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TriMet Geospatial Data

Name: Portland Trimet Portolan Data Catalog (Mirror)
Creator: Chris Holmes

TriMet — the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon — runs bus, light rail (MAX), commuter rail (WES) and streetcar service across the Portland metropolitan area. It publishes eight geospatial layers at developer.trimet.org/gis as Shapefile and KML, each with a metadata page carrying full attribute definitions and code lists.

This catalog is a cloud-native mirror of all eight: the same features as GeoParquet and PMTiles, with TriMet's original Shapefile, KML and metadata page linked from every collection. Nothing has been added to the data and no features were dropped.

The GeoParquet keeps TriMet's native EPSG:2913 (NAD83(HARN) / Oregon North, international feet), so lengths and areas come out in feet without a projection step. The PMTiles are WGS84, because vector tiles are.

🗺️ Open the TriMet data browser →

Preview all eight collections on a map drawn with TriMet's own cartography, inspect each one's schema and license, download the GeoParquet or PMTiles, and follow the links back to TriMet — no setup, nothing to install.

Agents: start at AGENTS.md for join keys, the quirks that produce silently wrong answers, and verified query recipes.

Collections

Collection	Features	Geometry	Description
TriMet District Boundary	1	Polygon	TriMet service district boundary.
TriMet Routes	200	LineString	TriMet fixed route alignments (includes bus and rail.)
TriMet Rail Lines	171	LineString	TriMet rail service optimized for cartographic display.
TriMet Stops	6,316	Point	Active TriMet stops (includes bus and rail.)
TriMet Route Stops	8,314	Point	Active TriMet stops (includes bus and rail) by route and direction.
TriMet Rail Stops

Quick start

Past the first query, the interesting pattern is joining across collections. stops and route-stops share stop_id exactly — all 6,316 of them — which turns a stop location into the set of routes that serve it:

Cartography

Where TriMet publishes a style for a layer, this catalog reproduces it rather than inventing one. Two TriMet sources are used, and both are mirrored into the collections they style so the reproduction can be checked against its origin:

ott:rail, the GeoServer SLD behind TriMet's rail maps, fetched from ws.trimet.org via WMS GetStyles. Its rules key on exactly the line values the rail layers carry, so rail-lines/styles/default.json reproduces it segment for segment — including the layered dashed overlays that show which services share a track.
trimet-routes, TriMet's MapLibre style at tiles.trimet.org, which gives the line weights and the flat bus color #136390. Where it resolves route_color from GTFS, the equivalent colors are taken from TriMet's GTFS routes.txt.

Every collection ships three to five styles; see each collection's README.

Where the data comes from

Collection	TriMet source	Last updated at source
TriMet District Boundary	`tm_boundary` — Shapefile · KML · Metadata	January 09, 2013
TriMet Routes	`tm_routes` — Shapefile · KML · Metadata	July 13, 2026
TriMet Rail Lines	`tm_rail_lines` — Shapefile · KML · Metadata	September 26, 2024
TriMet Stops	`tm_stops` — Shapefile · ·

All eight are published in EPSG:2913 (NAD83(HARN) / Oregon North (ft)) and reprojected here to EPSG:4326. TriMet's note on the GIS page:

TriMet provides these datasets free of charge in shapefile and KML format. All geospatial datasets created and distributed by TriMet are in NAD83, Oregon State Plane North projection and coordinate system. Refer to the metadata for additional information regarding a specific data layer. TriMet provides data to the general public under certain terms and conditions.

Contact for the source data: TriMet GIS, 4012 SE 17th Ave, GIS3, Portland, OR 97202 — gis@trimet.org.

License, and a warning

TriMet distributes these datasets free of charge, but the terms of use do not grant redistribution rights. Section 4 of TriMet's Terms of Use reserves reproduction, modification, distribution and republication of site Content without written consent; the redistribution license in section 5 covers the Web Services API, not these GIS downloads. The collections therefore declare "license": "other" with a link to those terms, rather than claiming an open license the source does not offer.

Practically: use the data, and contact gis@trimet.org before redistributing it or building a product on it. If you need transit data under clear open terms, TriMet's GTFS feed is the better starting point.

About this mirror

Maintained by Chris Holmes (cholmes@9eo.org), not affiliated with TriMet. Conforms to the Portolan specification v0.1.0.

Both halves are on GitHub, and contributions are welcome

Nothing here is hand-written — the catalog is generated, so a fix belongs in the source rather than in the published files.

	Repository	What lives there
Catalog	`cholmes/portolan-catalog-trimet`	The generators in `tools/` that build this catalog from TriMet's Shapefiles — the metadata, the column descriptions, the MapLibre styles and these docs.
Data browser	`cholmes/trimet-data-browser`	The data browser itself — map preview, downloads, schema and license.

Found something wrong? A description that misreads, a column definition that does not match the data, a query that fails, a style that draws badly, a caveat that is missing — please open an issue or send a pull request. Improvements are just as welcome as corrections.

Corrections to the data itself go to TriMet at gis@trimet.org; this catalog only mirrors what they publish and does not edit it.

If you are editing the catalog, everything under catalog/ is regenerated by tools/build.py and a hand-edit will be overwritten — change the generator or the manifest instead. CLAUDE.md says which file to edit for what, and the test suite runs every published SQL example before anything ships.

The TriMet name and logo are trademarks of TriMet, used here solely as a link back to trimet.org, which section 6 of TriMet's Terms of Use permits.