Crews painted a couple of Portland’s transit-only travel lanes a bright shade of red this week, a first for the city in an effort to provide an inescapable visual cue to drivers to stay in their lanes.

But why did Portland start with painting a few stubby blocks when the 57-block Transit Mall downtown on 5th and 6th avenues is sitting there like an unfinished transit Sistine Chapel?

Some 1,570 TriMet buses use the transit mall every day, as do 298 MAX trains. It runs through the heart of downtown, and, as any transit rider knows, is not uncommon to see drivers turning into the bus lane. Some are oblivious out-of-towners; others are opportunistic ne’er-do-wells trying to get out of the one-way couplet in whatever way serves them best.

TriMet, one of the city’s partners on the red lane project, said bus and rail operators see drivers use the transit lanes “all the time.”

Why not start on the mall?

Hannah Schafer, a Portland Bureau of Transportation spokeswoman, said the transit mall “has many complexities,” and the avenues are perhaps some of the most high-profile streets in the city.

“We wanted to start with other locations and learn from them first,” she said.

Portland is slowly rolling out more bus-only lanes city wide – including two downtown on the approach to the Steel and Hawthorne bridges in recent months. Plus, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly is expected to unveil her larger vision early next year for additional travel lanes dedicated to buses.

The new downtown lanes – on Southwest Madison and Northwest Everett streets -- aren’t yet painted red, either.

“The locations we are installing now on SW Main Street, NE Grand Avenue, and NE MLK Jr. Boulevard allow us to get experience installing red generally,” Schafer said in an email, “as well as applying the material on concrete versus asphalt, and along rail tracks.”

We didn't just dress up our tracks for Halloween! Red paint means transit priority, which means a faster, more reliable trip! pic.twitter.com/McdOXfbeEU — Portland Streetcar (@PDXStreetcar) October 31, 2019

The idea is that the city will test out the different “installation methods” and “learn from it.”

Doing that will help the city know what it’s doing before it plans to paint sections of the Transit Mall.

And that, Schafer said, is likely what it will be: sections of red paint. Painting all 57 blocks would make the central city look like it was occupied by the Red Army or was cleaning up from a citywide tomato fight.

“We do not intend at this time to install red continuously along the whole Transit Mall,” Schafer confirmed.

Painting on the mall will be a logistical challenge in and of itself, she said, and the city needs to plan to make sure it’s ready. It’s unclear how much it would cost to paint the street as estimates weren’t immediately available.

Portland isn’t likely to slap paint on the mall without getting design feedback, either.

“Given the level of thought and quality of design that went into designing the Transit Mall, we want to honor that and give more consideration to how we apply red there. We intend to ask for design advice from the Design Commission.”

That should happen sometime in 2020.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

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