$2.80 gets Wilsonville commuters a one-seat bus to PDX
Line 170 is TriMet’s weekday-only PDX/Wilsonville bus, built around peak airport shift and office hours, with just a small set of commuter trips and no weekend service. It’s meant for south-suburb regulars who want a direct ride to Portland International Airport’s Terminal T without a transfer, not for all-day visitors landing at random times.
The fare is the standard TriMet adult rate of $2.80, so you pay the same as any other local bus or MAX line with no airport surcharge added. That ticket gives you 2½ hours of transfer validity across TriMet, which helps if you’re chaining this with another route on the Wilsonville end or backing it up with the Red Line on the Portland side.
Service runs only on weekdays, with Line 170 schedules clustered around specific morning and afternoon commute windows shown on TriMet’s timetable page rather than every 15–30 minutes. The trips are directional, so you might see morning buses heading toward PDX for early flights and afternoon runs back toward Wilsonville, but you will not get full-day coverage in both directions.
Pickup and drop-off are timed to common work shifts at and around PDX, according to the published schedule blocks on trimet.org that group trips around typical 8–9 hour workdays. That means it works well if your flight or airport job lines up with those exact windows, but a 2 p.m. departure or a late-night arrival will leave you outside Line 170’s span of service.
For visitors landing at PDX, the key detail is that this line is far too limited to rely on blindly, with only a handful of trips listed in each direction on weekdays and zero runs on Saturdays or Sundays. Most occasional travelers still end up using the MAX Red Line or a rideshare from Terminal T, while Line 170 quietly serves its niche of regulars with fixed schedules.
Step-by-step: using TriMet Bus 170 PDX/Wilsonville
- 1. Check the current Line 170 timetable on trimet.org and confirm there is a weekday trip that matches your exact flight time or work shift, including direction and stop.
- 2. From Wilsonville or the south-suburb stop listed on the schedule, arrive at least 10 minutes before the posted departure time, since these commuter trips do not run often.
- 3. Pay the $2.80 adult fare on board with Hop card, contactless payment, or cash, and keep the 2½-hour transfer window in mind if you plan to connect to another TriMet line.
- 4. Ride directly to Portland International Airport and follow the signs into Terminal T once the bus pulls into the airport stop listed on the schedule.
- 5. For the trip home, check the limited afternoon or evening return times in advance and have a backup plan, like the Red Line plus a local bus, in case a meeting runs long or your flight is delayed past the last Line 170 run.
One tip: print or screenshot the exact trip times for your travel day, because a missed Line 170 departure can mean waiting several hours or losing the direct one-seat ride altogether.