TriMet Rail Stops — agent guide

Public transit rail stops. Includes existing, under construction, and planned MAX, WES, and Portland Streetcar stops. The data have been generalized to improve cartographic display at smaller scales. 169 Point features, WGS84, one GeoParquet file of 17.1 KB in 1 row group(s).

Access

Reads stream over HTTP range requests — query in place, do not download. The file is Hilbert-ordered and carries a GeoParquet 1.1 bbox covering column, so a spatial filter on geometry_bbox prunes row groups from metadata alone. Note the column name: GDAL writes the covering as <geometry column>_bbox, so it is geometry_bbox here, not bbox.

The recipes below use bare relative paths ('rail-stops/rail-stops.parquet') for readability. Prefix them with https://data.source.coop/cholmes/trimet/ to run remotely.

Other formats: rail-stops.pmtiles for map display (layer name rail-stops), and TriMet's original Shapefile and KML, linked from collection.json as source_shapefile and source_kml.

Coordinate system, and what follows from it

The GeoParquet is in EPSG:2913 — NAD83(HARN) / Oregon North, international feet — which is what TriMet surveys and publishes in. It is deliberately not reprojected. Only the PMTiles are in WGS84, because vector tiles are Web Mercator by definition.

The practical consequence is a good one: measurements just work, in feet.

Useful conversions: × 0.3048 for metres, ÷ 5280 for miles, ÷ 43560 for acres, ÷ 27878400 for square miles. 400 m is 1312.34 ft, a quarter mile is 1320 ft.

Two things to watch:

• Coordinates are not longitude and latitude. An x of 7633099 is feet east of the projection's false origin, not a degree. Anything expecting lon/lat — a web map, a geocoder, most GeoJSON consumers — needs a transform first.
• always_xy := true when you do transform. Without it DuckDB honours EPSG:4326's authority-declared latitude-first axis order and every result comes back Infinity:

The bbox covering column is in the same feet, so a spatial filter written against it uses projected coordinates, not degrees. The collection's STAC extent stays in WGS84, because STAC requires that regardless of the data's own CRS.

Nothing here carries a pre-computed length or area except the district boundary, which has TriMet's own area_sq_mi and acres.

Quirks and caveats

No id column — this layer does not join to the rest of the catalog

rail-stops carries station, line, status, type and nothing else. There is no stop_id. To connect a station to real-time arrivals or to route service, do a nearest-neighbour spatial join against stops, and check the result: the generalized geometry means the nearest stops point is usually right but not guaranteed.

NS/BL again — the metadata says BL/NS

Exactly as in rail-lines: TriMet's code list documents BL/NS, the data contains NS/BL, and here it is the code on 12 of the 169 stops. Filter on NS/BL.

Counts here do not match the rail rows in stops

169 stations here against 225 rail-typed rows in stops. Neither is wrong: this layer collapses directional platforms into one station point, and stops keeps them separate. Pick the one that matches your question and say which you used.

station is not unique

Streetcar loops in particular repeat station names at nearby points. Do not use station as a key.

All Existing, as with the line layer

Planned and UC are documented but unused in this snapshot.

Query recipes

Interchange stations, ordered by how many services meet there

Stations per line code

Match rail stations to their nearest public stop id

Related collections

• rail-lines — the track these stations sit on, sharing the line code space and palette
• stops — the full stop list, with public stop_id values but no station names

Provenance

TriMet publishes this as tm_rail_stops at developer.trimet.org/gis, last updated December 04, 2024. Every column description in collection.json comes from TriMet's metadata page — that page, not this catalog, is the authority on what a field means.

Conversion: ogr2ogr -f Parquet -t_srs EPSG:4326 -lco COMPRESSION=ZSTD -lco SORT_BY_BBOX=YES -lco WRITE_COVERING_BBOX=YES, then tippecanoe with -r1 --no-feature-limit so no feature is dropped at any zoom. See tools/convert.py.

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.