How Come TriMet Has Exactly Zero Routes That Use Our Beautiful, New Sellwood Bridge?

There’s not enough demand for burb-to-burb travel to justify a dedicated route.

By Marty Smith

How come TriMet has exactly zero routes that use our beautiful, new Sellwood Bridge? If you want go from, say, Milwaukie to Lake Oswego, you still have to go through downtown. Could we have at least one east-west route? —Austin

What a shocking oversight—you'd think the well-heeled machers of Lake Oswego would have descended on City Hall long ago, demanding that the unwashed hordes of Milwaukie be provided easier access to Lake O's manicured lawns, country clubs and insincere water sculptures.

Conspiracy theories aside, I understand that you, like everyone else, thinks there should be a straight-through, frequent-service bus line running directly from your door to your drug dealer's house. Unfortunately, the logistics of public transit (not to mention the frequency with which drug dealers change residences) make this impossible.

Freaks like you aside, most folks on public transit are traveling between this or that outlying neighborhood and the central city. There's not enough demand for burb-to-burb travel to justify a dedicated route.

That said, one bus does cross the Sellwood Bridge: the rush-hour-only line 99. Sure, it's on its way downtown, but you can now transfer to line 35 or 36 to get your Tualatin fix.

If that's not enough breathless excitement for you, remember that TriMet is a government agency, which means it is constitutionally obligated to listen to your tedious whining.

"We are listening," says TriMet's Roberta Altstadt. "TriMet is always looking for rider feedback and input on current and potential future service." She also suggests you join TriMet's Riders Club, which offers polls, surveys, focus groups and access to exciting behind-the-scenes transit events—not to mention, one presumes, some pretty wild parties.

That's your cue, Austin. If you and enough of your fellow Milwaukians demand a direct route to West Linn—haunting public-comment hearings, sending damp letters vaguely alluding to legal action, and leaving long, meandering messages on the voicemail at 503-238-RIDE—TriMet will have to at least think about it. Become a transit crank—you know you want to!

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