Anonymous asked:
Is Trimet a good transit system?
catgirlforeskin answered:
It’s decent where I am, most bus-related problems are (besides funding) a result of still having to navigate inside car-centric infrastructure and cities, which are bad. I use it pretty regularly and can’t complain too much
Biggest issues I think are the lack of connectivity to certain parts of the portland area (especially southwest) and the slow speed thru downtown Portland itself because of a lack of grade separation and too many stops close together. Every light rail being funneled over the same bridge also limits frequency and speed. The "too many stops" problem extends to the bus routes too, for example the bus route closest to my house has stops literally every 2 blocks for a significant portion of it, for basically no reason (these aren't massive city blocks, they are pretty small, it takes literally a minute to walk from one of these stops to the next). This leads to a bus that takes 25 minutes to go two miles in a straight line, even with no traffic. The light rails also have stops in downtown that are like, only 3 or 4 blocks apart in some places, and the most obnoxious and incoherent of these is the fact that there is one stop that is literally only one block away from another (albeit a large city block, but it's still absurd for a light rail). It's especially silly cause one of those stops is the stop that my very slow bus route connects to.
While the grade separation and increased frequency (by building a new bridge, or retrofitting an old one) are things that would need large infrastructure investments, many problems could be solved basically effortlessly by reducing some of the stops that are right next to eachother on both the bus routes and the MAX lines.
✍️💯🔥
We are kissing rn. City of Bridges needs some more fuckin bridges (or just take away some from the cars and run rail and buses over em. Tired of having to go through downtown to get anywhere else)
Every US City should be given a free ring line in their metro system to give them an actual interconnected transit system
