Central City Mass Transit Tunnel

[MarkDaMan]

Duh!

From KGW: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/t...283-6ed9c1fc-7e8b-4ccd-b589-1324d76a9d6e

Sick of slow MAX trains? A downtown Portland tunnel could speed things up, eventually
Downtown Portland is a light rail bottleneck, and Metro says a tunnel would help fix it — but it's not a high priority right now.
Author: Anthony Macuk (KGW)
Published: 6:00 PM PDT May 6, 2024
Updated: 5:50 PM PDT May 7, 2024

PORTLAND, Oregon — Regular riders of Portland's MAX light rail system are all too familiar with the problem: the trains zip in quickly toward the city center along Interstate 84 and the Robertson Tunnel, but they slow to a crawl as soon as they hit downtown, often making it so the final couple miles of a trip take almost as long as the whole rest of the journey.

Portlanders who have visited New York, London or even Seattle may have noticed that those cities don't have the same problem, thanks to a key piece of infrastructure that Portland lacks: downtown train tunnels. The observation raises an obvious question: can Portland still catch up?

The answer is yes — it isn't going to happen anytime soon, but the idea of a downtown Portland MAX tunnel has been around for a long time, and TriMet and Metro have both taken some early steps to study what it might look like.

Speed and the Steel Bridge
Running on dense city streets and surrounded by mixed traffic, MAX trains are limited to just 15 miles per hour when they cross downtown Portland — and factoring in station stops and waiting for cross traffic, the average speed is even slower.

TriMet knows its a problem, and in recent years the agency has tried to speed things up by closing a few downtown stations that were spaced too close together and upgrading the tracks on the Steel Bridge so trains can cross a little faster.

Those improvements help, but the gains are marginal; it currently still takes an average of 22 minutes for a train to travel between the Goose Hollow and Lloyd Center stations and west and east ends of downtown. The next station on the chopping block is Skidmore Fountain, but TriMet estimates that taking it out will only save about 40 seconds.

Truly speeding things up would require a whole new route that takes the trains off the streets altogether, which is where the tunnel concept comes in. TriMet and Metro have both looked into the idea, first with a TriMet study in 2017 and then with a Metro study two years later.

Train speed was definitely a factor in the studies, but the biggest driver was actually a separate problem: the Steel Bridge, where all of the MAX lines converge to cross the river on a single set of tracks.

...

...

Metro's tunnel plan

The Metro study concluded that a tunnel would be the best option to solve the Steel Bridge bottleneck, in part because it avoids the problems with the above-ground crossing options, and in part because it would solve the downtown speed problem at the same time. It's also the only option that would allow for the possibility of running longer trains, because the underground station platforms wouldn't be limited by the length of Portland's city blocks.

The tunnel as envisioned in the study would be exclusively for the Blue Line, turning it into a sort of express route for riders passing through downtown. The other lines would remain on their current surface routes to keep serving existing stations, but they would still benefit from the removal of the Blue Line from the Steel Bridge.

...

...

And even if momentum for a tunnel starts building again, the project's price tag is likely to be a major obstacle. The 2017 TriMet study put the estimated cost of a tunnel at up to about $2 billion, and just two years later, the Metro study estimated the cost at up to $4.5 billion — and both estimates came long before the recent period of post-pandemic inflation.

Ridership is another factor that could decrease the urgency. MAX ridership peaked around 2013 and then plateaued for several years, and came crashing down due to pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. It's been growing again for the past two years, but still hasn't caught up to pre-pandemic levels. In the long run, Metro planners see the pandemic as a blip rather than a permanent change in the ridership trajectory, but it does suggest that Portland is still a long way out from the kind of capacity crunch that might boost the case for a tunnel.

....(continues)