TriMet to me: you cannot get there from here

By mikel kelly

The Clackamas Review, Dec 26, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (13 Reader comments)

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(Mikel Kelly is a humor columnist and editor at the Beaverton Valley Times and The Times, serving Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood. His office is on Lake Road in Milwaukie, nine miles and more than two hours from his Portland home.)

Like a lot of my pointy-headed liberal friends who talk glowingly about mass transit but never seem to get out of their gas-sucking cars, I talk a good game, but my actions are something else again.

For the last couple of weeks, The Other Person Who Lives At Our House and I have been sharing one car, and she’s been taking the bus to her job in Northwest Portland, in the shadow of Good Samaritan Hospital. Last week, she asked if she could have the car on Friday, her day off.

I agreed, then asked if she might want to drop me off at work.

Not really, she said, adding that I ought to just take the bus, like she’s been doing every other day of the week.

I’m not sure how that would work, I mumbled, staring down at my shoes. I do that for sympathy, but it never works.

Just go to the TriMet trip planner site online, insisted TOPWLAOH, and they’ll show you how to get where you want to go.

Now, bear in mind that my house — near Mountain Park in Southwest Portland — is a measly 9 miles from the newspaper office, in Milwaukie. It takes 18 minutes to drive it on a good day. On other days, it’s more like 20.

OK, I thought, my inner first-grader only given away by my giant protruding lower lip. I’ll show you. I’ll do it.

So I went to the TriMet Web site (trimet.org) and typed in my home address, then my work address.

The computer blinked off into outer space, or wherever it goes when it’s trying to find something really ridiculous to show you. Then — boing! — it was back.

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