Various short trips around the Willamette Valley

[Matthew H Fish]

This one had been on my list for a long time:

Lane Transit District, centered in Eugene, Oregon, has a "city bus" that goes 55 miles eastward, through the McKenzie River Valley to McKenzie Bridge. It only runs, currently, four times a day, and since I live in Corvallis, I had to really plan out how to get there. I took an Amtrak train from Albany to Eugene. It was supposed to arrive there about 30 minutes before the bus left, and so I was naturally a little anxious--- since Eugene Amtrak and Eugene transit center are 10 blocks apart, I was calculating how late I could be and still run to the station! To my surprise, the Cascades pulled into Eugene 10 minutes early.
I don't know the exact combination of politics and policy that led to a "city bus" up the McKenzie River Valley, but I am glad it is there! The bus takes about 90 minutes from Eugene to its turnaround at McKenzie Bridge, which is actually really quick for a 55 mile route. The stops are at a few towns, but at some places, the bus just stops by boat ramps and river access. The town I stopped for, waiting for the bus to turn around, was Blue River---a town that I learned, after arriving in it, had almost totally burnt to the ground three years ago.
One thing I talked about in this video is that sometimes it is hard to explain what Oregon, or the Western States in general, are like to people from the Eastern US or Europe, because the distances and the population densities are so different. In this video, I mention that Lane County is about the size of Connecticut, or a little smaller than Slovenia. And that for Oregon, Lane County is considered to be one of the "urban" counties since it has a big city. So the fact that this area gets even four buses a day is a good thing.
And finally, for Amtrak travelers, especially the more adventurous kind, this would be a good place to consider visiting, because it is possible, with a little planning, to pop off a Cascades or Coast Starlight, take the bus up to a campsite on the river, spend a night or two, and then head back to Eugene to continue your journey. It is even possible to do some of this in a day trip---although, as I showed, it is a cramped trip for time.

 

[tgstubbs1]

And finally, for Amtrak travelers, especially the more adventurous kind, this would be a good place to consider visiting, because it is possible, with a little planning, to pop off a Cascades or Coast Starlight, take the bus up to a campsite on the river, spend a night or two, and then head back to Eugene to continue your journey. It is even possible to do some of this in a day trip---although, as I showed, it is a cramped trip for time.

This is a good idea, but I bet most people wouldn't know how to figure out that it's possible. I'm not sure if there are any guidebooks that descirbe these kinds of short sidetrips in any detail.

 

[Willbridge]

This one had been on my list for a long time:

Lane Transit District, centered in Eugene, Oregon, has a "city bus" that goes 55 miles eastward, through the McKenzie River Valley to McKenzie Bridge. It only runs, currently, four times a day, and since I live in Corvallis, I had to really plan out how to get there. I took an Amtrak train from Albany to Eugene. It was supposed to arrive there about 30 minutes before the bus left, and so I was naturally a little anxious--- since Eugene Amtrak and Eugene transit center are 10 blocks apart, I was calculating how late I could be and still run to the station! To my surprise, the Cascades pulled into Eugene 10 minutes early.
I don't know the exact combination of politics and policy that led to a "city bus" up the McKenzie River Valley, but I am glad it is there! The bus takes about 90 minutes from Eugene to its turnaround at McKenzie Bridge, which is actually really quick for a 55 mile route. The stops are at a few towns, but at some places, the bus just stops by boat ramps and river access. The town I stopped for, waiting for the bus to turn around, was Blue River---a town that I learned, after arriving in it, had almost totally burnt to the ground three years ago.

I was working for ODOT in Salem and my brother was Service Planner for Lane Transit District when this service was introduced. The key thing that happened was the 1973-75 Energy Crisis. LTD had only been formed on June 29, 1970 and had taken over the failing Emerald Transportation Co. driver co-op in November 1970. They were still getting established when Oregon was hard hit by overlapping shortages of hydro power, natural gas, and the world petroleum shortage,

Under the 1969 Oregon statute, transit districts could be formed within SMSA counties. Lane County -- as your video shows -- was sharply divided between urban and rural areas. As part of the land use plan, Eugene-Springfield, and unincorporated Bethel and Thurston, were surrounded by the Urban Growth Boundary. LTD pledged to not encourage sprawl and so its board limited taxation and service to the urban defined area. I think that they were also aware that Tri-Met in the Portland SMSA had used the county boundaries and was launched into battles with rural pockets that had no service and sprawl suburbs that opposed taxation and were getting little or no service at the start-up phase which in Portland began in 1969.

LTD's attempt to be responsible backfired when the Energy Crisis hit. The smaller Lane County cities were outraged that they were not being served or were served by Greyhound Lines or Pacific Trailways at times oriented to longer distance trips. McKenzie Bridge was served by one daily Bend<>Eugene PT trip. Westbound in 1974 it stopped there at 1:05 a.m., eastbound at 1:25 a.m. Blue River did not show in the timetable, although it was a flag stop.

McKenzie Bridge and related towns had reverse commuting from Eugene-Springfield to a fish hatchery and lumber operations. It also had day trippers and hikers from the university population. It and the other interested areas were brought into the district. The biggest potential area, Florence, turned the idea down to avoid the taxes. Critics demanded service immediately! A subfleet of GM "New Look" suburbans was bought from Baltimore to provide highway service.

And five decades later, the emergency service is still running.

LTD received the "Green Meanies" from the driver co-op in 1970.


Desperate for equipment, LTD purchased a subfleet of well-used "Baby Jimmies" from LA in 1972.


Ridership soared and a federal grant finally came through for a subfleet of gasoline powered Twin Coaches. None of these buses was built for highway operation.


Edit: And here's Maryland to the rescue. Going to the second-hand market was politically necessary for LTD's suburban/rural expansion pressures and there wasn't time enough to convince UMTA (FTA) with studies to get federal funding.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

LTD's attempt to be responsible backfired when the Energy Crisis hit. The smaller Lane County cities were outraged that they were not being served or were served by Greyhound Lines or Pacific Trailways at times oriented to longer distance trips. McKenzie Bridge was served by one daily Bend<>Eugene PT trip. Westbound in 1974 it stopped there at 1:05 a.m., eastbound at 1:25 a.m. Blue River did not show in the timetable, although it was a flag stop.

McKenzie Bridge and related towns had reverse commuting from Eugene-Springfield to a fish hatchery and lumber operations. It also had day trippers and hikers from the university population. It and the other interested areas were brought into the district. The biggest potential area, Florence, turned the idea down to avoid the taxes. Critics demanded service immediately! A subfleet of GM "New Look" suburbans was bought from Baltimore to provide highway service.

And five decades later, the emergency service is still running.

So basically someone made this decision five years before I was born and no one has gotten around to changing it since then?
I would also guess that for some of the smaller communities, the bus (which had 3-6 riders on my trips) is a lifeline for certain people, especially for medical uses. And I imagine someone looked at the cost of subsidizing a bus route and compared it to the cost of sending an individual ambulance out. Medical transportation gets very expensive very quickly.
It does produce some oddities though. The McKenzie River valley gets four round trips a day. The city of Coburg, substantially larger, and substantially closer, gets two. I guess that it was just stitched together, over time, and that with the main focus being moving university students around, the less transit friendly suburbs just get what they get through inertia.

This is a good idea, but I bet most people wouldn't know how to figure out that it's possible. I'm not sure if there are any guidebooks that descirbe these kinds of short sidetrips in any detail.

I actually have a thread in "Where to go, what to see", about all the possible side-trips off of the Amtrak Cascades.
But I agree---for the most part, it is hard to plan for, and to find the information, unless you are specifically the type of person who pours over local transit system guides and maps for fun (like me). And a lot of times, with local transit, there are complicated fare structures, routes change, it is hard to know how reliable the transit system is, sometimes there are diversions, that type of thing...so even when it looks good on paper, a lot of times it isn't something a weary traveller would want to jump into.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Another video, and an announcement!
Yesterday, I travelled to Stayton, Oregon, a small town/suburb of Salem located about 15 miles east of Salem, Oregon. To get there, I took a Flixbus to Salem, and then a regional Cheeriots bus, followed by the same bus back to Salem, where I took an Amtrak bus from Salem to Albany, where I then took the loop bus back to Corvallis. I left before 8 AM and got back after 9 PM to go somewhere that was less than 30 miles in a straight line from my house.
Before making this post, I reread a lot of the comments I made in the previous six pages. I realized that I repeated myself a lot...but of course, I wrote these entries months apart, so I sometimes forgot what I said. But also, some of the points are obvious and do need repeating. And most of them apply here.
For long distance Amtrak travellers, Stayton is another town---like Silverton to the north, that while it is possible to visit, and while it has some charm, it would be difficult to recommend that anyone specifically go out of their way to visit Stayton. With the planned expansion of Amtrak Cascades service later this year/early next year, maybe it will be more possible to visit some of these smaller towns, if a long distance traveller is curious about Oregon.
Second, from a local transit point of view---in cities like this, even though they are not tiny, and are not that far distance, transit is treated like a social service. On the local bus to get there, there was 5 or 6 riders. I understand that it is obviously important to those people, but the idea is that bus service is clanky and slow and not for large numbers of people who need to commute. So even though there is local transit service that works all over the Willamette Valley, outside of Portland and Eugene, it is pretty much treated only as a last option.
And now for my announcement, which is that I am leaving the US in a few days. More details to come, and more trip reports, because I am going somewhere where I can ride trains at least a little!
Also, I had some other thoughts here, but I am too tired to write them now. I want to talk a little bit more about Amtrak Cascades and the Willamette Valley, after taking all these trips!

