TriMet Route Stops — agent guide

Public transit stops for all bus and rail lines. For stops served by multiple lines there are multiple records in this dataset. 8,314 Point features, WGS84, one GeoParquet file of 343.6 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 ('route-stops/route-stops.parquet') for readability. Prefix them with https://data.source.coop/cholmes/trimet/ to run remotely.

Other formats: route-stops.pmtiles for map display (layer name route-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

frequent is here but is not in TriMet's metadata for this layer

The shapefile carries a FREQUENT column. TriMet's metadata page for tm_route_stops does not document it — the page lists ten attributes and this is not one of them. The definition carried in this catalog's table:columns is borrowed from tm_routes, where FREQUENT is documented, and the column description says so. Treat it as reliable but formally undocumented upstream.

The key is (rte, dir, stop_id)

No single column is unique. stop_id repeats across routes, (rte, dir) repeats across stops, and stop_seq repeats across route-directions.

Average 1.27 routes per stop, but the tail is long

Most stops are served by a single route. The busiest, Clackamas Town Center, is served by 11. Analyses that assume one route per stop will be right most of the time and badly wrong at exactly the places that matter.

stop_name agrees with stops on every row

Verified: zero disagreements across all 8,314 rows. You can join on stop_id alone without worrying about reconciling names.

No public_rte here

Unlike routes, this layer carries only the integer rte. To show riders the public name (FX2 rather than 2), join to routes on (rte, dir).

Query recipes

The ordered stop list for one route-direction

Transfer points: stops where the most routes meet

Attach public route names by joining back to routes

Stops reachable without a timetable — the Frequent Service stop set

Related collections

• stops — the deduplicated stop list; join on stop_id
• routes — route attributes including public_rte; join on (rte, dir)

Provenance

TriMet publishes this as tm_route_stops at developer.trimet.org/gis, last updated July 30, 2026. 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.