History
In the mid-1970s, Multnomah County officials negotiated a number of improvements to the proposed I-205 freeway with the Oregon Department of Transportation in order to win their support. Among them was the transitway, a bike path and reconfigured interchanges. The transitway was intended to connect at Gateway into the proposed Banfield Transitway, which originally was to have been a busway and would have run along I-84 to the Lloyd District and Downtown.
By the late 1970s, light rail became the selected transit mode in the Banfield corridor and opened in 1986 as Portland's first light rail line (now a portion of the Blue Line). When light rail was selected over the busway option in the Banfield corridor, the fate of the proposed I-205 busway was sealed (as the busway made little sense without a downtown connection) although the corridor was, since the late 1970s, considered a potential future light rail line.
The Blue Line uses a short portion of the transitway between the Gateway station and Burnside Street opened in 1986. The portion of the route north from Gateway opened in September 2001 as the Red Line. The portion south from Burnside (and beyond to the Clackamas Town Center) opened in September 2009 as the Green Line.
Read more about this topic: I-205 Transitway
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