As cities around the region try to help their residents move around and improve the environment, some local groups are undertaking innovative new ways to improve transit in their communities. These groups contend that their programs allow communities to fill gaps in the regional transit system and be more responsive to citizen demand.
Three groups presented about their programs at the most recent Metro Policy Advisory Committee meeting as a part of the Climate Smart Communities Scenarios Project. This project is a response to a 2009 state mandate that the Portland area reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent of 2005 levels by 2035.
Forest Grove started operating a local bus service, GroveLink, last August because the city had wanted to expand transit for decades. But TriMet would not expand its offerings in Forest Grove beyond the ending loop of the 57-TV Highway/Forest Grove line.
"Our city interest in transit goes back a great number of years. We wanted to expand transit service when I came to Forest Grove in 1964,” said Forest Grove Mayor Pete Truax. "The bus line was exactly the same as it is now, some 50 years later, and the city has grown from 8,500 to over 22,000 (people)."
The city, using grants from TriMet and the State of Oregon, began a supplementary service to extend transit to Forest Grove High School, industrial areas and outlying neighborhoods.
It has been a success, GroveLink's ridership has increased each month and in January averaged 108 passengers a day.
"We had something like 43 riders the first day, we are now over 100 riders a day. We are at where we thought we would be in two years," Truax said.
The Mary's Woods retirement community in southern Lake Oswego took transit into their own hands to give their non-driving residents an opportunity to get around.
"A lot of people weren't going anyplace because of the long walk from their houses up to the bus stop," said Roger Sabrowski, transportation manager at Mary's Woods. "We do have a bus stop in front of our place but it's almost a quarter mile away from the housing."
So last November they began a shuttle service, called Shuttle in the Woods, to take residents to the Lake Oswego city center and to pick up employees in Oregon City on their way to work.
"We have a lot of employees that live in Oregon City," Sabrowski said, "and the bus route going up south end got cut."
Similar to GroveLink, the drivers for Shuttle in the Woods will deviate off of the route to pick up riders and will also pick up anyone who waves them down along the route. They are working to expand the service by serving another retirement community in West Linn and connecting to the MAX Red Line.
To the southwest, the Tualatin Shuttle was born because Tualatin was growing as a job center.
"We went through the statistical data and we have over 22,000 jobs in town, and it is growing, we always like to say we are the future of Washington County," said Linda Moholt, executive director of the Tualatin Chamber of Commerce.
The chamber surveyed its 13 largest employers and found that 81 percent of workers in Tualatin were commuting by car, Moholt said.
"Maybe 15 percent of them could actually fit a TriMet schedule," she said.
The chamber’s solution was to provide last-mile shuttle service so more workers could take advantage of TriMet. The Tualatin Shuttle consists of two vans, one that travels along a fixed route serving the industrial areas of the city, and one that takes riders directly to their worksite from the WES station.
The shuttle service, which is funded entirely through a TriMet grant, serves 2,200 riders per month.
TriMet also presented at the MPAC meeting, and discussed its planning efforts. Planner Tom Mills, representing the regional transit agency, recognized the need for partnerships like these examples, because they cannot serve every neighborhood. In some cases, he said, a flexible local solution may be more effective.
"The idea behind it is to find partners to serve areas that are difficult to serve with traditional fixed-route transit and find ways to serve them in a more cost efficient way that is more tailored to that community," Mills said.
MPAC Chair Jody Carson, a West Linn city councilor, said she supported the creative transit efforts.
"There are folks in my community that have difficulty getting places and there’s no TriMet line anywhere nearby," she said. "The more we can find opportunities to have these alternatives to regular TriMet lines the better."