Expand MAX use? How?

With all the talk about gas prices and higher mass transit use, I got to thinking about a recent opportunity to observe the MAX system as an outsider, and what it showed about the reality of increasing light rail ridership.

On the Fourth of July, my family took advantage of the weekend evening to head downtown for the Blues Festival fireworks show. It was the first-ever glimpse of big fireworks for my 6-year-old, and -- if you ignore the drunks dropping f-bombs a few yards from my kids -- we had a grand time.

When it was finished, we climbed into our car for the ride home, knowing full well it would take longer than the usual 15-minute commute to Beaverton. As we passed the MAX stop at Third and Morrison, a lone Tri-Met official was desperately trying to push the throng of people away from the platform edge, lest they lose their toes and other lower extremities when the impending train pulled up. There was not much room for them to move away from the edge, as the platform was packed wall-to-wall with people making their way from Waterfront Park.

We continued to drive up Morrison, and saw similar crowds at Fifth and at Pioneer Square. It wasn't until the Galleria that the crowds thinned, but those people were likely stuck at the Galleria stop for a while -- all the riders from previous stops were filling a succession of MAX trains, leaving no space for riders farther up the tracks. And that was with trains coming much more frequently than during your average rush hour. When we got home 40 minutes later, I'm willing to bet there was still a sizable contingent of riders waiting for space on a train.

Now, granted, the fireworks were a special occasion that brought out a lot of additional riders. But every time I hear some politician proclaim mass transit as the salvation of our oil-price woes, or read about another scheme to spend billions on light rail extensions, I think about that night on the Fourth of July. A night in which the number of riders far exceeded the mass transit capacity.

You can add light rail to Vancouver, Milwaukie or Lake Oswego if you want, but none of the people trying to find space on MAX that night were trying to get to any of those locations. So expanding the routes will not give you the ability to service more commuters per location, only more locations.

Remember that MAX is eternally limited to two cars per train, so there is no additional capacity. If that's the case, who's going to put up with that sort of cattle-herding to take mass transit? You can spend all you want on MAX, but there's a lid on the number of riders that can use a MAX train (and if you've seen a MAX train at rush hour, you know that lid is almost closed).

If gas prices are going up without ceasing in the near future, surely more people will consider mass transit as a more cost-effective means of commuting. But unless Tri-Met plans to put a train on the tracks every 30 seconds or so (which seems to me an invitation for train accidents) the detriments appear to far outweigh the benefits.