TriMet’s Line 14 buses now have a clear path around traffic on Southeast Portland’s Hawthorne Boulevard thanks to new transit priority lanes.
TriMet’s partners at the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) installed the transit priority lanes as part of the region’s efforts to make the transportation system work better for transit riders and everyone who uses the road. By improving speed and reliability, riding the bus becomes more convenient and accessible, which helps encourage more people to come on board.
A better direction for buses
PBOT included transit priority improvements on Hawthorne Boulevard as part of its Rose Lane and Central City in Motion projects. The new markings are key to speeding up trips on Line 2-Division, 10-Harold and 14-Hawthorne buses, which serve thousands of riders daily, between Downtown Southeast Portland’s Lents Neighborhood and Gresham.
The lanes show drivers where to give buses space, so they can safely move through congestion points in the corridor:
- Southeast Hawthorne at Cesar Chavez Boulevard (eastbound and westbound)
- Southeast Hawthorne between Grand and 12th Avenues (eastbound)
- Southeast Madison between Grand and 12th Avenues (westbound)
Later this year, PBOT, in partnership with Multnomah County, will continue the eastbound bus-only lane on inner-Hawthorne west to include the Hawthorne viaduct, which runs between the Hawthorne Bridge and Grand Avenue.
The Hawthorne Viaduct Bus Implementation is one of several transit priority projects PBOT has planned for 2022. The work builds on years of improvements that TriMet, PBOT and partners throughout the region have prioritized to help make riding transit a better option for more people.
Some of these updates, like the transit priority lanes PBOT installed on Southwest Madison and Northwest Everett streets in 2019, resulted in such significant time savings, that TriMet says it had to tighten schedules to keep buses from arriving at their destination too early.
