that allows both cars and buses, or a lane that only allows buses?
Metro Council is scheduled to consider bond funding for 82nd avenue and four other projects on July 31. Metro should eliminate bus-only “BAT lanes” from any further consideration as part of the 82nd Avenue Transit Project.
Max Powers is a Research Associate at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market, public policy, research organization.
Kimberly
Stop messing with the highways a lot of people drive and do not take dry Net. You don’t think about the actual cars you would make more of a traffic jam than anything and hardly anybody rides the buses in the Max because you guys don’t take care of your shit, clean up your buses and your maxes before you go making only bus roads.
terry
As a registered Democrat, I want to register my disapproval of “road diet” for 82nd ave . Tri-Met is a non competent organization that has only stifling rules and costs for the average person in the Tri-County area. Tri-Met was spawned by the Federal Government and should be ended.