When I was young, I wanted to be (a) a U.S. senator, (b) a novelist, or (c) a TriMet bus driver.
My affinity for Portland's buses was directly correlated to the amount of time I spent on them: just getting home from my summer camp at age 10 took three buses and about 1.5 hours. But kids don't mind killing time, and true to form, I used the gaps between connections to indulge in a daily food ritual (pork hum bao from an early downtown food cart, corn dogs from the Burlingame Fred Meyer's - I was not a svelte child).
The last bus on my daily journey - the 39 - only came every half hour and took even longer to reach my house, and its only riders were those like me who had all the time in the world. I always sat in the front seats, legs dangling, corn dog in hand, giant sweating fountain drink between my knees, so I could listen to the bus driver chat with the other passengers. Buses are still pretty friendly around here. Riders greet the driver and say "thank you" when they disembark, and drivers and riders are prone to striking up long and usually random conversations (which make great dinner table stories in the retelling).
My TriMet heyday in the late '80s was the era of the original downtown "bus mall": two streets dedicated to public transit, with two bus stops per block and lots of 1970s public art installations to which our mayor Bud Clark famously exposed himself. The bus shelters were brown-and-glass mushroom-like capsules with honkin' television monitors that displayed, in shaky type like in airport terminals of old, the arrival time of the next buses (which was a-MAAAA-zing in 1988). One of these old stops has been left as a relic, turned into a coffee stand; the new shelters are all sleek and glassy, with flat screen monitors and no real protection from the rain.
Today it's the MAX light rail and the little streetcar that get all the attention (and the funding), but the buses still do most of the serious work. Don't be fooled if you come to town sans car: other than getting to and from the airport, the MAX and the streetcar are pretty much useless. You want the buses.
Granted, buses are not as tourist-friendly. But in Portland, you really can ask the bus driver for help identifying your stop or where you want to go. Plus TriMet has a decent trip planner, which is also integrated into Google maps, and there are more than 50 apps (as collected by TriMet) that provide real-time tracking of the buses.
Alas, due to serious budget shortfalls (and, imho, over-spending on extending the MAX and streetcar lines), TriMet has recently cut back bus service even further. What this means is that locals can't get cross-town quickly (say, from SE to NE Portland) - but it is still super-easy to get just about anywhere from downtown. And for tourists, that is likely what matters most.
OK, so let's say you are staying at a hotel downtown, which also means you probably don't have a car, but you have an extra day to kill and you want to check out this "East Side" you keep hearing about (which is really, truth be told, where you find the heart of Portland these days). What do you do?
Pick a line, ride across the river, and hit up one of East Side's distinct neighborhoods. Roughly from south to north, your best neighborhood bets are:
My affinity for Portland's buses was directly correlated to the amount of time I spent on them: just getting home from my summer camp at age 10 took three buses and about 1.5 hours. But kids don't mind killing time, and true to form, I used the gaps between connections to indulge in a daily food ritual (pork hum bao from an early downtown food cart, corn dogs from the Burlingame Fred Meyer's - I was not a svelte child).
The last bus on my daily journey - the 39 - only came every half hour and took even longer to reach my house, and its only riders were those like me who had all the time in the world. I always sat in the front seats, legs dangling, corn dog in hand, giant sweating fountain drink between my knees, so I could listen to the bus driver chat with the other passengers. Buses are still pretty friendly around here. Riders greet the driver and say "thank you" when they disembark, and drivers and riders are prone to striking up long and usually random conversations (which make great dinner table stories in the retelling).
 |
| Portland's bus mall and Bud Clark's muse. |
 |
| Mushroom bus shelter-turned-coffee shop. |
Today it's the MAX light rail and the little streetcar that get all the attention (and the funding), but the buses still do most of the serious work. Don't be fooled if you come to town sans car: other than getting to and from the airport, the MAX and the streetcar are pretty much useless. You want the buses.
Granted, buses are not as tourist-friendly. But in Portland, you really can ask the bus driver for help identifying your stop or where you want to go. Plus TriMet has a decent trip planner, which is also integrated into Google maps, and there are more than 50 apps (as collected by TriMet) that provide real-time tracking of the buses.
Alas, due to serious budget shortfalls (and, imho, over-spending on extending the MAX and streetcar lines), TriMet has recently cut back bus service even further. What this means is that locals can't get cross-town quickly (say, from SE to NE Portland) - but it is still super-easy to get just about anywhere from downtown. And for tourists, that is likely what matters most.
 |
| The new shelters: sleek, yes; rainproof, not so much. |
Pick a line, ride across the river, and hit up one of East Side's distinct neighborhoods. Roughly from south to north, your best neighborhood bets are:
