Various short trips around the Willamette Valley

[Matthew H Fish]

Tri-Met Rte 57 is a direct corporate descendant of the Red Electric.

Among all that other great information, I am curious about this, because back in the 1990s, Route 57 was somehow the Trimet bus with the most hours of service, running from something like 5 AM to 2 AM in all. Was this a legacy of that being the schedule of what was essentially an intercity bus/train line when Forest Grove was a clearly different city than Portland?

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I've heard, don't know if this is accurate, that some of the surrounding Oregon counties aren't in the 'self-limiting' growth pact which has led to them growing and sprawling. It's also led to Vancouver being a housing destination for cheaper housing since it's in another state the regulations haven't affected it as much - obviously everywhere has had massive ramp ups in prices lately.

It is also hard to calculate just how much cities have "sprawled", because sometimes larger cities will have certain features (like airports and regional parks) that bring down their average density. Just looking at people per square mile isn't always a good way to tell if a city is dense or not.
But many of the cities in the Willamette Valley outside of Portland do have a lot of sprawl, but because they have sprawl, it doesn't mean they are adding housing. To illustrate the point, I am going to do some totally unfair cherry-picking:

This is the interchange between I-5 and 99E in Albany, Oregon, which is the city in the Willamette Valley that is generally the furthest away from being transit/pedestrian friendly
And here is Orenco Station, a high density neighborhood planned around transit access in Hillsboro, Oregon:

(These pictures are to the same scale).
It is kind of an unfair comparison: the Albany picture also includes part of an airport, as well as industrial sites. But in general, when it comes to housing, even the suburbs that are sprawling are offering relatively little housing compared to high-density areas like this. But people's casual perceptions of where people live might not always catch that. It is similar to something that happens when people look at trains: an "almost empty" train might actually carry as many people as a packed bus, and a packed bus might equate to 50 cars stuck at an intersection.
And as further evidence of that, Orenco Station itself has more housing than three entire Oregon counties (separately).

 

[Willbridge]

Among all that other great information, I am curious about this, because back in the 1990s, Route 57 was somehow the Trimet bus with the most hours of service, running from something like 5 AM to 2 AM in all. Was this a legacy of that being the schedule of what was essentially an intercity bus/train line when Forest Grove was a clearly different city than Portland?

Rte 57 inherited a market that carried over from the two interurban electric railways. When Tri-Met took over Tualatin Valley Stages there was still ridership from the previous professional operations of SP subsidiaries Oregon Motor Stages and Pacific Greyhound Lines. They didn't run the broken down LAMTA GM's that other suburbs got. In 1968 when drivers cranked rollsigns on their GM Suburbans, you'd see places like Antioch, Concord, Redwood City, San Rafael, San Francisco Ferry Building, etc. Unlike some other lines that had disappeared, there was continuity.

The span of service that Tri-Met inherited was a little shorter than it later provided. I think the last trip on Tualatin Valley Stages from the Portland Greyhound station was 12:35 a.m. or a bit later, to mesh with the last Rose City Transit Co. systemwide meet at 12:32 a.m. a few blocks away. With Pacific University in Forest Grove, and with package express coming in from connecting Greyhound buses, there was business enough.

Tualatin Valley Stages, in intercity style, parked some buses for the night in Forest Grove. Tri-Met inherited Rosy's scheduling department and union agreement, so the last bus to Forest Grove deadheaded back to Center Street. The first bus in the morning deadheaded out to Forest Grove to start there. I was with ODOT when this was going on and suggested to Tri-Met that they run those buses in service, making the Owl bus connections in downtown Portland. This led to the span of service that you are recollecting, with only a few minutes of incremental cost. It worked out well, but eventually when there was a west side garage the economics changed, and with the decision to axe the Owls, Rte 57 went back to what it is now.

Dashcard found on a Portland > Forest Grove bus. When those buses belonged to Greyhound, they sometimes were used as back-ups for intrastate highway runs.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Dashcard found on a Portland > Forest Grove bus. When those buses belonged to Greyhound, they sometimes were used as back-ups for intrastate highway runs.

View attachment 30976

One thing for me, is that I view most of the communities along the West Coast as a continuum, I see connections between them. This is kind of my personal view, not shared by most of the people I know in Portland. For most people in Portland, the outer ring Portland suburbs like West Linn are places they never go. But for me, the Willamette Valley and even the coast are all on a continuum. Part of it is that I have walked everywhere from Portland to Monroe (not all at once, but over the years, I have walked on foot between most Willamette Valley towns). So for me, there is a kind of logic that Forest Grove and Willits are all the same place. But I know in objective terms, that doesn't make sense to everyone: the distance between them is equal to the distance between New York City and South Carolina.
A bit of personal history behind this thread: when I was 8 years old, my family moved from Battle Ground, Washington to near Turner, Oregon...a distance of about 80 miles, which isn't that far, but was a long distance when I was 8. And even at that age, I would think about the connection between the city I left behind and the city I moved to, and I would have persistent dreams of being somewhere between the two of them, often waiting for a bus or a train in some tiny, usually non-existent town. But because these were dreams, sometimes I would take the wrong bus and end up in Nevada---which again, is why the idea of Forest Grove and Willits being next to each other makes perfect sense to me.

 

[Willbridge]

One thing for me, is that I view most of the communities along the West Coast as a continuum, I see connections between them. This is kind of my personal view, not shared by most of the people I know in Portland. For most people in Portland, the outer ring Portland suburbs like West Linn are places they never go. But for me, the Willamette Valley and even the coast are all on a continuum. Part of it is that I have walked everywhere from Portland to Monroe (not all at once, but over the years, I have walked on foot between most Willamette Valley towns). So for me, there is a kind of logic that Forest Grove and Willits are all the same place. But I know in objective terms, that doesn't make sense to everyone: the distance between them is equal to the distance between New York City and South Carolina.
A bit of personal history behind this thread: when I was 8 years old, my family moved from Battle Ground, Washington to near Turner, Oregon...a distance of about 80 miles, which isn't that far, but was a long distance when I was 8. And even at that age, I would think about the connection between the city I left behind and the city I moved to, and I would have persistent dreams of being somewhere between the two of them, often waiting for a bus or a train in some tiny, usually non-existent town. But because these were dreams, sometimes I would take the wrong bus and end up in Nevada---which again, is why the idea of Forest Grove and Willits being next to each other makes perfect sense to me.

You're right about the links between places. When you look at Turner in Table 5 of that 1919 SP timetable you can see how the railway tried to deal with that in lightly populated areas -- all stop locals. That was quickly done in by even the most awful highway travel.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Flights by summer? Salem council approves $2.4M to ready airport for commercial service

The effort to revive commercial air service at Salem Airport just got $2.4 million closer to becoming a reality.

www.statesmanjournal.com

Since it is too cold and rainy for me to make any real trips, I wanted to include this news item--- scheduled, commercial air service might be returning to Salem, Oregon. Salem is one of only three or four state capitals that don't have airports with regular service. It has before, but it never appears to take off (excuse the bad pun). Salem is close enough to the Portland area and Portland airport (about 60 miles) that in most cases, it is cheaper and easier just to fly into PDX and then take a shuttle to somewhere in the valley.
I don't know who the market for this airport would be, since its two routes seem to be LAX and Las Vegas, so either...people doing government business, or tourists going to Las Vegas? People who want to visit wine country that is 30 minutes closer by car from Salem than from Portland?
To me, this seems more like local boosterism, and not part of a transportation strategy that is meant to solve a problem.
The money spent for this also plays into discussion about priorities and how transportation is subsidized...because the money needed to bring the airport up to standard (2.4 million dollars) is equal to the money needed to do many other transportation projects.

 

[Northwestern]

I am amazed by all the stops (mostly flag stops) along the Rogue River route. Back in 1955.

The Rogue River - April, 1955 - Streamliner Schedules

April 1955 timetable for the Rogue River passenger train at Streamliner Schedules.

is.gd

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I am amazed by all the stops (mostly flag stops) along the Rogue River route. Back in 1955.

The Rogue River - April, 1955 - Streamliner Schedules

April 1955 timetable for the Rogue River passenger train at Streamliner Schedules.

is.gd

For me, I have been to the first 16 towns downward on the schedule, mostly on foot.
It is also weird for me that the days of passenger rail in these towns seem so long ago, but when my family moved to Turner, Oregon in 1988, that was actually closer to 1955 then it was to the present day. And when I moved there in the late 1980s (as an eight year old), I still remember there being local markets every few miles, driving down a country road with my mother and sometimes stopping at these little stores. Most of them were just in the process of closing down: big box stores seemed to really come to Oregon in the 1990s. And even today, (like in the Suver video), I will be passing through a little cross-roads and will see a building that was at once time a gas station or a store, only it has obviously been closed for years or decades. And don't get me wrong---those old stores were kind of depressing places, overpriced items and maybe some old bruised fruit lying on the shelf. But I also wonder what those places were like when they were really communities.
An example of a community that managed to hang on is Marion, Oregon. It is on that time table, and if you have ever been on the Cascades or Coast Starlight, it is easy to see it between Albany and Salem. It is a T-intersection that has a market/deli, a fire station, and some churches. In the 1990s, there was a post office there, but it looks like it is closed now. I remember in the 1990s, sometimes someone would try to open a hair salon, etc, in town, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Another thing about these small towns is---there is usually no way to interface with the community. There is no community meeting point. The people there live there, but all of their interactions will be a dozen or more miles away, in the towns that have big box stores or services like a community college or library. So one of my biggest feelings when I am going through these locations is "What if these were actually communities, and not just a point on the map?"

 

[Willbridge]

Flights by summer? Salem council approves $2.4M to ready airport for commercial service

The effort to revive commercial air service at Salem Airport just got $2.4 million closer to becoming a reality.

www.statesmanjournal.com

Since it is too cold and rainy for me to make any real trips, I wanted to include this news item--- scheduled, commercial air service might be returning to Salem, Oregon. Salem is one of only three or four state capitals that don't have airports with regular service. It has before, but it never appears to take off (excuse the bad pun). Salem is close enough to the Portland area and Portland airport (about 60 miles) that in most cases, it is cheaper and easier just to fly into PDX and then take a shuttle to somewhere in the valley.
I don't know who the market for this airport would be, since its two routes seem to be LAX and Las Vegas, so either...people doing government business, or tourists going to Las Vegas? People who want to visit wine country that is 30 minutes closer by car from Salem than from Portland?
To me, this seems more like local boosterism, and not part of a transportation strategy that is meant to solve a problem.
The money spent for this also plays into discussion about priorities and how transportation is subsidized...because the money needed to bring the airport up to standard (2.4 million dollars) is equal to the money needed to do many other transportation projects.

When I was at ODOT United Airlines served Salem once a day each way with a 737 that flew San Francisco<>Salem<>Portland<>Pendleton. The weak point, of course, was flying Salem to Portland. Eventually I was sent to testify at an OPUC hearing in support of Hutmacher's van service between Salem and Portland International and they were successful in getting a permit.

Aviation boosters and fans have no shame in proposing air routes, but my favorite unrealized scheme in Oregon was a proposal to have turboprops hovering over the state, ready to be called in like an air strike when customers needed service.

 

[Willbridge]

For me, I have been to the first 16 towns downward on the schedule, mostly on foot.
It is also weird for me that the days of passenger rail in these towns seem so long ago, but when my family moved to Turner, Oregon in 1988, that was actually closer to 1955 then it was to the present day. And when I moved there in the late 1980s (as an eight year old), I still remember there being local markets every few miles, driving down a country road with my mother and sometimes stopping at these little stores. Most of them were just in the process of closing down: big box stores seemed to really come to Oregon in the 1990s. And even today, (like in the Suver video), I will be passing through a little cross-roads and will see a building that was at once time a gas station or a store, only it has obviously been closed for years or decades. And don't get me wrong---those old stores were kind of depressing places, overpriced items and maybe some old bruised fruit lying on the shelf. But I also wonder what those places were like when they were really communities.
An example of a community that managed to hang on is Marion, Oregon. It is on that time table, and if you have ever been on the Cascades or Coast Starlight, it is easy to see it between Albany and Salem. It is a T-intersection that has a market/deli, a fire station, and some churches. In the 1990s, there was a post office there, but it looks like it is closed now. I remember in the 1990s, sometimes someone would try to open a hair salon, etc, in town, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Another thing about these small towns is---there is usually no way to interface with the community. There is no community meeting point. The people there live there, but all of their interactions will be a dozen or more miles away, in the towns that have big box stores or services like a community college or library. So one of my biggest feelings when I am going through these locations is "What if these were actually communities, and not just a point on the map?"

My German immigrant great-grandfather knew how to politic and was appointed postmaster of Meridian, Oregon. It was halfway between Marquam and Mt. Angel. Mt. Angel had the closest rail service. There was a German community there and Teddy Roosevelt was big on getting the German immigrant vote. It looks as though the Lutheran Church is the remaining community focal point.

My maternal grandfather called on those grocery stores for the H. J. Heinz company, driving, of course, a black Buick. My dad called on those in resort areas and main highways for the Seattle Times, driving a Studebaker or riding trains and buses, and it was fun when they sat together at holiday gatherings and swapped stories about some of the more eccentric or tight-fisted merchants. An uncle worked as a CPA in the lumber industry, and when he was a bachelor, he was often sent to remote mills. We kids would watch from our front yard for the West Coast Airlines DC3 flying him to Coos Bay. That gives you an idea of the old Oregon economy. Life in Portland was closely tied to the small towns.

The demise of that economy began in the mid-1950's, marked by train-offs on the SP Rogue River, the Coos Bay<>Portland sleeper, the SP&S Astoria/Seaside train, the UP Spokane, etc. All of these linked small towns with the Rose City. The chicken and egg question, of course, is whether the end of service due to low ridership helped then to contribute to the decline of some of these towns.

Here's the SP&S Columbia River Express westbound at Vancouver's curved platform. Nice name, but it made flag stops everywhere between Pasco and Portland.

 

[Northwestern]

Mr. Willbridge, I took a tour of the Oregon State Capitol building, in Salem, a number of years ago. That was fun. The next time, in Salem. I would like to visit the AC Gilbert House museum in Salem. Gilbert's American Flyer train was a Christmas gift, for me, at a very young age. Gilbert was also the inventor of the Erector Set, as well. He obtained a medical degree from Yale and was a magician to help pay for his tuition. He also won a gold medal, in the pole vault, in the 1908 summer Olympics.

I noticed, looking at the schedule for the Rogue River, that the first 18 stops are not more than 12 miles apart.

Matthew, I may or may not have a different view of small towns. I grew up in a small town of around 5000 people in the late `40's and '50's. Most stores were "mom and pop" with the exception of a Rexall pharmacy and a Safeway supermarket. The proprietors were either friends of my family or, in many cases, neighbors. There was a real sense of community. My parents might drive over to the "big city" (Santa Rosa) to get a cheaper price on something or purchase an item they couldn't find in town. They did, however, like to do business in town and support the local businesses. It really created a strong sense of community. Now, as you mentioned, the small town today probably would have several big box or chain stores which wouldn't provide the same ambience. We also had one of the few towns with railroad tracks (SP) along the center of the downtown strip, where a penny in place could really be flattened. I can still hear, in my mind. the train horn sounding late at night.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I grew up in a small town of around 5000 people in the late `40's and '50's.

This has been a persistent problem for me when I talk about communities, here, and elsewhere, because the words to describe populations are very vague. When I say "town", one person might hear 500 people and another person might hear 50000 people. For me, 5000 people is not a "small town", it is a medium town on the way to being a small city. 5000 people is large enough to have a choice of cafes/restaurants, a library, a movie theater, etc. Some of the crossroads towns I've been talking (and some of which are listed on that time table), are in the low three digits. Like Marion, Oregon, which I mentioned, has a current CDP population of 307 people. And at 300 people, it is harder to find a sense of community, because there aren't any services/businesses that would give an area a common meeting place. And since the town doesn't have any businesses, there are no common employers. The people in these little intersection towns are probably driving 20 miles in every direction to get to work.
Why this is even more important is that being "from the country" is often used as a moral position in American culture, and it has come to have almost no reference to how people actually live. People from exurbs of tens of thousands of people who go into those cities to work in office jobs will claim to be "just a simple country boy/girl", and it is used as a signifier of what lifestyle accessories they have, and sometimes their social and political views...but most of those people couldn't even wrap their head around what it would be like to live in a town of under 1000 people.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I am about to post my main video for today (it is a long one), but I also took this along the way:


This is a video showing that the Salem, Oregon Greyhound station is closed, with all business being redirected to Woodburn.
This also shows that despite some concerns about the security of the area, the area around the station is clean. The station and the parking lot are also in good repair. So it seems more likely that it was something to do with trying to tighten schedules that was the reason for the change. Which is quite a shame, the station is actually quite nice.
I guess the best reason is just that if someone really does need to go south of Eugene, they have a train station that is also a bus station right next door, so they an take a train/POINT bus to Eugene and then catch a Greyhound to somewhere in southern Oregon or beyond.
But the main thing this video confirms is that it wasn't due to damage or abuse to the station.

 

[Willbridge]

I am about to post my main video for today (it is a long one), but I also took this along the way:


This is a video showing that the Salem, Oregon Greyhound station is closed, with all business being redirected to Woodburn.
This also shows that despite some concerns about the security of the area, the area around the station is clean. The station and the parking lot are also in good repair. So it seems more likely that it was something to do with trying to tighten schedules that was the reason for the change. Which is quite a shame, the station is actually quite nice.
I guess the best reason is just that if someone really does need to go south of Eugene, they have a train station that is also a bus station right next door, so they an take a train/POINT bus to Eugene and then catch a Greyhound to somewhere in southern Oregon or beyond.
But the main thing this video confirms is that it wasn't due to damage or abuse to the station.

Salem had an agency station that is probably owned by the State of Oregon, which put quite a bit of money into improving what was the old express office. Therefore, it may be:

• that the agent quit or was dropped, and they couldn't leave the attractive station open unsupervised.
• or, they had an argument with the landlord.
• or, Amtrak is soaking up a lot of the business and they decided to go for the agricultural workers and retirees of Woodburn. They also dropped Jackson, MS, so they are not sentimental about state capital cities.
• things are happening so hard and fast at GL that they may have just been looking at running time and revenue. The East Salem Bypass, built for US99E, takes I-5 a long way from the bus station.

All of these items have happened elsewhere over the years. Fifty years ago, Pacific Greyhound Lines had a Regional Manager in Portland and he had a field representative who would find a replacement when they lost an agency. The rep would also teach small town business people how to increase sales. That position was eliminated to save expenses, and one by one the number of cities with no agent, no checked baggage, no package express, kept increasing. The last I heard, the Pacific Northwest region is managed from Denver.

[Note: moderator might want to move this to the Greyhound cutbacks thread.]

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Salem had an agency station that is probably owned by the State of Oregon, which put quite a bit of money into improving what was the old express office. Therefore, it may be:

• that the agent quit or was dropped, and they couldn't leave the attractive station open unsupervised.
• or, they had an argument with the landlord.
• or, Amtrak is soaking up a lot of the business and they decided to go for the agricultural workers and retirees of Woodburn. They also dropped Jackson, MS, so they are not sentimental about state capital cities.
• things are happening so hard and fast at GL that they may have just been looking at running time and revenue. The East Salem Bypass, built for US99E, takes I-5 a long way from the bus station.

All of these items have happened elsewhere over the years. Fifty years ago, Pacific Greyhound Lines had a Regional Manager in Portland and he had a field representative who would find a replacement when they lost an agency. The rep would also teach small town business people how to increase sales. That position was eliminated to save expenses, and one by one the number of cities with no agent, no checked baggage, no package express, kept increasing. The last I heard, the Pacific Northwest region is managed from Denver.

[Note: moderator might want to move this to the Greyhound cutbacks thread.]

In the short term, all of those reasons make sense. Or there could be more:
If Greyhound is having the same trouble finding operators, they may need to have those operators drive further, but there is a limit on that. So perhaps by eliminating Salem, they can make the maximum allowed time for operators stretch a little bit further?
In the local area, the story might be that lines once run by Greyhound are now a hodgepodge of local, regional and long distance lines. The buses to the coast, once Greyhound lines, are now local Cheeriots routes.
The bigger picture could also be that Flixbus, a German company, didn't understand what the Western states were like. Oregon has a population density of 1/15th of Germany, and what that meant when they bought Greyhound. Even when a company sees those facts on paper, it might be hard for them to understand what it looks like on the ground. When I took a Flixbus survey after travelling on Flixbus, they included options like asking me if I was a "pensioneer" and whether I would consider travel for distances "under 500 kilometers"---signs that they hadn't even done a surface level adaptation of their customer service for the United States.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Also, I might have gone a little bit too far down the rabbit hole, but apparently the founder of MTR Western, the contract bus company that operates both Flixbus' routes in the Pacific Northwest, and some of the Oregon POINT routes, was arrested and convicted of financial fraud, and escaped from jail.
So basically there might be a lot of stuff kind of sketchy about bus service around here?

Darren Berg - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Willbridge]

Also, I might have gone a little bit too far down the rabbit hole, but apparently the founder of MTR Western, the contract bus company that operates both Flixbus' routes in the Pacific Northwest, and some of the Oregon POINT routes, was arrested and convicted of financial fraud, and escaped from jail.
So basically there might be a lot of stuff kind of sketchy about bus service around here?

Darren Berg - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think he topped some of the characters from my time in the Pacific Northwest. There were company owners who behaved badly, but didn't get caught violating federal laws (well, other than tax evasion and insider trading).

 

[Willbridge]

In the short term, all of those reasons make sense. Or there could be more:
If Greyhound is having the same trouble finding operators, they may need to have those operators drive further, but there is a limit on that. So perhaps by eliminating Salem, they can make the maximum allowed time for operators stretch a little bit further?
In the local area, the story might be that lines once run by Greyhound are now a hodgepodge of local, regional and long distance lines. The buses to the coast, once Greyhound lines, are now local Cheeriots routes.
The bigger picture could also be that Flixbus, a German company, didn't understand what the Western states were like. Oregon has a population density of 1/15th of Germany, and what that meant when they bought Greyhound. Even when a company sees those facts on paper, it might be hard for them to understand what it looks like on the ground. When I took a Flixbus survey after travelling on Flixbus, they included options like asking me if I was a "pensioneer" and whether I would consider travel for distances "under 500 kilometers"---signs that they hadn't even done a surface level adaptation of their customer service for the United States.

Yes, stretching the miles that a driver can cover on duty is one of the considerations. Flixbus started out in the U.S. with a pretty bright staff headquartered in Los Angeles, but then had a mass layoff when they shut down for the pandemic. Since then I haven't seen them doing much new in the west. I've seen tests of integrating their booking system with GL going on for months now. But I've seen no other sign of them coordinating.

So, coming back to this thread, Flixbus has had one daily trip through Salem from Portland to Eugene. At Eugene they stop miles away from GL (which actually stops in Springfield). Their other PDX<>EUG trip does not stop in Salem. It seems odd that Flixbus has not added a second trip to replace the two GL trips that were rerouted. Unless GL expects to find a new agent.... stay tuned.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

And now, for our feature presentation:


Today, I went to Silverton, a small town about 12 miles east of Salem. To get there, I took a Flixbus from Corvallis to Salem, then a regional bus from Salem to Silverton, the same bus back, and then the Coast Starlight from Salem to Albany, and a bus back to Corvallis. That is a lot of travel for January! I was out for about 10 hours, and left and returned in the dark.
This is a long video, I address a lot of things in it, even though I was very tired while making it:

The story of Stu Rasmussen
Silverton was the first city in the US to elect a transgender person as mayor. The reason that this is important for a post I am writing about transit is that at this point, everything in the United States is politicized, and transit is certainly one of those things. In Oregon, attitudes towards transit are divided between Portland and Eugene, where transit is a normal part of life, and everywhere else, where transit is viewed as either a waste of money or insidious. Or, at best, as a cute social service. Despite Silverton being progressive enough in terms of acceptance of gender diversity, in terms of transit and urban development, its still a small town that assumes that cars are the only serious method of transit. In general, Oregon communities are very diverse in their views of economic and social issues, and "urban Oregon" and "rural Oregon" is usually way oversimplified.

The Amtrak Cascades would be great with hop-on hop-off service
Well, there is a radical idea. There are places where the Amtrak Cascades service allows this: if you are going between Portland and Seattle, you can hop off and have lunch in Centralia. Of course, you would need to have two tickets! It took me a long time to get to Silverton from Salem. Actually, the trip isn't that long, but they only run five times a day. And the Salem transit center is some distance away from the Amtrak station. For an intrepid traveller, someone who is just backpacking around looking for an adventure, it would be possible to do something like start in Eugene, take the Cascades to Salem, take a bus to Silverton and back, then get back on a train to Cascades. But for most people, it wouldn't be a feasible option. Amtrak Cascades service is expected to increase, which takes away part of the problem. A bus directly from the train station to Silverton and back would make it a possible tourist destination. Imagine being able to work your way up and down the Cascades route, and being able to take side trips!

Combining the above two points: small towns can be small until they aren't
Downtown Silverton has a lot of small businesses. It also has very walkable streets. And lots of parks. And it doesn't have traffic lights. It is a charming place. The problem is, a town can't maintain "charming, friendly downtown" if it grows too big and refuses to have transit. The town has preserved its downtown, but I would guess most of the residents are commuting into Salem to work, and the downtown is mostly for tourists (and of course the service workers). If the town gets bigger, those charming little streets will become traffic jams. Unless there is some sort of transit planning. Right now, there are 5 trips a day to and from Salem (and north to Mount Angel/Woodburn). This isn't enough for employment. In the long term, the city can't maintain its charm without transit planning. But people from small towns often reject the expense of transit. Whether Silverton, like other small towns in the Willamette Valley, will shift away from being totally car-centric is something that remains to be seen. Especially since there is currently a high level of sociopolitical animosity towards anything considered "urban".

 

[Matthew H Fish]

Yes, stretching the miles that a driver can cover on duty is one of the considerations. Flixbus started out in the U.S. with a pretty bright staff headquartered in Los Angeles, but then had a mass layoff when they shut down for the pandemic. Since then I haven't seen them doing much new in the west. I've seen tests of integrating their booking system with GL going on for months now. But I've seen no other sign of them coordinating.

So, coming back to this thread, Flixbus has had one daily trip through Salem from Portland to Eugene. At Eugene they stop miles away from GL (which actually stops in Springfield). Their other PDX<>EUG trip does not stop in Salem. It seems odd that Flixbus has not added a second trip to replace the two GL trips that were rerouted. Unless GL expects to find a new agent.... stay tuned.

I indeed took one of those Flixbus trips today, as shown in the Silverton video. The 8 AM trip is currently the only one that stops in Salem going north.
The last I checked, Greyhound is actually not stopping in Springfield anymore, but has gone back to stopping next to the Eugene Amtrak---maybe one reason that it discontinued Salem, because that makes it easier for Salem passengers to take POINT to Eugene, and then transfer to a Greyhound bus, since they don't have to go to Springfield?

If nothing else, I do agree with "stay tuned"

 

[Willbridge]

I indeed took one of those Flixbus trips today, as shown in the Silverton video. The 8 AM trip is currently the only one that stops in Salem going north.
The last I checked, Greyhound is actually not stopping in Springfield anymore, but has gone back to stopping next to the Eugene Amtrak---maybe one reason that it discontinued Salem, because that makes it easier for Salem passengers to take POINT to Eugene, and then transfer to a Greyhound bus, since they don't have to go to Springfield?

If nothing else, I do agree with "stay tuned"

You're right regarding the move in Eugene. They don't say it is the Amtrak station, just give people the street address. I riffed through their operating bulletins back to May and they didn't show any wholesale running time change for it. As they have no agent, I'm sure that the Amtrak station staff know exactly when people started showing up asking why the bus from Grants Pass is late.

 

[Willbridge]

I looked up the 1973-74 Hamman Stage Lines schedule for Silverton. In the depth of the Energy Crisis, business picked up. The morning commuter trip originated in Silverton. It returned from Salem XSH at 5:15 p.m. and terminated in Silverton. Hamman operated out of the Greyhound Station in downtown Salem.

7:05 a.m. to Salem XSSH
8:46 a.m. to Mt. Angel XSH
9:11 a.m. to Salem XSH
2:32 p.m. to Mt. Angel XSH
3:05 p.m. to Salem XSH

They had ticket and package express agencies in Silverton and Mt. Angel, as well as at the Greyhound in Salem. The driver in the photo is Bob Willard, who was also crusty old Floyd Hamman's dispatcher. He had dropped by the Highway Bldg. (yes!) to pick me up for lunch.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

They had ticket and package express agencies in Silverton and Mt. Angel, as well as at the Greyhound in Salem. The driver in the photo is Bob Willard, who was also crusty old Floyd Hamman's dispatcher. He had dropped by the Highway Bldg. (yes!) to pick me up for lunch.

View attachment 31157

If this was 1974 or so, this was about 20 years before I started riding the buses to and from Salem---I took my first Greyhound trips on my own from the Salem station in 1996, when I was 16-17 years old. In a thrilling adventure that requires its own story, while a bored student at Chemeketa in 1996 at the age of 17, I just went downtown, bought a Greyhound ticket for Phoenix, Arizona, and left. My mom was not amused. In many ways, that was a very different world for transit. Mostly because without ever present phones, we couldn't just look up transit connections. Also, in this particular case, downtown Salem looked very different, with no transit center and the Greyhound station in its old spot.
But, still to me, when I look at this picture from 50 years ago, I am looking at the *past*, while my trips from 30 years ago are still roughly contemporary.

 

[Matthew H Fish]

I looked up the 1973-74 Hamman Stage Lines schedule for Silverton. In the depth of the Energy Crisis, business picked up. The morning commuter trip originated in Silverton. It returned from Salem XSH at 5:15 p.m. and terminated in Silverton. Hamman operated out of the Greyhound Station in downtown Salem.

7:05 a.m. to Salem XSSH
8:46 a.m. to Mt. Angel XSH
9:11 a.m. to Salem XSH
2:32 p.m. to Mt. Angel XSH
3:05 p.m. to Salem XSH

They had ticket and package express agencies in Silverton and Mt. Angel, as well as at the Greyhound in Salem.

That looks like three round trips a day--- which I guess means that in about 50 years, we have gotten a little bit better service, since it is now 5 round trips per day. Of course, Silverton now has more than twice as many people, and hopefully we all know a lot more about the disadvantages of fossil fuel usage.
Obviously it is a complicated issue, but Silverton has gotten about as I've seen a town get before sprawl takes over. It is about the same size, for example, as Junction City, which is much more sprawly, despite having a similar distance to Eugene.
This is also relevant in terms of Oregon's housing problems--- as housing gets more expensive in the larger cities, it would be natural for these smaller exurban towns to start fitting people in. However, it would mostly be a commuting suburb for Salem (service jobs in the tourist industry aren't something you can base a town around), and then you have all those people needing to work in Salem, driving down a two-lane country highway (Highway 213) with flashing stop lights, which will then need to be widened, and then everyone who thought it would be a good idea to "move to the country" is stuck in another suburb.

 

[Willbridge]

That looks like three round trips a day--- which I guess means that in about 50 years, we have gotten a little bit better service, since it is now 5 round trips per day. Of course, Silverton now has more than twice as many people, and hopefully we all know a lot more about the disadvantages of fossil fuel usage.
Obviously it is a complicated issue, but Silverton has gotten about as I've seen a town get before sprawl takes over. It is about the same size, for example, as Junction City, which is much more sprawly, despite having a similar distance to Eugene.
This is also relevant in terms of Oregon's housing problems--- as housing gets more expensive in the larger cities, it would be natural for these smaller exurban towns to start fitting people in. However, it would mostly be a commuting suburb for Salem (service jobs in the tourist industry aren't something you can base a town around), and then you have all those people needing to work in Salem, driving down a two-lane country highway (Highway 213) with flashing stop lights, which will then need to be widened, and then everyone who thought it would be a good idea to "move to the country" is stuck in another suburb.

You raise a good point. If the bus service had kept its share of riders, there should be six round trips a day between Salem and Silverton, with four round trips continuing to Mt. Angel. So, for example, there could be an evening trip for night classes at Chemeketa?

I also note that there are only three round trips on Saturdays, so no service increase despite population doubling.

On the other hand, perhaps Silverton has more services and retailing now than it did before, so there is less reason to "go into town." Seniors might be more willing to drive around Silverton than to go into Salem.