99W light rail likely to get Metro’s nod

By Shasta Kearns Moore

The Times, Jan 28, 2010 (1 Reader comment)

L.E. Baskow / Pamplin Media Group

Mayor Craig Dirksen standing beside Highway 99W.

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Looks like light rail just may be in Tigard’s future, after all.

Metro councilors are expected to approve a recommendation to make the Barbur Boulevard, Highway 99W corridor the next regional priority for high-capacity transit. The topic is tentatively scheduled for a council meeting in early February.

“In a sense, the wand has been waved,” said Tigard Mayor Craig Dirksen at the Jan. 19 Tigard city council meeting. “They’ve acknowledged that we should be the next to receive it.”

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — of which Dirksen is a member — officially endorsed the corridor Jan. 14, sending the matter to the Metro Council for final approval.

“I’d be very surprised, I’d be startled if they were to choose a different course,” Dirksen said.

The other proposed project is a high capacity transit line between Portland and Gresham, through Powell Boulevard.

High-capacity transit has meant light rail for most of the previously identified corridors, but it could also mean a rapid bus line or other mode of getting lots of people to and from downtown Portland quickly.

The Highway 99W line could reach all the way to Sherwood, though one of the first things a $2.5 million to $4 million mobility study the council is also expected to approve will determine if that’s feasible, said Metro spokeswoman Karen Withrow.

Highway 99W and Barbur Boulevard was the only corridor identified in the 1982 regional high-capacity transit (HCT) plan, which led to the modern MAX system, that did not receive significant attention.

“So that makes it a logical thing,” Withrow said. But she and others say that another major factor in Tigard’s supremacy over Powell Boulevard is the potential for new public transit passengers.

Metro analysts predict that daily ridership along Barbur and Highway 99W would be up to 38,000 in 2035 with an HCT line, representing a nearly 50 percent increase. Ridership along Powell is expected to only increase by about a 1,000 daily riders, up to 28,000.

“We would be serving a new area that has not had HCT before,” Withrow said. “There’s great potential for new riders.”