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Location: Still in Portland, Oregon, for some reason
890 posts, read 3,711,595 times
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I went to London and let me tell you, MAX is an absolute joke compared to the Tube. In a compact city like London with absolutely horrible roads and traffic, trains work and work well. But in Portland where Hillsboro and Gresham are a good 35 miles apart, it's just not sensible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pirate_lafitte
I heard that in NYC, "turnstyle jumpers" started getting arrested. I wonder what would happen if that was tried in Portland.
Oh no, the police are beating up people just trying to get around again. Why can't you just let them get on the train Mr. Policeman. I shouldn't have to pay....
I went to London and let me tell you, MAX is an absolute joke compared to the Tube. In a compact city like London with absolutely horrible roads and traffic, trains work and work well. But in Portland where Hillsboro and Gresham are a good 35 miles apart, it's just not sensible.
Oh no, the police are beating up people just trying to get around again. Why can't you just let them get on the train Mr. Policeman. I shouldn't have to pay....
Guiliani's idea, not mine. I just threw that out there for size.
The tube might be good for London. I want to see more of that in the USA. If only places like NYC have it, that is just disturbing. Hillsboro and Gresham might be 35 miles apart, but why not try to improve on the system? Why not make it adaptable for the distance from western PDX metro to eastern PDX metro?
The MAX is great, I ride it 3-4 days a week for work and take short hops downtown on the weekends.
The fare inspector will give you a $75(?) ticket if you are caught riding without a ticket. I get checked maybe 1-2 times a month. I ride the blue line and I only see a few people getting caught without a ticket. Most commuter have a ticket. Maybe yellow line is different. I know when I want to go up one stop on the yellow line, I don't want to pay for a ticket....
Also, the green line has much better pacing through downtown and get through much quicker.
Only one stop between pioneer square and PSU.
I believe there is a plan to make a downtown bypass from the tunnel exit to the PSU stop, to South Waterfront, then across the yet to be built bridge to around OMSI. This will make going through downtown much quicker. Not sure if this is going to happen though. Also don't know where it will join up with the rest of the line... I guess you can take the street car up to Rose quarter.
This info might be outdated....
Or people just ride for free, which many do. For the first 4 years I rode the Yellow Line, I got my ticket checked maybe like 3 times...and this was riding it daily from the N Killingsworth stop to downtown. They've gotten better about checking tickets---but on the other hand I've seen instances where they acutally check tickets and over a quarter of the people don't actually have tickets or passes. I've always wondered how much the freeloaders cuts into the total revenue for the MAX line--then again those fines if you're caught are much higher than a monthly pass(if you're actually forced to pay them). But MAX doesn't have the budget apparently to hire more fare collectors apparently...even while they build more street car lines.
I think MAX works in some locations. Taking the train to the airport from downtown is definetely a plus--and from Portland to Beaverton is pretty quick if you are just going to a central area near the MAX network. Part of the problem is that downtown, the MAX basically becomes a street car. If they had money to construct underground for part of downtown the speed of the whole network would be improved. And there are too many stops downtown as well---there are spots like Pioneer Square and Old Town where you have stops literally a block or two away from another stop.
I don't think that MAX has been a mistake or failure---although I think they should think seriously about the benefits of adding some of the future lines they are proposing. Not sure how most people in Milwaukie feel about the proposed new line going through SE Portland, however I've heard that the city isn't really interested in it. It's a problem when we're cutting bus lines to areas with minimal service to begin with and adding street cars to spots like NE MLK that already have service from multiple bus lines.
They need to enforce the fare better. That would help immensely, for starters. Honor systems were made to be "dishonored."
And I think the new line through SE Portland is a great idea, though I wish it went east instead of south to Milwaukie. I constantly scratch my head at my TriMet hasn't built a light rail line through the largest and most populous quadrant of the city (Southeast). If there were a light rail line along Powell Blvd, I'd be CONSTANTLY riding that instead of driving my car downtown. The bus, somehow, isn't as convenient. Also a streetcar or something along 39th, I mean... Chavez Blvd to connect Northeast and Southeast, that would be sooo great and I think it would get heavily used and encourage density in these popular neighborhoods where the bulk of Portlanders actually live and work--the east side.
I'll gladly bus downtown and ride the MAX to the airport though. Otherwise? It's inconvenient for me. There's no easy way to get from Southwest, at the PCC Sylvania campus (WTF is with that school being way the hell out there anyway? it's as far away from everything as possible, particularly good bus and rail lines), to my work in Northeast, and then back to my home in Southeast.
So, for people like me, who are a lot of people, the public transit system in Portland just isn't sufficient. If you have a lot of ground to cover (this is a small town, so often you do have to conduct business in far flung seperate corners of the city), it just doesn't work.
If you're just commuting to an event or live close to a MAX stop and go downtown often, it makes great sense.
I'm neutral on my opinion of MAX's effectiveness, but I am glad it's there. I wish public transit were better subsidized and more convenient. Then I might actually consider dropping my car... Oh well.
Freddie's, Safeway, and others sell booklets of 10 tickets and monthly passes.
And yes, I sometimes ride into Portland City, and back out on the one ticket with sometimes only 5 minutes over the 2 hour time limit by the time I get home. What is great is sometimes a bus driver will give me my transfer / receipt with 2-1/2 or 3 hours riding. Those MAX line validators at each station time stamp the prepaid tickets exactly 2 hours.
True, but the problem is that many times you can't finish your business inside of two hours (i.e., attending a class or an appointment or a long show).
So are schools. And museums. The post office rarely runs in the black. What's your point? Taxes pay for quality of life improvements. The only people who complain are the ones who don't bother to take advantage of what their taxes pay for. The article that was linked didn't offer any solutions, although it did hint at removing the system entirely, which is financially not an improvement. The cost of shutting it down would be huge. Better to build it up until the main complaint of "it doesn't go where I need it to" goes away.
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Regarding fare enforcement - it is terrible. The few times I've seen fare collectors they always catch somebody, and the one time I accidentally skipped a fare (while switching from passes to tickets) the two safety officers on the train informed that they don't check for non-payment. It's a no-win situation: fare enforcement would reduce ridership which in turn would reduce funding, but no enforcement leads to fare jumping which reduces funding.
cdelena, the same could be said for freeways that route through cities. Let's put a toll on them (which is what a bus/lightrail fare is) for their costs. What we pay in gas tax doesn't cover the expense, by the way..
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Freeways do not require a large tax funded staff for operation and all the costs that go with the staff. The capital costs and maintenance are actually lower for roads that rail systems.
Roads also support freight, commerce, emergency services, and freedom of movement that are simply not capabilities of mass transit systems,
I never said that light rail is bad, just from an economic point of view it is not a sound investment. It is a political solution.
I have mixed feelings. It was probably prudent to secure the old rail lines and develop the system. It takes pressure off the highways and should serve us indefinatley into the future.
However the problem is that TriMet has gone off the deep end with these idiotic extensions like WES that are more efficiently served by buses.
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