Testifying against a bill aimed at making the TriMet board of directors more accountable to taxpaying citizens, head honcho Neil McFarlane actually came out with this gem:
“I would sort of ask the question,” McFarlane said, “what is broken with TriMet?”
A better question would be: what isn't broken at TriMet? McFarlane claims that mounting employee health insurance costs are driving the agency toward a fiscal cliff, although he recently found nearly $1 million to dole out in pay raises to himself and 69 of his bestest, closest managers - most all of whom were already receiving six-figure paychecks.
The bill he was testifying against would turn the seven-member TriMet board from one exclusively consisting of gubernatorial appointees into a board appointed by folks at the local service level. As it stands, only one board member periodically rides transit; none of the others do. And McFarlane, now among the most highly-compensated of any transit agency head in the country, doesn't see a problem with the status quo.
What's broken? As one person commented, try this:
How about electric trains that have no power all day long and require buses for backup? How about Ticket Vending Machines that cancel your credit card when you're away from home and put you on a terrorist watch list? What's broken? How about millions of dollars in fare revenue that walk out the bus door every day because people won't pay, and drivers are fearful of assaults for asking them to? How about bridges to nowhere, and communities forced to pay for trains they don't want? How about bus drivers getting stabbed because of Neil McFarlane's "Rich bus driver" rhetoric, and divisive propaganda?
And how about an agency that keeps finding ways to fund multi-billion-dollar construction projects but complains incessantly about health insurance costs for drivers and mechanics?
Porkland continues to wasteinvest billions in tax dollars and cash borrowed from China to build little light rail and streetcar lines, but they don't have anything much that makes them worthy of the term "public transit": due to downtown Porkland's uniquely small city blocks, the light rail "trains" can never consist of more than two cars. Moreover, they don't take people where they want or need to go.
By contrast, Minneapolis has the Hiawatha line (now being re-named the "blue" line) that runs out to the largest shopping mall in the country, and will be bringing their "green" line - running between Minneapolis and St. Paul later this year. These trains are actual trains; three or more cars in length. And they have the populations and destinations to support them.
Even better, they aren't stupidly train-centric, unlike their counterparts in Porkland.
Porkland and the development agency known as TriMet are suddenly finding themselves in unfamiliar territory, after decades of wallowing in pork: KOIN television is actually hitting the development agency hard, much to the apparent dismay of longtime Friend of Neil (Goldschmidt) and nominal head of a "transit" agency Neil McFarlane. McFarlane, evidently expecting softball questions during an interview on an appropriately immobile light rail car(Correction: some guy notes that it's a 3000-series bus. Still, not moving,), was confronted with a few annoying facts, such as the hefty raises he managed to sneak through for himself and 70 or so of his best "managers".
Naturally, McFarlane blames the fiscal disorder at his agency upon the recession and the high cost of TriMet’s union health benefits while attempting to fend off discussion of the fact that TriMet executives are more highly paid, on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, than their counterparts across the country - even as they raise fares and slash services. It's a well-done report, and highly entertaining.
Meanwhile, another darling of the porkers at TriMet and of Porkland Democratics, the "Columbia River Crossing", appears to be well on its way to oblivion. If the Washington legislature doesn't come up with the cash (to the tune of some $450 million) by September, then it's all over but the wiping. This would be an excellent development, as Oregon's legislature has already pledged $450 million in funds it doesn't have, and the federal government is clearly in no position to fund the project despite its promises. If Washington legislators are able to sink it, we can finally stop throwing more money into the bureucratic rat-hole.
The former transit agency (now a development agency) is spending $1.5 billion to build a 7.3-mile light rail line into northwest Clackamas County, despite the fact that most county residents oppose it. By the way, that $1.5 billion is only the construction costs; operating the "trains" will cost extra, as has been discussed here on a number of occasions over the years. As Cascade Policy Institute has noted several times, there are better ways to spend that kind of money:
Video found at Antiplanner. He has some of the facts wrong (Oregonian writer Joseph Rose initially denied that credit and debit card accounts had been frozen). And it would have been nice to have found the video a few years earlier; the Clackistanis might have had a fighting chance.
