Quote:

Motorman
the light rail agency is building a similar system

You tell me if you'd ride a MAX train, with the exact same seats, for 100+ miles, stopping every mile or so. Light Rail is a hybrid of interurban and trolley service, but it is not a true interurban service, and Sound Transit is **NOT** building anything akin to what the Oregon Electric (or Red Electric) was back in the 1920s.

As Arlen said, look at the existing service levels for two Amtrak trains a day, four POINT buses a day, Greyhound, Flixbus, plus the various Airport shuttle companies (Groome Transportation). The fact that the companies have CUT service, and not one but TWO airlines (Horizon and SkyWest) have cut 100% of the PDX-EUG air service, shows the market. Bolt Bus eliminated its service, Greyhound is down to just one or two schedules... There isn't one. You could eliminate ALL of the competition and still fit 100% of the traffic just by adding two local Superliner coaches to the Coast Starlight.

Even in the Portland-Seattle market where there is actually a decent and bidirectional commute flow, there is just the Cherriots/SMART 1X route that gets you to Wilsonville (nowhere convenient) and whose ridership is crap because it drops you off 20 miles short of where anyone wants to go; it also doesn't run mid-day or weekends. The Amtrak/ODOT/Oregon POINT service is geared towards downtown Portland but not only does it overshoot the business district, downtown Portland is nowhere near close to recovery, and the Union Station area is downright scary now, with the nearest MAX platform a de facto homeless camp occupying the entire platform. Most traffic actually heads up Highway 217 to Beaverton and Hillsboro - there's absolutely zero transit that covers that without extremely inconvenient, out-of-the-way and lengthy transfers that make transit 2-3 times longer than the highway (even in bad traffic).