Being a civil engineer, I’m pretty interested in transportation and transit in particular (although the actual work I do usually involves more highway and street design than transit, unfortunately). I love transit maps and I’ve tried to collect as many as possible (mostly in electronic form) from cities around the world. So in my free time at work I decided to draw a map of possible future transit service in the Portland area. I started with a more geographically accurate map, but thought it might look cooler if I did a diagrammatic version. Most of the service shown in this map is either existing, in the planning or construction phase, or has been mentioned in TriMet/Metro reports (the RTP, etc). There are some, though, that I just thought would be cool, so I drew them in. Here it is (you can click on the map for a much larger version if you can’t read the text)…
A few notes about the map…
- I didn’t include streetcar lines because I thought it would get too cluttered.
- Heavier lines indicate service that currently exists or is under construction or planning (I didn’t include the CRC in this category, but probably should have).
- Service that hasn’t reached the planning stages (and some that may never get there because I just made them up) is in a lighter line weight.
- I’m not sure if the Milwaukie LRT will actually be a yellow line extension, but I drew it that way. I’ve seen drawings that made it look like a yellow line and others that made it look orange.
- The “Orange Line” has not been chosen (as far as I’m aware) as the color for the Barbur/I-5 light rail, I just thought the map could use some orange (it looks brown in the image, but looked orange when I drew it in CAD). Same goes for the “Grey Line.”
- The Powell/Foster “Grey Line” was mentioned in the RTP as a BRT line, extending to Damascus, but I thought the map would look cooler if it were LRT to Clackamas TC. 
- I drew new commuter rail lines in pink/purple.
- New stations are in parentheses.
- I haven’t drawn a city center map yet.
- The lines I basically just made up are the St. Johns Yellow Line branch, the I-5 South to Boones Ferry Orange Line branch, the East Vancouver Red Line branch (I did see a map from the 80s that listed this as a possibility, but haven’t seen anything in current documents about it), the Bethany Red Line branch, the Blue Line Express, and the TV highway commuter rail. All the others were mentioned as possibilities for future high capacity transit in the RTP or somewhere else (though I made up the station locations on some of them).
So what do you think? What areas did I leave out that should have rail service? Does anyone else have a “fantasy transit map” for Portland? Feel free to post it if you do.
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