re-to all you assholes riding trimet.. (portland)

A Streetcar Named Liar

CLASSIC TWEETS

You never know what can happen when you're a public transit bus driver

This is classic. The bus driver takes off and the riders all stampede each other

$1.50 short on fare leads to 19 months in jail

Eucharia Nwerem ends up in jail over $1.50

I know I'm a bleeding heart when it comes to people paying their transit fare. Part of the reason for my bleeding heart is that everyone that works at Trimet Transit district makes pretty good money. If you're a Trimet executive you can actually retire wealthy.

 So when somebody like the person pictured gets on the bus and pays $1,  I NEVER, EVER questioned that. It was $1 more into the Trimet coffers. She most likely had no more money. I saw it as a positive for Trimet not a negative

 Unfortunately my opinion was the minority opinion back in the days when I drove buses at Trimet. 

Now the poor woman is in jail for 19 months over $1.50 and her inability to control herself

Reminds me of the story of MEJA POOT who was 25 cents short on his fare. The bus driver made a deal out of that which eventually lead Meja's death and the closing of a psychiatric hospital.

You never know where a fare dispute will end, which is why I never in my 15 years at Trimet got hot and bothered about a fare

ATU757 BYLAW CHANGES

I don't have any time or energy to get involved with any of the ATU activities but this change makes a lot of sense to me. If a candidate for office does not have 50% or more of the vote a runoff election will be required. Good idea!

"You Can Only Do What You Can Do" - The Tri-Met Motto

"It's unusual," said Altstadt. "You can only do what you can do to keep providing service."

Yeah, they only had two days' warning that high winds were on the way, so hey - why bother planning for something like that? Tri-Met's rail "services" just roll that way: if it's too hot or too cold or too windy, well - suck it, riders.
And they wonder why transit ridership keeps falling, even as they keep building "models for the nation".
Maybe it's because they're more interested in PR than in providing actual transit.
Max RedLine

Isn't it odd that Trimet places the same value on equipment and employees

I guess employees are just equipment to Trimet. But I already knew that anyway

I love the way #trimet employees have the same value as Trimet property pic.twitter.com/jAok6TWfir

— AL M (@AlYourPalster) December 16, 2014

Trimet light rail-the gift that keeps on giving

#trimet MAX Red Line is disrupted due to a collision between a train and a pedestrian at Parkrose/Sumner TC. Shuttle buses are serving ...

— unTriMet alerts (@unTriMetAlerts) December 13, 2014

Where's Mcfarlane?

This guy has gotten rich of the Portland tax payers and his system is so fragile that even a little wind can shut everything down. 

Mcfarlane sits at home counting his cash while citizens are stuck on his piece of shit light rail system.

What does he care, his riches are assured, nothing can touch him because he is connected to the crooked Portland aristocracy.

Mcfarlane shows off his stupid bridge which changes colors

Another massive Trimet fail

And dozens more pissed off Trimet rider tweets on my twitter feed!

St car ridership numbers and on time performance has been a fraud

Why is Trimet doing ridership statistics for the Portland Streetcar? I thought the street car was independent of Trimet? It makes me wonder if Trimet's own ridership and on time statistics are fudged also. I bet they are. Has anybody ever audited the Trimet ridership and on time statistics?

Older adults want bus stops

 According to the AARP older adults are much more interested in bus service than rail service by a margin of 2:1

OPAL finally gets its extended transfer

Trimet has been stonewalling OPAL on this extended transfer for years, 4 years according to JOE ROSE.

This dispute started when Trimet installed those ticket printers and reduced the amount of time given to bus riders on weekends. Bus riders used to get a extra time on weekends to make transfers but the ticket printer eliminated extra time on the weekends.

OPAL had been trying to get that extra hour returned to bus riders and it tuned into this huge long drawn out ordeal because Trimet officials stonewalled after OPAL lodged a Title 6 complaint against Trimet 

Anti Trimet revolution marches on

While Portland and its surrounding communities have been besieged with Pro Trimet expansionist propaganda the 'anti Trimet' forces continue marching on.

While Trimet officials 'ignore' every single negative thing that occurs (such as the demise of CRC which was due to Trimet involvement, election of anti Trimet officials in Clackamas, The Tigard and Tualatin votes) the movement to curtail Trimet hegemony continues.

Classic Tweets

Way to traumatize my autistic son Trimet: http://t.co/p8ezjBp6Mh via @YouTube

— CariAnn Drew (@CjmDrew) December 10, 2014

Shirley Block

Bruce Hansen Wants to Keep Silence Me. Why??

All, I want you to know if you looked in the Labor Press dated December 05, 2014 you will see I have no article but I sent one in on 11.19.14 at 7:13 PM in time to be placed in the paper but Bruce Hansen pulled it with no word at all to me. I feel this is wrong so I will send out via face book, My Blog and email.
From: shirley block [mailto:shirley.block2@comcast.net]
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 7:13 PM
To: catharineH@atu757.org
Subject: December Larbor Press

Latest Trimet propaganda

Trimet continues pumping out endless 'press releases' 'informing' us how wonderful they are.

