You bet I believe there are a lot of things wrong with TriMet.
Its the same things that are wrong with every single other government institution. Never ending expanding of their bureaucratic empires, endless capital projects with no cost limits, managements that pretend they are listening to the public but have already made up their minds about policies. "Rules for thee but not for me".
TriMet is no exception to any of this, after all they are nothing but "government" under another name
Now with that said there have been some definite improvements from my point of view.
For example:
A-Don't sweat the masks
B-Don't sweat the fares
C-Don't sweat the personal carts/ hand trucks/wagons
D-Don't sweat babies left in the strollers
E-A slightly more friendly attitude towards the dispossessed citizens (what I call the walking dead)
F-They did give a bonus of $1000 to each employee (not that people sitting at home deserved it)
G-An extra day off for the front line workers
What really needs to happen in regards to their drivers is a total restructuring of wages.
For example start at $30 and Top out at $40
Give people a real reason to want this job and stay at the job.
In the past we took this job for the defined pension and excellent health benefits, all of that is gone now.
You will have to make this job more attractive to get the type of people you should have behind the wheel.
Right now there are a lot of people driving buses that really have no business working with the public.
I'm sure that's a result of the "unskilled labor" designation of Transit operators. Transit operators, the good ones, are very skilled at what they do and how they do it and those folks are not compensated adequately
Great recap Al. That was well written
ReplyDeleteand makes sense to me. All those points
should be implemented now.