Moving 10,000 TriMet Riders a Day in Portland

The city that’s the home to counter-culture, the legendary Powell Books, and the famous Blue Star Donuts also plays host to one of the most technically advanced bus routes in the world.

The FX-2 (Frequent Express) high-capacity bus service from TriMet carries over 10,000 riders a day between downtown Portland, Ore. (Division Street, SE Portland) and the suburb of Gresham, with buses arriving every 12 minutes for most of the day, every day.

With the help of LYT’s AI-powered, next-generation Transit Signal Priority solution, Portlanders are now able to traverse this 13 mile route in just a half-hour’s time.

In addition, TriMet was LYT’s first partner traffic agency to take advantage of our Travel Analytics Portal, providing key transit performance metrics used to help monitor and improve the flow of traffic in heavily trafficked corridors. TriMet is now enjoying an innovative fusion of data from transit vehicles and traffic lights to showcase how LYT.transit is improving transit vehicle performance throughout Portland and Gresham.

Launched in the Fall of 2022, the FX-2 features a first of its kind hardware-less bus detection system in queue jump lanes, along with other great innovations that riders enjoy every day.

TriMet embarked on a months-long education campaign to inform riders and residents about all the new technology on-board the FX-2 bus. But it wasn’t until the service launched that the agency started receiving curious questions, like, “Why did that bus run a red light?”  What residents mistakenly thought was law-breaking behavior was actually yet another way LYT was helping to keep buses on-time.

Compared to the Local-2 route that TriMet ran along a similar route, the FX-2 is light years faster in travel time/operation. With high-frequency headway-based scheduling, riders simply just show up and enjoy faster travel times, thanks to LYT.transit. This convenience is highlighted by riders in the agency’s most recent video.

With 58 stops spread across 13 miles of roadway, the promise of faster, more convenient bus service seemed counter-intuitive.  Traditional timepoint-based scheduling meant that more stops would add more “hurry-up-and-wait” time for TriMet buses.  But not with LYT.

Thanks to LYT’s ETA-based transit signal priority solution, we’re able to precisely optimize green lights using machine learning, helping TriMet to deliver consistent, reliable service no matter the roadway conditions.

When a manufacturer’s recall forced TriMet to take their new FX-2 buses off the road and revert back to their traditional 40-foot buses temporarily, LYT.transit didn’t skip a beat. Unlike other hardware-based solutions that require hardware on each bus to trigger signal priority, LYT.transit was instantly able to recognize these new buses and provide signal priority with no interruption. That’s the power of LYT’s cloud-based, hardware-less approach to Transit Signal Priority.