With The Vine soon to take hold in Vancouver, C-Tran officials are considering how to revamp services to better serve riders.
Bus routes are something of a work in perpetual progress. C-Tran adjusts services up to three times a year to keep with riders’ needs and when businesses or service centers move. But the changes now being considered would affect more than half of C-Tran’s existing routes.
“We’re trying to make the system we have today work better,” said C-Tran’s senior planner Roger Hanson. “We’re trying to raise it up from, ‘Hey, we opened a new business here, can you adjust the route.’ We don’t want to look at the stop level, then come up to the route level. We want to look at it from a much bigger picture of ‘What are we trying to accomplish with this route?’ ”
C-Tran’s busiest routes, the 4 and 44, will be replaced by The Vine, the Portland-Vancouver area’s first bus rapid transit system. Its 60-foot articulated buses will run between Vancouver Mall and downtown, mainly along Fourth Plain Boulevard. The Vine will also serve Fort Vancouver Way and Clark College.
Changes The Vine brings, combined with public comments and the C-Tran board’s approval of adding an additional 10,000 service hours, allow for the opportunity to tweak other routes and invest money elsewhere in the system.
All told, 11 routes would be adjusted and four new routes would be added.
Broadly speaking, the routes being adjusted would be trimmed to focus on shorter trip durations, making arrival times more reliable and improving connections between buses. Most of the current service would be retained.
One of the new routes would cross the Columbia River into Portland to connect TriMet’s Delta Park MAX station with The Vine in downtown Vancouver. Currently, both routes 4 and 44 connect with Delta Park, but The Vine’s bigger buses won’t cross the Interstate 5 Bridge.
The morning route from downtown Vancouver would go first to Delta Park, then stop at Jantzen Beach on the return. The evening route would be reversed, stopping at Jantzen Beach on the way to Delta Park and then returning to Vancouver.
Because The Vine will use Fort Vancouver Way to serve Clark College, Fourth Plain Boulevard between Waterworks Park and Broadway would lose service without some changes. In addition, there is no service on Fourth Plain west of Broadway and Fruit Valley service doesn’t include a stop near grocery shopping. A possible remedy would be to replace Route 3 with two new short routes that would travel east and west from the Veterans Affairs campus.
Hanson emphasized that the changes being considered are just the starting point for what C-Tran hopes will be a public discussion. In the coming months C-Tran will begin looking to the public for comments and concerns. Staff will put a proposal together and present it to the board in May. If the changes are approved, they’d take effect sometime in September.
C-Tran board member Jack Burkman noted that the proposals would be the first major changes to be made since The Vine came into play, but said he felt good about them.
“I think they’re very good proposals and I’m pleased to see Fruit Valley residents get service to a grocery store,” he said.
