Trimess

Monday, May 16, 2011

WHEN THINGS GO BAD AT RAIL.....EVERYBODY IS SCREWED

TriMet: Blue, green and yellow MAX trains out, but delays continue after derailment | OregonLive.com

3 comments:

Erik H. said...

The problem is that when MAX takes a crap, it's buses to the rescue.

At rush hour, there aren't any spare buses...so TriMet is forced to inconvenience otherwise unaffected riders by stealing their bus.

Frankly in cases like that, TriMet should be giving out free day passes to all riders whose trip was cancelled, and the cost of those passes should be billed to MAX operations. (In addition to the cost of the bus shuttle service - billed to MAX operations at the charter rate.)

By the way, when there is a bus bridge, who pays for it? Bus Operations, or MAX Operations?? Is this another example of bus subsidizing MAX?

Anonymous said...

They were actually suggesting that people take regular buses instead:
http://service.govdelivery.com/service/rss/updates.rss?code=ORTRIMET

Max said...

Here's my reply to Erik from the boregonian:

"but at TriMet "contingency" buses are part of the regular daily fleet and TriMet has no contingency to cover emergency situations like this one"

Wow Erik, even you are making stuff up! Industry standard is 20% spare fleet, and that's exactly what TriMet has. The greatest number of buses scheduled out on the road at any given time is 501 (weekday PM peak), and TriMet has 600 buses in the "active fleet" and an additional 26 in their contingency ("semi-retirement") fleet.

The head mechanic specifically mentioned that these extra buses are, in fact, used for bus bridges and/or supplemental service.

All of this information was stated at the April board meeting ~8+ mins in.