Portland is at a critical point in the evolution of our transit network.

Buses and streetcars, along with all the people on them, are increasingly stuck in traffic and getting slower. They are most often delayed while full of passengers, which makes them late to pick up new passengers. This leads to longer travel times by transit. It causes people to be delayed, miss transfers to other transit lines, and ultimately arrive late to their destinations.

Enhanced Transit is the City’s effort to improve transit capacity, reliability, and travel time through capital and operational treatments of moderate cost. There are many ways that cities can improve transit to make it faster and more reliable: smart traffic signals, the placement of bus stops, the use of bus lanes and road striping among others.

All of this is will help us more rapidly implement our Enhanced Transit Corridors Plan (adopted in June 2018) to help meet our transit ridership and mode share goals and make more efficient use of the public right-of-way.

To meet our climate and transportation system plan goals, we need to more than double daily transit commute trips in the City of Portland by 2035. That would get us from approximately 101,500 daily transit commute trips in 2010 to 223,500 daily transit commute trips in 2035. This means increasing daily transit commute trips by 7,625 trips each year.

We have work to do.