TriMet Plans to Cut Late-Night MAX Service

TriMet announced today that it plans to reduce its late-night MAX train service and replace it with buses. The regional transit agency released few details, beyond that it planned to begin rolling out the changes this summer.

The agency currently runs buses twice a night along the Orange Line from Milwaukie to downtown Portland, and plans to replicate that practice on its other lines. It did not say at what time in the evening service would switch from trains to buses.

“The final hours of MAX night bus operations has not been determined and a timeline is not set, but the rollout of night buses on other MAX lines could begin as early as late June 2024,” the transit agency said in a statement this afternoon.

The statement lists several rationales for the change. There’s only a 47-minute gap between the last MAX train at night and the first one the following morning, which provides little time for crews to perform maintenance. (That’s a much smaller than average gap compared with other transit systems, TriMet says.) Furthermore, the changes will impact few riders: Less than 2% of riders take TriMet trains between midnight and 4 am.

A presentation to TriMet’s board of directors last November provides further reasons: “There’s a marked increase in security events in the last hour of service,” according to a slide presented by Dan Blair, the agency’s director of maintenance operations. That’s 2 am, the hour a 25-year-old man was arrested after chewing off another man’s ear on a Gresham MAX platform last January.

And, cutting service will save money: more than $4 million if the gap is increased to three hours, Blair said. The agency, facing a financial squeeze, hiked fares 12% this year.

At the board briefing, Bonnie Todd, TriMet’s chief operating officer, said limiting late-night service would serve two purposes at once. It “addresses several needs: a serious need for additional maintenance opportunities for a system whose infrastructure has aged and is aging—and an ability to seriously address some security challenges.”