Wired needs to calm down.

From Wired.com, "Why Portland’s Mass Transit Rocks"

Portland, Oregon is routinely ranked among the best transit cities in the country. The accolades certainly are deserved. Commuters are swept quickly and comfortably from almost anywhere to almost anywhere on a system that is reliable, convenient and bicycle friendly. It should be a model for other cities.

There’s no end to the things that make the system, called TriMet, awesome. Its customer interaction system is amazingly useful and includes a real live person to help plan trips if you call during business hours. Its iPhone app should be widely duplicated. The Fareless Square, which allows people to ride for free downtown or just across the Willamette River, lets people move quickly and easy around downtown. The Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) rail system seamlessly transitions from inter-city streetcar to intra-city commuter rail and remains best method of transport anywhere. And the system actively looks for ways to improve, regularly handing out surveys to get feedback from riders.

Your intrepid Autopia contributor sold his car and spent a full year in Portland, relying on TriMet to get around . Though TriMet offers a fantastic, comprehensive transit system, there are a few tweaks, minor and major, that could bring vast improvements.

Like most mass transit, TriMet shuts down for the night. Many people who work or revel at night live beyond the core of downtown, and TriMet’s relatively early closing time is a real limitation. Even those living in relatively accessible neighborhoods have to head home before the buses stop at 12:30 a.m. The MAX stops running an hour or so later, but those living beyond walking distance of a station face a long walk or a cab ride. There’s no shortage of taxis, but running even a single bus hourly on major routes could improve late-night and early-morning ridership greatly. Imagine the money and carbon emissions that could be saved.

Another problem is many riders simply do not pay to ride because the stations are open and fare inspectors rare. As structured today, Portland cannot actually force people to pay before entry because there is no barrier between station and sidewalk, so perhaps the best option is to extort a whole lot of money from somewhere and make MAX free. It probably wouldn’t cost much more than it does already. It also isn’t unusual to see people simply wave an expired ticket in the general direction of the driver as they get on. There are even fake ticket rings, but who needs them when the ticket you bought last week will probably do the job. It would be interesting to know what fare jumpers and expired tickets cost the system, but to my knowledge no one’s published such a study.

Another issue is that the three different transit systems don’t have standardized tickets. Bus use different tickets than MAX, which uses different tickets than the other regional systems like the Westside Express Service light rail. It’s all a little neurotic.

Portland’s extensive route system is in some ways lacking. East Portland, which is densely populated, could use a streetcar like the one downtown. If it could make an extensive loop, starting at the Rose Quarter Transit Center, swinging up through North Portland, down through the Hollywood Transit Center as far south as Division Street, nobody in Portland would ever use a car again. An East Portland streetcar is in the works, but it is not particularly extensive and thus not particularly useful.

The new MAX Green Line, which runs north to south, is too far east to be useful to people on their way to main commercial areas and too far west to pick up many commuters. It runs largely along an existing highway, which not only brings little incentive for commuters along the route to ride the MAX but virtually guarantees there will be little development of the type that MAX has brought in the suburbs.

MAX connections to the north and south, which do not currently exist, deserve a serious examination. The proposed Columbia River Crossing almost certainly will have a MAX line. Fantastic. Get it built, then build a MAX network over the river in Washington and link it to the local bus networks. Commuters on I-5 are stuck in continual gridlock, and during rush hour the highway barely moves. They will take mass transit given the chance, which they are currently not afforded.

High-speed rail is coming. Portland is on a designated high-speed rail corridor stretching from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle, Portland and further south. There are currently trains running, but trips to Seattle and San Francisco take so long it’s tough to justify the journey. There is even an airline flying between Portland and Seattle every hour, a role perfectly suited to high-speed rail. If a reasonable downtown-to-downtown service can be built, air traffic between the two cities will evaporate.

Portland’s transit system is held up nationally as a model network, as it should be. All things considered, it’s a great system. It can stand to be improved. A truly comprehensive system would make it a standard for the world.