MAX Light Rail is the centerpiece of the city's public transportation system
As if the gang-bangers weren't enough, Tri-Met's light rail "trains" have also been serving as places of business for a prostitution ring. Giggity! Talk about convenience....
Last Tuesday (05/07/13), cops and transit police participated in a sting operation directed against the hookers and their customers - on the light rail train. Keepin' on, keepin' it weird. Apparently, you can not only "Go By Train", you can also...um, well....
Oddly, it wasn't mentioned on the nightly news. Maybe they ran a story on the late-night edition.
The Steel Bridge in Portland, Oregon while fully raised.
Great story in The Oregonian today about yesterday's light rail failure, and the story illustrates why the newspaper's lost another nearly 8% of its circulation during the past year. Crack Zero reporter Joseph Rose homes in on the problem which resulted in a cascade of substation failures: a little surge protector on the top of one power pole. Its failure overloaded a nearby substation, and the others overloaded when trying to take up the slack. The result: a cascade effect that shut down half a dozen substations and brought the entire "system" to a halt; one "train" blocked a downtown Portland intersection, another was stranded on the Steel Bridge, and similar tales of woe emerged across their vaunted "system".
Fortunately, as they haven't completely gutted the bus system thus far, the development agency known as Tri-Met, which runs the rails as well, was able to bring buses in to rescue stranded rail passengers.
But Rose, taking a page straight from the Tri-Met PR manual, spent most of his discussion blaming the Steel Bridge for Tri-Met's light rail issues:
Or maybe it was the fact that electrical problems on the Steel Bridge have increasingly become a pain in the commute for MAX riders. The transit agency didn't have data available on how many times overhead propulsion wires have gone dead in the past year. But in recent years, train speeds have been reduced from 15 mph to 5 mph due to wear where the lift span meets the fixed structure and due to sensitive signaling equipment on the lift span.
Hey Joe, they chose to run trains across that bridge. It's not like anybody held a baseball bat to their heads. You really mean that with all the highly-compensated "managers" at the development agency, it never occurred to anybody that running electric toy trains across a drawbridge might be a problem? You realize, presumably, that Burlington Northern has been running trains across the lower span for decades without major issues?
You see, Joe, the problem is that BN runs real trains, not electric toy trains - and it never occurred to the brain-trust at Tri-Met that electrical connections on a lift span might, just maybe, pose a bit of a problem. Hey, what's the worst that could happen, right?
Of course, at the same time that TriMet announced that trains would start rolling over the Steel Bridge again Monday night, another service alert went out to MAX riders: Another power outage had disrupted Blue and Red lines between Beaverton Transit Center and Sunset Transit Center.
Power was restored in less than than an hour but trains couldn't use the lines because a train that was hit by the outage was stuck on the tracks between the Beaverton Transit Station and the Sunset Transit Station.
Break out the buses again!
Rose likely was constrained by space, so he couldn't really get into that whole westside outage thing, and as AltheDriver noted in the subsequent comments:
On Sunday 5 substations went down at once, that should have been a clue something is wrong.
So, in two days, at least eleven (and likely more, as the westside outage was not explained) substations cascaded into darkness. And nobody said anything until the big commute-stopping outage yesterday. How odd. AltheDriver further noted that during the Monday outage, all controller desktop systems crashed as well; compounding an already huge problem.
An actual newspaper might have taken the time to explore all of these issues; perhaps even considering the potential ramifications in the event that one day the "vaunted" Tri-Met light rail system was targeted by terrorists. Looks like a pretty easy target. But then, The Oregonian can't be bothered. And they wonder why their numbers are tanking.
