[VIDEO] Next stop: campus! Schools team up with TriMet for new bus service on Line 25

Brand-new bus stop at the heart of Mt. Hood Community College's campus helps connect students with home, work and other destinations

Students returning to Mt. Hood Community College for the fall term are finding something new on campus: a TriMet bus stop.

Mt. Hood Community College is the new endpoint for Line 25-Glisan/Troutdale Rd, which runs between the college campus in Gresham and the Gateway/NE 99th Ave Transit Center in outer Northeast Portland.

The new bus service is ultra-convenient for students. The bus stop is just up the stairs and past the fountain from the student union and other major hubs of campus life. Line 25 also links them with the regional transit system, with connections to the MAX Blue, Green and Red lines at the Gateway Transit Center, plus more than a dozen other bus lines.

We recently extended Line 25 to Fairview, Wood Village, Troutdale and Northeast Gresham. It now serves both Mt. Hood Community College and Reynolds High School, among other destinations. In addition, Line 25 now runs on all days, with buses arriving every 30 minutes for most of the day.

Traci Simmons, Associate Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Mt. Hood Community College, calls it a "game-changer" for Mt. Hood students.

A redesigned line

Line 25 was one of several bus lines that saw major upgrades as part of our most recent service improvements, which we rolled out Aug. 25. These improvements are part of TriMet's Forward Together service concept: a new vision for how we provide bus service throughout our tri-county area.

The goal of Forward Together is to increase ridership and make bus a better option for more people, particularly those with low or limited income. That's a challenge that many students at Mt. Hood Community College face.

Many students "don't have access to a lot of resources like money, or gas, or even a car," says Isaias Damian Figueroa, a second-year student. He usually rides his bike to school, or he catches another bus at a stop that is a lot further from his home. Line 25 runs right past his neighborhood, though - and he says now that it connects his home to campus, he'll be taking the bus a lot more often.

Daniela Cabrales, another student and part-time employee at Mt. Hood Community College, says she's already seeing a lot of fellow students on the bus. She calls it a "great resource," both for Mt. Hood students and others who live in the community. About 30,000 people live within one-quarter mile of the extended Line 25.

Valued partnerships

TriMet serves a 533-square-mile area that includes parts of three counties. As we add service, we're guided by the input we receive from members of the community. The feedback we hear from riders helps to shape the decisions we make about where, when and how often we run buses.

We also value our relationships! Mt. Hood Community College and the Reynolds School District are trusted partners of TriMet. For years, we've worked with them on fare programs that put transit passes in the hands of students. When our partners asked for more direct bus service, we listened - and answered, with the expanded service we're providing on Line 25.

"TriMet has been helping us with providing Hop cards and passes and ways for students to get on and off campus for a long time," says Simmons. "This is just that next level."

Line 25 is an example of how TriMet is working with community partners to improve connections and expand access to opportunities throughout the region. On the same week we rolled out this new and improved service between East Multnomah County and Northeast Portland, we also:

• Created a new bus line, Line 153-Stafford/Salamo, in response to requests from residents and local officials in Lake Oswego and West Linn for a connector between the two cities.
• Added midday service on Line 29-Lake/Webster Rd, answering Clackamas County's call for more buses to serve its new Lake Road Health Center.
• Extended the MAX Red Line to the Hillsboro Airport/Fairgrounds MAX Station, a long-anticipated service improvement sought by business and community leaders in Washington County and the Port of Portland.

Those are just a handful of the service upgrades we made in August - and there's more to come! We'll continue to roll out more Forward Together improvements in the coming months. Stay tuned for more details.

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