 

[Matthew H Fish]

So this is an objective comment on the Amtrak Cascades, and why I was travelling to all these small towns.
One thing I never really put into words before, because I didn't realize it, is how much an outlier the Amtrak Cascades is in terms of distance travelled, and the size of the cities served.
The Amtrak Cascades is the second longest state supported route, at 467 miles (including Canada). Also, almost every other corridor route is anchored in a large city (New York, Chicago, LA or the Bay Area). Seattle and Portland are bigger than they used to be, but they are still mid-sized metros, that have five trains a day between them (including the Coast Starlight). The closest comparison is the Piedmont and the Missouri River Runner---both of which have shorter routes.
So part of my interest here, is to see how corridor service can serve the areas around smaller metro areas. Of course, these videos are in Oregon, where there is only three train trips, and several bus trips, a day. But still: the three stops where I spent most of my time (Salem, Albany and Eugene), were in metro areas of around 300,000, 75,000 and 300,000 people, and they get train service three times a day! Meanwhile, there are corridors with cities much closer together that get service only once a day, or less! So in some ways, the Amtrak Cascades is a great success.
But the Cascades are also off-mission for Amtrak. Amtrak's main missions seem to be the NEC along very busy cities that are relatively close together---and long distance routes that are geared towards tourists. But Amtrak probably doesn't consider a senior citizen in Salem who needs semi-regularly medical visits to Portland among their core base. Oregon and Washington kind of invented, or reinvented this type of corridor service! And soon, it might be spreading to other mid-sized metro areas, like Minneapolis and the Ohio corridor.
So one thing I would conclude, from all these trips, is that the presence of train service hasn't really changed life and transportation possibilities outside of the cities right on the corridor. It could, but it doesn't. If you are a hearty traveller and you live in Salem and you want to go to Seattle for fun or business, it is a possibility. But if you are in a town like Stayton---really anywhere more than a few miles from the train station, the added time and effort of getting to the train station makes corridor travel much less likely. And I think this takes away a lot of the customer base, and a lot of the political base, for train travel. I think that Amtrak should try to integrate shuttles between the different cities along the Cascades routes. And I think that communities that want to implement Amtrak corridor service in places like Denver, Minneapolis, and the C3D corridor, should look at what has worked and not worked about the Amtrak Cascades, and see how mid-sized cities can increase ridership by making it easier for people in suburbs, exurbs, and small towns to access the train.

 

[AmtrakMaineiac]

Also, almost every other corridor route is anchored in a large city (New York, Chicago, LA or the Bay Area). Seattle and Portland are bigger than they used to be, but they are still mid-sized metros, that have five trains a day between them (including the Coast Starlight). The closest comparison is the Piedmont and the Missouri River Runner---both of which have shorter routes.

Another comparison would be the Downeaster route which has 5 trains each way daily between a city roughly the size of Seattle or Portland OR (Boston), and Portland ME which is much smaller, also a shorter route.

 

[Willbridge]

In 1972 when the Cascades corridor was conceived it evolved from planning for a BART-style, separate right-of-way between Portland and Eugene. That idea is reflected in the 1967 telegram below (yes, I misspelled the name of the SP's president). After the Army had sent me to Europe for 27 months and I had hung around train stations of all sizes I had a much better understanding of the importance of network design as compared to high-tech new technologies. Capital projects should support the network -- scheduling, reliability, convenience.

That's the approach that has been taken by most of my successors since. As Matthew has discovered, there are an awful lot of loose ends that could be better coordinated. And it's sad that there aren't more examples of this approach in other North American corridors.

Oregon's political system was heavily influenced by Switzerland's. It would be great if its transport system could be influenced by Switzerland, too.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Another comparison would be the Downeaster route which has 5 trains each way daily between a city roughly the size of Seattle or Portland OR (Boston), and Portland ME which is much smaller, also a shorter route.

I think along with its size advantage, Boston has the advantage of being a city that is on the NEC, and where people are used to riding rail. I think that is a reason a lot of routes that branch off from the NEC, like the Downeaster, Empire Service, Ethan Allen, and Keystone are so successful. Harrisburg isn't that big of a city, but when you have 30 or so Amtrak trains a day going between New York and Washington DC, you have a large amount of people who are naturally going to think of rail. On the West Coast, of course, we just have the Coast Starlight.

In 1972 when the Cascades corridor was conceived it evolved from planning for a BART-style, separate right-of-way between Portland and Eugene. That idea is reflected in the 1967 telegram below (yes, I misspelled the name of the SP's president). After the Army had sent me to Europe for 27 months and I had hung around train stations of all sizes I had a much better understanding of the importance of network design as compared to high-tech new technologies. Capital projects should support the network -- scheduling, reliability, convenience.

I've had this same discussion with many enthusiastic young transit fans, especially about more fanciful ideas of extending commuter rail to every town or that the area between Redding and Eugene needs a "high speed corridor".
The technology for rail exists, and the speed of the Cascades is pretty good. But there isn't much of a network. And from my experience, a lot of that is cultural, because most people in smaller towns, or even in most suburbs, just won't consider taking a bus seriously. When I look at communities like Stayton, or Junction City, or McMinnville, I see a lot of people whose economic and educational prospects could expand greatly with access to transportation. And there has to be enough people in towns like that to fill at least a few buses a day. But since they don't consider it, no demand is generated, etc.
But I am probably repeating myself here...