Local bike-ped-transit news magazine Portland Afoot has dug into the numbers on TriMet's bus routes and determined which lines are the most and least reliable.

Here's the rundown of 2012 Portland bus rankings:

MOST FREQUENT: The 72-Killingsworth, with 218 trips, followed by the 4-Division, with 174 trips.

LEAST FREQUENT: SW Portland's 55-Hamilton has only four trips per weekday and the 18-Hillside has only five.

MOST RELIABLE: TriMet records how often buses "bunch" together on a route, arriving one right after the other, which means one bus is running late. Of the "frequent service" buses, the most on-time lines are the 57-TV Highway and the 75-Cesar Chavez.

LEAST RELIABLE: Of the frequent service buses, the most frequent are also the least on-time, with the 72 buses "bunching up" 28 percent of the time and the 4 line bunching up 26 percent of the time.

MOST CROWDED: The 35-Macadam takes the prize, for being "above capacity" on 11 percent of trips.

Portland's Bureau of Transportation—enduring millions in mid-year budget cuts thanks, in part, to unreliable gas-tax revenues—has found a way to raise a bit more cash. Like they've done for the past few years, fines for parking violations will jump up starting February 7—led by a $15 increase in the fine for failing to pay a meter.

Cheryl Kuck, a PBOT spokeswoman, says the bureau is expecting the newly increased fines to raise an additional $700,000 a year. But it's not just about the money, she contends. It's also about making the fines ugly enough that more people people are persuaded not to skirt the law. No-meter violations have gone down, but not quite enough, she says. Other violations have actually increased since 2010.

"The number of violations," Kuck says, "hasn't dropped to a level we were content with."

Carsharing company Zipcar broke the news today that car rental giant Avis is buying the company for $500 million.

The sale looks like it'll be investigated as a raw deal to stockholders, but if the sale goes through, it could mean big changes for Zipcar.

Carsharing is very popular in Portland, where about 15 percent of residents don't own a car. In fact, the first carsharing company in the country opened in Portland in 1998: a fleet of four Dodge Neons that founder David Brook dubbed "Carsharing Portland." That company was bought by Seattle-based Flexcar, which merged with Zipcar in 2007. In that way, Avis's acquisition of Zipcar is just the latest in a pattern of companies gobbling carsharing start-ups.

The Washington Post predicts the buy-out will spell doom for Zipcar. Writer Steven Pearlstein says, essentially, Avis's old-school corporate mindset will kill the creativity and adaptability that made Zipcar thrive. Pearlstein forsees Avis centralizing pickup points for cars, rather than having them spread conveniently all over the city; merging Zipcar's website with Avis's; and trying to annoyingly upsell customers on insurance and hotel deals.

On the other hand, change might be good for Zipcar. Their market dominance has been threatened recently by Mercedes Benz-owned Car2Go, which has a fleet of pint-size cars that, unlike Zipcars, don't have to be returned to the same spot after rental. Another company that lets people offer their own cars to share, Getaround, is also increasingly popular. With Avis' money behind it, Zipcar might be able to incorporate some of the best features of those companies or improve its own service.

Here is your handy guide to TrIMet holiday schedule changes during the next week.

Christmas Eve – Monday, Dec. 24
All trains and buses are on regular weekday schedules.

Christmas Day – Tuesday, Dec. 25
All buses and MAX trains operate on Sunday schedules. Watch out, because not all bus lines run on Sundays. WES will not be operating.

New Year’s Eve – Monday, Dec. 31
All buses, MAX trains and WES will be operating on regular weekday schedules. AFTER 8PM, TRIMET IS FREE!

Additionally, MAX Blue, Green and Yellow line trains will run until 3 am with service approximately every 35 minutes. MAX Red Line will not run late. However, after train service ends, shuttle buses will be available to take riders between Gateway Transit Center and PDX Airport, until about 3:30 am.

New Year’s Day – Tuesday, Jan. 1
All buses and MAX trains will run on Sunday schedules. WES will not be operating.

• Robert Gilhooly - New Scientist

The train dubbed "Eco Ride" works just like a coaster but without everybody putting their hands in the air like they just don't care. It's cranked up hill for the first station and then just cruises to the next one. Quick, painless, and if we're lucky, containing at least one barrel roll.

Check out the article from New Scientist.

TriMet is adding extra trains and buses tomorrow to accommodate two big events happening right at the same time: The US women's soccer team versus Ireland match at Jeld-Wen field and Bruce Springsteen at the Rose Garden.

Both of these events are likely to cram TriMet, as people head to them right during rush hour, so TriMet is adding extra MAX trains to run after the Springsteen concert, plus running special bus service that will ferry people between downtown Portland and Jeld-Wen field. Here are the details on those buses:

• Before the match (from 5:30-7pm), catch buses across from MAX stations at Mall/SW 5th Ave and Galleria/SW 10th Ave.
•After the match, catch buses across from stadium’s main entrance on Morrison Street at 18th Ave. Riders will be dropped off at three MAX stations (Library/SW 9th Ave, Pioneer Square South and Mall/SW 4th Ave) to get to parking garages or connect with MAX Green or Yellow line trains.

