The Mill Plain BRT project continued to advance in 2020, focusing on more detailed design and planning as the project moves closer to construction in 2021. Mill Plain also reached another milestone in 2020, when the Federal Transit Administration announced that it is allocating $24.9 million to the project as part of the FTA’s Capital Investment Grants program. That’s a major piece of the project’s $50 million financial plan.
The Mill Plain project will be the second bus rapid transit line in Clark County, after The Vine on Vancouver’s Fourth Plain corridor. The new project will operate on the Mill Plain corridor—C-TRAN’s second-busiest, after Fourth Plain—stretching about 10 miles between downtown and east Vancouver. It will add larger vehicles, enhanced stations and other new features to provide Mill Plain with faster, more efficient and more reliable transit service. It will also create a new transit center serving multiple routes on east Mill Plain near Clark College’s Columbia Tech Center campus.
In the coming year, C-TRAN will wrap up design on the Mill Plain BRT project and begin construction on the corridor. The system, replacing the existing Route 37, is expected to begin service in 2023. The Vine on Fourth Plain began service in 2017.
