Last week for the 17

They've been talking about it for years, but this time they're actually doing it. Tri-Met, Portland's crumbling mass transit service, is killing the 17 Broadway bus line as currently configured. After Saturday, for the first time in 116 years, there will be no north-south transit service on Northeast 24th Avenue through Irvington and Alameda.

Originally there was a streetcar that ran north on 24th, and south on 22nd, between Broadway and Mason Street, the latter being up on Alameda Ridge. (The streetcar climbed the ridge along Regents Drive, thus avoiding "Dead Man's Hill.") In 1948, the trolley was replaced by a bus that ran both ways on 24th, for many years designated the no. 9. It eventually became the 17, the change having to do with what the bus did after it reached downtown.

Beginning next Sunday, that bus will be no more. North-south service up onto the ridge will be limited to the Crazy 8 on 15th and whatever number they're planning to call it, I think it's going to be 17, on 33rd. The distance between those two lines is about a mile.

It's not that working people and shoppers don't live along 24th any more. It's that they don't go downtown, which is where the 17 takes you. And even if they are headed that way, a lot of Portlanders don't feel comfortable on the bus or the train, like they used to. There are too many crazies running around any more, and for your occasional downtown run there's this thing in your pocket called Uber or Lyft.

I rode the 17, and the 9 before it, countless times over the years, but never lately. Its impending disappearance, a sign of our strange times, won't affect me other than making the neighborhood a little less noisy. And I can't imagine too many other folks will be upset, either. Daytime ridership on the 17 has been way down from historical levels, and most of the nighttime 17's in recent years have been literally empty.

There are lots of other transit cuts going into effect at the end of the week, too. The system, it seems, is broke, and broken.

As blasphemous as it sounds, it might be time to rethink Tri-Met entirely. It's extremely expensive, worsening the city's awful tax climate, and it's not delivering for the average person the way it once did. The current structure is 57 years old. The Jackson 5, a contemporary of Tri-Met, broke up quite a while ago.