Just kidding...they've increased fees and added new ones. Stealth taxes designed to bleed a minimum of another $470.3 million from your pocket over the next year and a half. Oregon doesn't bother with things like Return On Investment analysis - they just keep on mismanaging your resources.
Case in point:
When TriMet starts running low on cash, they just head to the state with a request to increase their taxing authority - which is always granted. There's no incentive to cut costs, nor to improve performance.
Their light rail stuff will never be cost-effective, in part because they insist that "trains" never exceed two cars in length, so that they can fit within downtown Portland's tiny "blocks". This is a limitation that they willfully chose, and it ensures that light rail will never be a significant factor as a transit option in Portland.
There's a reason why the L is fairly successful in Chicago: the trains are ten cars long, and service is frequent. In general, it's separated from other traffic, as is the system in New York City and in Washington, D.C. In Portland, it's almost as though they sat around and tried to come up with the most expensive and least effective means for transporting people. In that, they have certainly succeeded.
Yet they and their fellow Neil Goldschmidt sycophants insist upon pushing the holy grail. We can't build a new I-5 bridge across the Columbia River unless we agree to spend over a billion dollars to add light rail. That's short-sighted and just plain stupid. If light rail used actual trains, it might be a workable proposition. But they don't, and they won't, because the two-car "trains" must - absolutely must! - putt through downtown Portland, stopping every two blocks or so in order to allow any riders the opportunity to gawk at the vacant storefronts that light rail built.
Far from the success claimed, loot rail has been a disaster for downtown Portland and every other area it has thus far touched. Beaverton's vaunted "The Round", built over time right on the loot rail line, has gone bankrupt three times so far, and it's not even half completed - despite millions of dollars in public subsidy money.
On the Northeast side of the Blue line, the corridor along loot rail has become a magnet for crime.
Over along the airport line, the land devoted to "Transit-Oriented Development" sat vacant for a decade. This was supposed to be a "mixed-use village" with small retail downstairs and condos upstairs. The light rail "trains" dutifully stopped there and opened their doors. One day, a coyote leapt aboard. That's where my comment image came from - an empty train, save for a coyote curled up on a seat.
Until the zoning was changed to allow big-box stores with (gasp!) 2,000 parking spaces for cars!, nothing changed there. When the zoning was changed, Ikea and Best Buy moved in. It seems that nobody buys bedroom sets or refrigerators and hauls them back home on light rail.
Yet the government class never seems to change their tactics. ROI is not for them. When their plans don't work out, they don't cut the fat. They just find ways to bleed you for more cash.
