Trimess

Saturday, February 12, 2011

LET'S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT THIS #1 RATING FROM US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

Criteria #1- per capita spending on public transportation
I certainly have no problem believing this statistic! Portland and Trimet spend wild amounts of money on transit “investments”. The debate would be “is it money wisely spent?” Other services are ignored while transit is the main focus of government spending. Is it money well spent? Time will tell.

2-number of safety incidents per million trips
This was a shock to me. Our management has been spending thousands of staff hours and tens of thousands of dollars to transform our culture to a “culture of safety”. So who’s mistaken? US News and World Report or Trimet executive management? If Trimet executive management has been using safety as a control method or propaganda tool then I we have a real problem with who’s running Trimet right now. If US News is wrong then the entire article can be disregarded as faulty research methodology.

3-the number of trips taken per capita
No problem believing this either. Trimet’s methods of collecting data along with its fare less square, and its bogus transfer system (which is basically unenforceable)which  allows riders to travel in any direction for as long as the transfer is good would definitely make this a believable statistic.

All in all, these ratings mean nothing. The only statistic that is of any value is the safety statistic.And that means our management is seriously deluded or just plain liars if the statistic is indeed accurate.

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