Portland Mayor Sam Adams with then-City Councilor Tim Leavitt at a meeting regarding the Columbia River Crossing Project. Leavitt is now Mayor of Vancouver, Washington.
She says it'd be irresponsible to fund the "Columbia River Crossing", and she's far from alone. She even understands why it's such a clusterduck:
From 1926 to 1982, four major bridges were built across the Columbia River, with heights ranging from 140 to 210 feet. The CRC is designed at just 95-116 feet in order to accommodate Portland's light rail, which a majority of Clark County voters have repeatedly rejected. Three Southwest Washington businesses representing thousands of good-paying jobs presently located upriver from the proposed CRC location are seriously threatened due to inadequate bridge height. Any new crossing must accommodate current and future river users.
And yet the "CRC" like a scene from "Night of the Zombies", staggers blindly on, consuming $3 million per month; on track, as it were, to spend some $200 million without ever having turned one shovel-full of dirt. Wouldn't you love to work at CRC? Imagine getting paid six figures for doing nothing more than sitting at a desk, writing fairy tales. Put a bird on it and call it "art".
Westside Express Service train at Wilsonville maint. facility.
As mentioned here yesterday, TriMet's ticket machines are incredibly unreliable, and it's been reported that as many as 2,000 people a month, attempting to pay with a credit card, have had the card rejected and an electronic cancellation message sent to the issuing banks - a claim refuted by a writer for The Oregonian. However, Portland television station KATU last night refuted the refutation:
PORTLAND, Ore. – TriMet admits its ticket machines have been causing banks to cancel or suspend thousands of debit and credit cards.
Spokeswoman Roberta Altstadt said a bug in the ticket machine software caused some of the machines to flag cards as stolen.
“We believe it was affecting about 1,000 to 2,000 credit card transactions a month,” said Altstadt. “For at least five years.”
One of their many PR flacks, Alstadt suggests that people pick up some tickets while they're out buying groceries, adding, "It can be that easy." The arrogance on display at the former transit agency (TriMet having recast itself as a development agency) is simply breathtaking. Of course, there's little reason for accountability there; the board is composed of government appointees, and nobody at the agency is elected.
But the ticket machines, though needlessly inconveniencing some tens of thousands (Vancouver residents are doubtless salivating over the prospect of having a couple of shiny new ticket machines on their side of the Columbia River), are really little more than symptoms of a much larger problem.
CPI notes that the "Westside Express Service", a nearly 15-mile- long commuter rail line that TriMet opened amid considerable fanfare some four years ago, carries approximately 20 to 50 riders on each trip between Beaverton and Wilsonville; each rider subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $40 per round trip. And rather than taking passengers off the roads, thereby reducing congestion, WES actually increases congestion - and only around 800 people actually use the train each week. And while light rail's bad enough, their WES line's even worse:
The operating costs for WES are 12 times higher per hour than bus service, but the public benefits are not 12 times higher. In fact, WES is not even equal to bus service; it is far less flexible, and the equipment is unused most of the time.
TriMet recently predicted that within the next decade, more than half of all bus routes will be eliminated due to operating losses if something doesn’t change. The Board places the blame for this on a labor union contract that saddles the agency with the costliest employee benefits package in the nation. But the union did not force management to build an absurd commuter rail line; that was a choice made by the Board alone, without any consideration of the legacy costs it would impose on future riders.
As has been mentioned here before on a number of occasions, TriMet is busily cannibalizing bus service in favor of efforts to force passengers onto their trains. It hasn't been working as planned; ridership continues to drop. Now, they're making clear their intention to kill half of all remaining bus routes, while blaming the union. Unions are, for the most part, nothing more than Political Action Committees for Democratics, and are justly loathed by many. However, they're not the problem at TriMet; managment (or what passes for management) is.
