Just west of the sprawling, Eden-like green of Portland's Eastmoreland Golf Course, workers in orange hard hats will spend the next five months finishing what TriMet calls a "ravine station."
Located 70 feet below a bridge carrying Southeast Bybee Boulevard traffic over train tracks, the platforms for the soon-to-open MAX Orange Line aren't exactly easy to access. To catch a train, riders will hike down two steep stairways cascading from the bridge's midspan.
The design makes the future Bybee Boulevard station the perfect testing ground for the MAX system's first pay-to-enter fare gates, TriMet planners says.
After nearly three decades of operating on the honor system at its light-rail stations, TriMet plans to install turnstiles at two Orange Line stations once the agency's $30 million e-fare system goes live in 2017.
"The community has been asking us to look into doing this in some locations," said Dave Unsworth, deputy director of the Orange Line project. "We try to listen, believe it or not."
Actually, many regular commuters and business leaders have been lamenting TriMet's decision to build turnstile-free rail lines for as long as anyone can recall. Even on one of America's most celebrated transit systems, there's a hard-to-shake belief that Portland's trains would be safer and cleaner if it were more difficult for fare jumpers to ride.
After years of pushing through turnstiles to gain access to the New York Subway, Alex Campbell, a 29-year-old computer programmer who moved to Portland in 2012, said he may never become accustomed to the MAX's wide-open access.
"It doesn't feel right -- just letting anyone on the street step on a train with or without a pass," he said. "As someone who has taken public transit my whole life, I guess I'd feel better with some sort of barrier in place."
A welcoming transit system
In the 1980s, TriMet planners ruled out turnstile entrances because the devices would have dramatically driven up costs and conflicted with Portland's neighborly reputation.
When the downtown transit mall opened for the Green Line in 2009, those attitudes persisted, with every MAX stop sharing space with public sidewalks.
But growing worries about lost fare revenue and the emergence of electronic-ticketing technology have TriMet taking a different approach on the Orange Line.
Scheduled to open Sept. 12, the 7.5-mile route's 10 stops have been designed and wired to maximize what TriMet sees as a future of reloadable electronic tap cards and smartphone tickets stored in the computing cloud.
The Orange Line's stops all have clearly delineated fare zones. But in order for TriMet to install gates, an e-fare system needs to be in place to activate and open the devices.
At the split-level Bybee station, for example, commuters will swipe valid transit tickets, smartcards loaded with money or a smartphone running a mobile fare app to gain access to the stairs and an elevator. The Park Avenue station in Milwaukie will also be part of the demonstration.
"This is just a test," Unsworth said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the agency to install turnstiles at many existing street-level stations. "But if the pilot proves successful, we can see this being easily implemented with e-fare at stations like Washington Park, Sunset and Hollywood."
Budgeting for fare enforcement
In 2011, The Oregonian found that TriMet, despite a budget crisis and a spike in crime on the system, was getting increasingly lax with fare cheats on MAX. After the newspaper published its findings, the agency began a crackdown with new uniformed fare enforcers, who haven't eased up with issuing $175 tickets to those caught riding without a ticket.
In 2014, TriMet fare enforcers wrote 21,464 citations -- a 23 percent increase from the year before -- and 8,053 warnings for the infraction. Meanwhile, since 2010, the number of full-time fare inspectors has more than doubled, from 13 to 27, now costing TriMet $2.8 million a year.
Still, TriMet estimates that the fare evasion rate on MAX remains at 10 percent. Systemwide, including buses, it's about 8 percent. By comparison, the rates on closed-station rail systems with turnstiles in New York and Washington, D.C., are less than 2 percent.
TriMet's number crunchers say they have not translated those percentages into lost annual revenue. The agency's proposed $505 million budget for the next fiscal year assumes 23 percent of revenue will come from passengers, many of whom use monthly or annual passes.
Since TriMet hasn't even bothered to quantify its losses, there's plenty of room for skeptics to question whether suddenly deploying fare gates at random light-rail stations would be worth the cost.
Fiasco in Vancouver
In Vancouver, B.C., TransLink's ongoing fiasco with its SkyTrain stations certainly raises serious doubts.
Like MAX, SkyTrain has used barrier-free stations that depended on the honesty of riders for decades. In 2009, however, TransLink announced a $194 million plan to install gates and introduce smart cards to fight $18 million in lost fare revenue every year. The transition was supposed to take a year.
Six years later, myriad technical glitches and bureaucratic tangles have turned the project into the criterion for government waste in Canada. Not one fare gate has been activated for public use.
"We've learned from cities around the world that extended delivery schedules are common with major and complex infrastructure projects like this one," TransLink spokeswoman Colleen Brennan said in an email.
Electronic fare projects are inherently complex, said Chris Tucker, TriMet's director of revenue operations. But he said TriMet has "our A team on the project" and the e-fare system is still on schedule to begin testing in 2016.
Given how much TriMet already spends on fare enforcers, Jarrett Walker, Portland-based author of transit-geek bible "Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives," cautioned TriMet against going crazy with fare gates.
TriMet, he said, may already be close to the "sweet spot" of enforcement, where commuters will accept a certain level of perceived cheating in order to avoid significant expenditures of tax money and being slowed by rush-hour lines at turnstiles.
"If you get obsessive about fare evasion rates," Walker said, "you can spend a fortune to catch every last person and end up cutting a lot of services in the end."
-- Joseph Rose
503-221-8029
jrose@oregonian.com
@josephjrose