Frequent Express (FX) is a high-capacity bus service operated by TriMet in Portland, Oregon, United States. Operating as FX2–Division, the route runs east–west from 5th & Hoyt on the Portland Transit Mall in downtown Portland to Cleveland Avenue Park and Ride in Gresham via Division Street. It connects Portland City Center, Portland State University (PSU), South Waterfront, Southeast Portland, and central Gresham, with transfers to MAX Light Rail and the Portland Streetcar.
FX features bus rapid transit (BRT) design elements such as dedicated lanes, transit signal priority, and buses with all-door boarding. It is the second such service in the Portland metropolitan area after The Vine in Vancouver, Washington. Fares are collected through the Hop Fastpass payment system.
The Portland metropolitan area's regional government, Metro, adopted the Regional High Capacity Transit System Plan in 2009 and initially identified Powell Boulevard between downtown Portland and Gresham as a priority for public transit investment. Subsequent planning ultimately resulted in a bus route alternative farther north along Division Street. Construction of the Division Transit Project began in October 2019, and the FX2–Division route opened on September 18, 2022.
History
Planning
High-capacity transit (HCT) planning for the Portland metropolitan area, previously evaluated in the 1982 Light Rail System Plan, was updated by Metro, the regional government, when it adopted the Regional High Capacity Transit System Plan on July 9, 2009. The updated plan identified corridors viable for HCT and deemed Powell Boulevard between downtown Portland and the eastern suburb of Gresham a "near-term regional priority". Four years later, Metro and the region's transit agency, TriMet, began studying alignment and mode alternatives for the corridor, as well as for Division Street several blocks farther north, with BRT, light rail, and streetcar under consideration. At the time, Powell and Division were served by bus routes 9–Powell Blvd and 4–Division/Fessenden, respectively, which together carried more than 17,000 riders daily.
In 2014, a steering committee for the Powell–Division Transit and Development Project was formed, whose members voted that September to discontinue studying rail alternatives in favor of bus-only options, citing fewer property and roadway impacts and a shorter construction time. Conceptual design work began two months later. The following year, plans for dedicated bus lanes, a key feature of BRT, were abandoned; planners defended this decision by claiming that reducing car lanes would "likely result in traffic diversion to other streets and significant delay". The system would use transit signal priority to move buses quickly instead.
The steering committee initially wanted a route that would use Powell Boulevard on its westernmost section, head north to Division Street somewhere between 52nd and 92nd avenues, and terminate at Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) in Gresham. In March 2016, a study conducted by TriMet revealed that this preferred route would take approximately 11 minutes longer to travel than the existing bus service. It was also estimated to exceed $200 million; to ensure federal funding was acquired, a target cost was set at $175 million. The steering committee recommended a locally preferred alternative (LPA) on November 7, 2016. The LPA dropped the Powell segment in favor of a Division Street-only alignment, with a route through the Portland Transit Mall instead of Columbia and Jefferson streets in downtown Portland. The steering committee had remained undecided on whether the route would use the Hawthorne Bridge or Tilikum Crossing to cross the Willamette River, but TriMet planners later opted to use Tilikum Crossing. The LPA had also scaled back the route's eastern end to terminate at Gresham Central Transit Center, rather than at MHCC, to lower cost, but subsequent LPA refinements re-extended the route slightly farther east to the Cleveland Avenue MAX station.