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TriMet Considers Even More Borrowing for Milwaukie
Back in May I complained that TriMet was getting ready to borrow $39M to fund the new Milwaukie line. This borrowing would be paid back with future payroll tax revenues – funds that could otherwise be spent actually providing service hours. Now Portland Afoot is reporting that TriMet may consider raising this amount to $60M…
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“State of Good Repair”
This was a phrase I heard a lot at RailVolution last week. It came up on several panels and was an interesting contrast: we heard it mostly from folks in the East/Midwest operating long-established rail systems. We didn’t hear it from the West Coast cities where rail transit is still running on pretty new infrastructure.…
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A New Way of Making Sausage for the MTIP
The Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Program (or MTIP) is the basic spending plan for transportation in our region. Most of the funds involved are programed quite proscriptively, but in each two-year cycle there are several tens of millions of dollars that are truly flexible, we can spend them as we choose. The result is intense competition…
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National Transit Data on a Couple of Fronts
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Transit Appliance Goes Out for a Beer
Today I had the opportunity to install our first alpha test unit of the Transit Appliance at Bailey’s Taproom (213 SW Broadway at Ankeny). Happily, compared to hotel WiFi setups, Bailey’s was a snap, with a simple passphrase entry. But each installation comes with new discoveries. At this location near the transit mall there are…