TriMet's ticket machines are notoriously unreliable, which may account for part of the reason why comparatively few bother to pay to ride their trains. Some machines have had reported downtimes of over 35%, and today, local media reports that as many as 2,000 people a month, attempting to pay with a credit card, have had the card rejected and an electronic cancellation message sent to the issuing banks - though Oregonian guy Joseph Rose claims that those were "fraud alert" messages, so apparently there's some confusion amongst our crack media professionals in this regard.
And while Clackamas County residents got started too late in the game to prevent an unwanted light rail line from being constructed into the suburban Milwaukie area, Clark County residents are set against running a line from Portland into their county, in Washington state, despite cajoling and threats from various politicians - so much so that Oregonian's Mapes referred to the county as "Clarkistan"; a takeoff on the popular term, the "Clackistani Uprising" resulting from that county's efforts to stop "Portland Creep".
Left unmentioned in Mapes' article is the fact that what's happened in Clackamas County has also motivated people in Washington County to take preemptive action against plans for yet another light rail line; this one planned for Hwy. 99W. Notably, citizens in suburban Tigard and King City voted to require their approval before the folks who've been tossing money around can bring their plans forward. Probably, "Washingtonstan" just doesn't have that "ring" to it.
In any case, Portland's ill-advised foray into the streetcar business has also been going through some rocky times: not only did the folks in Lake Oswego (Clackamas County) shoot down the city's carefully-crafted plan to run a streetcar line into that suburban town, but "United Streetcar" has been a complete bust. "United Streetcar" was formed as an offshoot of Oregon Iron Works to build streetcars right here in the good ol' USA, and has been an integral part of Portland's dream of being a global leader in "green technology".
United Streetcar, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, was supposed to manufacture five new Portland streetcars and have them in service in 2012. None was ready.
They were initially supposed to build six, but after it became clear that they're completely inept when it comes to building 19th-century transportation vehicles, Portland cut the order to five cars - but at the same price as they'd agreed to pay for six. Hey, it's just taxpayer money. "United Streetcar" also inked deals to build cars for Tucson, Arizona and Washington, D.C. And who knows? It's entirely possible that Tucson and D.C. will eventually get the cars. Perhaps in, say, 2050. They wer four years late in delivering the first car to Portland, and that one's had so many problems that it's due to be taken out of service for at least six months if "United Streetcar" ever manages to get another one operational.
Better yet, it's been proven on a couple of occasions that a middle-aged guy can actually get from point A to point B faster by walking, rather than taking the Portland Streetcar. But Portland Streetcar, run by long-time Friend of Neil Rick Gustafson, is in it for the long slog. Neil Goldschmidt may be gone, but the tentacles of his network run deep and strong in Portland and Salem to this day.
Long-time Friend of Neil Patricia McCaig is
back in the news. After raking in north of half a million dollars doing PR work for the "Columbia River Crossing" (and being appointed as Oregon Gov. Retread's top advisor on the CRC project), the good times are starting to catch up to her. Her company, McCaig Communications & Opinion Research, has been hit with an IRS lien over a $16,000 liability which McCaig, channeling Sgt. Schultz, claims to know nothing, nothing about. She also is in line for an Oregon Government Ethics Commission investigation for spending several hundred hours prodding legislators to support the CRC project. She's in trouble on that front because she didn't register as a lobbyist, as required by law. Washington state's also looking into her activities because she hasn't registered her business there, nor paid associated taxes and fees, while working on behalf of the CRC - which is located in Vancouver.
All views are welcome here, but there are a few rules that most understand intuitively. If you're stupid, you need them spelled out. So this note's for you:
1) You don't get to call people names (referred to in general parlance as an "ad-hominem attack").
2) You don't get to hijack discussion threads. This means that you confine your comments to the the post, and/or to comments related to the post.
3) You don't get to spit, drool, crap on the carpets, nor employ expletives - even if you believe that doing so showcases your vast intellectual capabilities.
4) If you happen to be stupid enough to be unable to comply with the above rules, you will receive one (1) warning - after which your subsequent comments may be removed, and your comment privileges revoked.
