Portland Transit Mall

The Portland Transit Mall is a set of public transit corridors through the center of downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. More specifically, it is a pair of one-way streets—one for northbound traffic, the other for southbound—along which two of the three lanes are restricted to transit vehicles only. The transit mall opened in 1977 and until 2009, buses were the only transit vehicles using it, but in 2009 light rail was added. Between 2007 and 2009 the mall was rebuilt and extended southwards, and it reopened for buses on May 24, 2009. Light rail service on the mall was introduced on August 30, 2009, with the shifting of the MAX Yellow Line to the mall from its original routing in downtown, and a second MAX line, the Green Line, began serving the mall on September 12, 2009. From fall 2009 to July 2014, the Portland Vintage Trolley also served the transit mall on certain Sundays. Although the mall's transit stops are mainly served by TriMet vehicles, on weekdays buses on express routes operated by C-Tran and the Columbia County Rider also serve the mall. In September 2015, the new MAX Orange Line replaced the Yellow Line service in the southbound direction on the mall, on 5th Avenue, with the Orange and Yellow lines being through-routed at all times.

The Portland Transit Mall (formally named simply the Portland Mall) was constructed by TriMet, the Portland metropolitan area's regional transit agency, in 1976–77 and opened on December 11, 1977. It was formally dedicated in March 1978. The mall comprises 5th Avenue, for southbound buses, and 6th Avenue, for northbound buses, and when first opened it involved the sections of those streets extending from West Burnside Street to SW Madison Street: the central core of downtown.

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