THE TRUTH ABOUT THAT BOTTLE DROP BUS THAT TRIMET RAN

 

Those of us who have a TriMet fixation may remember the ballyhoo that TriMet started their own bottle drop bus as some sort of humanitarian effort on their part.

 Well folks we've been fooled again by the professional liar class.  

Here's the real story behind it. 

You can see the original and full post which has a lot more information besides Trimet here--->Vanessa Sturgeon would like to speak to the manager

TriMet As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, Sturgeon used her considerable political influence to make these poor recyclers’ lives even more miserable.

 She did this by contacting Governor Brown’s Chief of Staff, Nik Blosser, on a Sunday, describing the BottleDrop situation as “dangerous.” (For Karens, it’s enough to imagine the absolute worst-case scenario and then behave as though it’s already happened.) 

Blosser responded within hours, promising that a policy advisor would look into the problem right away. Less than a month later, Sturgeon and Governor Brown had their solution to the “problem” of poor people daring to show up — to the one place they could — and exchange their bottles for a “few dollars.” 

 That solution was a publicly-funded TriMet bus, of course, from Rose City Transit Center to the middle of nowhere — literally next to the railroad tracks — which impoverished people could ride, every day, feeling like important business commuters, but with dripping bags of recyclables instead of briefcases, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, with all the attendant risks. 

This “solution” controverted Sturgeon’s assertion that her concern was for the “health and safety of a vulnerable population.” It instead suggests that she just didn’t want to see or hear any more complaints about homeless people and their bags of garbage. 

The bus line may not have even been a solution, period. Undoubtedly you can think of far simpler, cheaper, and safer ways for the homeless to get a damn sandwich (simply giving them sandwiches comes to mind), rather than forcing them to run a Covid obstacle course hastily arranged to quiet a rich lady’s tantrums.¹ 

Oh, and the bus was “free” only to Sturgeon and the riders: It cost taxpayers $71,000 per month to operate. For the month of May 2020, it ferried only 907 riders — approximately 30 people a day — at a cost of nearly $80 per ride. 

That is to say, it was not even a cost-effective non-solution, certainly nothing that Sturgeon would tolerate in her business — she will not even pay the union workers she promised to hire the last time she wanted the city to exempt her from local regulations. And $71,000 a month unquestionably could have purchased a lot of sandwiches.