TriMet Routes — agent guide

All existing bus and rail lines. 200 LineString features, WGS84, one GeoParquet file of 794.0 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 ('routes/routes.parquet') for readability. Prefix them with https://data.source.coop/cholmes/trimet/ to run remotely.

Other formats: routes.pmtiles for map display (layer name routes), 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

(rte, dir) is the key, not rte

200 rows, 113 distinct rte values, 87 of which appear twice. dir is 0 or 1 and TriMet documents it only as "Direction 0" and "Direction 1" — the human meaning lives in dir_desc (e.g. "To Portland"). Always group or join on the pair.

Use public_rte for display, rte for joining

rte is an integer and public_rte is a string. They differ where a service has a lettered public name: route 2 is displayed as FX2. Show public_rte to humans; join on rte, which is what route-stops carries.

Mixed LINESTRING / MULTILINESTRING breaks naive length code

ST_Length_Spheroid returns nan on this layer for both geometry types, so do not reach for it. Project and use ST_Length instead (see the recipes). If you need per-segment work, ST_Dump the multilinestrings first.

frequent is a string, not a boolean

Values are the literal strings 'True' and 'False', not SQL booleans. Compare with frequent = 'True'; a bare WHERE frequent will not parse.

Some alignments leave the district

A handful of routes run past the district boundary — service to Estacada and Sherwood, for example. Do not assume routes is contained by district-boundary.

Query recipes

Longest routes in kilometres, one direction only

Route-kilometres by mode

The Frequent Service network, as displayed to riders

Related collections

• route-stops — the stops along each of these route-directions, joined on (rte, dir)
• rail-lines — rail drawn for cartography, with per-line colors
• stops — the deduplicated stop list

Provenance

TriMet publishes this as tm_routes at developer.trimet.org/gis, last updated July 13, 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.