For example Trimet is BRAGGING  about the $170 million dollars that went to 'minority' businesses.
Well that's nice of course but when its put into the proper context its really just a drop in the bucket.
Approximately 10% of the boondoggle bounty went to minority businesses, the rest went to the usual Portland insiders. It's not news, its propaganda.

And the DAMN BRIDGE is still appearing as 'news' several times each week. Yes they lit it up and it looks 'nice' and will be great in the travel brochures. The fact that it does NOTHING for most of the citizens is irrelevant. Most Portlander's are impressed with the dumb thing. They have totally disconnected from the fact that that project cost $1.5 BILLION dollars.
Another in the long list of Portland farces.

Jury finds TriMet negligent in knife attack on 2 passengers, awards$306,000 to victims

Two men stabbed during a bloody melee aboard a TriMet bus were awarded more than $300,000 Friday by a Clackamas County jury.
Richard Dickson Jr. and Jeremy Thompson sued the transit agency claiming TriMet was negligent and failed to properly train the driver, Leonard James. They said James' failure to follow regulations resulted in their injuries.

November's weird TriMet service alerts

NOTE: Many of these alerts were written by dispatchers who are not expected to be language experts, may not have time to proofread, and make mistakes like all humans.  They may have many other tasks in progress at the moment, such as dealing with buses that are already stuck due to the blockage or situations elsewhere.  While the errors probably should be forgiven, they can cause confusion or problems for those who try to follow them.

Al Jazeera-"Trimet blaming convenient scapegoat"

Transit workers and riders, unite! | Al Jazeera America

Many such allegations are being made in advance of labor negotiations. In Houston and Chicago, labor contracts for bus drivers are set to expire next year. A raft of smaller cities will also face new contract negotiations. Commuters may be looking warily at these labor negotiations as a potential inconvenience to their daily transit routines. Municipal managers often try to oppose commuters’ demand for reliable, quality service in the name of benefits to transit workers. In Portland, Oregon, for example, TriMet, which provides bus, light rail and commuter rail service for the metro area, faced a projected budget shortfall of $17 million. TriMet is blaming a large percentage of the deficit on a convenient scapegoat: supposedly unsustainable health care costs for union employees.
This is nothing more than a divide and conquer tactic.

The streetcar flops

With the country just emerging from the Great Recession, it was a moment meant to show how federal backing could spark a rebirth in American manufacturing. But the years-long effort to help the firm, United Streetcar, has instead become an example of dashed Washington ambition.
Company executives and their patrons greatly overestimated the size of the market they could capture and underestimated the difficulty of starting a homegrown streetcar business from scratch. Executives hoped to sell 10 or 15 of the 8-by-66-foot vehicles each year and create hundreds of new jobs as communities embraced a national streetcar revival. The company’s president at the time, Chandra Brown, set her gaze further. “One day, we can’t wait to be exporting these cars,” she said during another LaHood visit in 2011.
Instead, the company built just 18 streetcars for three customers — the District, Tucson and Portland — and was late delivering them to all three cities. There are no new orders, and the facility built to produce up to 24 streetcars a year is dormant after the last Portland car was shipped out Nov. 21. Some workers have been laid off, others have been reassigned to United Streetcar’s parent company, Oregon Iron Works, which builds bridges and boats.
Or, as LaHood said, “maybe our calculations weren’t right.”

To many in Portland — which LaHood christened the “transportation capital of America . . . the green capital of America . . . the streetcar capital of America” — it seemed like a good idea.

The city is the cradle of what supporters call the “streetcar movement,” an effort to make streets and the areas surrounding them more people-friendly and vibrant with a new take on a throwback mode of transportation.  Full article HERE

Don't forget to buy your Trimet propaganda for Christmas

They should be giving some of that stuff away for free since its Trimet advertising.

Get your Trimet stuff HERE!

It turns out that very few people actually use the red line to the airport

Thanks to the always superb research of MICHAEL ANDERSON  we are finding out that Trimet's share of airport traffic is a puny 6% of all people going to the airport.

 Even I was surprised to hear this. 

We are all subjected to the non stop Trimet propaganda machine which never stops bragging about its wonderfulness so many of us assumed that  'most' people took the red line to the airport.

The power of propaganda is revealed yet again.

What's even more interesting is the fact that rental cars are more than double transit use.

 I always thought that most visitors to this city didn't bother getting cars since Portland is "care free and car free".

Yet Another myth debunked
You can read the full report HERE

This guy is running the blue line today

Why would anybody want to bother? I can only think of one reason, to generate publicity for themselves. Of course Trimet has jumped on board with this guy and is using it for their very own publicity campaign.

I'm curious how this qualifies as a 'marathon' when there is only one runner.

https://twitter.com/StevenAllenWong