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752-2665
Laidlaw Transit Service (541) 754-7525
Click here for the Greyhound schedule.
Click here for the Green Tortoise
The municipal bus service (see right; click here if the schedule is not visible) is not Corvallis's first attempt at public transportation. Early photos show horse- drawn carriages meeting passengers, first at the steamboat landing on 1st Street and the stage coach station on 4th St., then at the railroad station on Western (later at 6th and Monroe). Then the horses drawn carts were replaced by horse- drawn rail cars and finally by electric rail cars. The post-WWII generation of Corvallis bought the car culture adopted by their peers elsewhere and henceforth the public money would be spent almost exclusively upon road building and stop lights, insofar as transportation in Corvallis is concerned. The more imaginative possibilities of "urban planning" in the city shriveled almost exclusively to a matter of traffic control, with the funneling of its bloated flow toward the downtown merchants who dominated the city increasingly problematic, necessitating the rupture of entire neighborhoods to accommodate it. Even today, when oil is fetching prohibitive prices, the city council has failed to mount an effective promotion of public transport, which is confined to a set of buses. You'd be hard put to find a single councilor who makes use of them. The ever growing reach of Portland's ;ihjt rail appears to be the only hope for effective mass transit in the city, and that is at least a generation away.