A draft Portland Bureau of Transportation budget document obtained by the Mercury reveals several big revenue-raising measures the city will consider to shore up transportation funding as soon as possible. PBOT Director Tom Miller has pondered many ideas at public meetings on the bureau’s finances. But several plans have become serious enough that a specially convened PBOT task force of outside financial advisors has placed them atop a draft of a report expected to go before Portland City Council as soon as next month.

UPDATE 11/28: We just posted the draft document online here. Give it a read! /update

At the top of the list of possibilities is a street maintenance fee. This to-be-determined fee would be added to the monthly water and sewer bill of property owners and go into the transportation budget to fix the city's longstanding backlog of maintenance issues like its 60 miles of unpaved streets. Twenty-one cities and towns in Oregon already have a street maintenance fee and Portland's considered the idea several times, most recently at then-Commissioner Sam Adams' prodding in 2007.

Coupled with this would be a local gas tax, PBOT's draft suggests. Two Portland suburbs, Milwaukie and Tigard, already have gas taxes of two and three cents per gallon and PBOT suggests Portland introduce one as an "interim measure" while the city figures out better long-term funding sources. The draft of the document includes a note saying this idea may be struck out from the final recommendations, given that it's not a good long-term funding model.

The transportation bureau is facing a $4.5 million budget hole in part because its funding stream is unsustainable—built on one-time city money, federal grants, and the state gas tax. The PBOT draft budget memo succinctly spells out the problems with relying on the gas tax:

• It has been eroding in real value for decades.
• At every level of government, we lack political will to raise the gas tax to a rate that would meet today’s growing needs for transportation services.
• The nation’s policy interests in fuel economy will make the gas tax unreliable as a primary means of transportation funding in little more than a decade. This is exacerbated in Portland as more citizens choose fuel efficient vehicles and/or non-auto travel modes.

In the long run, the memo supposes, it's likely that the state will switch from a gas tax to a statewide tax based on vehicle miles driven. But meanwhile, the local gas tax and street maintenance fee could defray city cuts.

Another option floated in the memo, prepared by bureau head Tom Miller, include making the price of parking in Smart Park garages and downtown meters more market-based. Currently, the city only has market-based parking around Jeld-Wen field during Timbers' games—but there it's been very successful, tripling the daily city revenue per parking spot.

Sam Adams pushed hard for a local gas tax and street maintenance fee in 2008, but pulled the plug on his "Safe, Sound, and Green Streets" plan after oil company lobbyists vowed to refer it to voters and polling showed only 55 percent of Portlanders would support a monthly $4.54 fee.

The city seems to be mostly quietly adjusting to the most recent round of public transit budget cuts. Rider grumbling hasn't stopped the price of a TriMet ticket from jumping to $2.50 or brought free rail back to downtown.
Except in one neighborhood, where outcry over September's transit cuts is loud and clear and gathering steam. In NE Portland's Woodlawn neighborhood, the complaints will actually lead to change, with TriMet promising to repair the situation.

TriMet cut service on nine bus lines and reconfigured 15 others to save $1.1 million this year—$500,000 of that came from whacking the last 2.5 miles off the #8 bus line, which used to end at North Portland's Jubitz Truck Stop. Businesses and residents along NE Dekum in the Woodlawn neighborhood were mostly surprised to learn that the end of the line changed overnight, now dropping buses, drivers, and riders middle of Woodlawn's fledgling business district four blocks east of Martin Luther King Avenue.

Now, up to three buses at a time line up in front of Woodlawn Park and at peak times, six buses an hour circle the outdoor cafe at the Firehouse Restaurant.

For the past two months, neighbors have been meeting with TriMet to voice their complaints about the change. They're joined by TriMet drivers, whose union penned a forceful letter (pdf) in September saying the change has stressed out drivers.

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The MAX is popular in Portland, but light rail projects are very controversial in the city's suburbs. Vancouver, Washington, weighed a proposal that was crucial to funding the Columbia River Crossing project: Voters were asked to approve a small sales tax hike raising $2 million annually to cover operating costs for the bridge's light rail link planned between Portland and Vancouver. Instead, the tax was soundly rejected. Federal and local legislators have repeatedly said that the CRC will not be built if it doesn't include light rail.

Scrambling for a Plan B, the CRC project proposed raising the money from other sources, including cutting bus routes planned to run over the bridge, adding a surcharge on transit tickets, and charging for parking at Park and Ride stations.

Meanwhile, Clackamas voted in two anti-"Portland creep" conservative candidates to the county commission last week, both of whom have promised to oppose the already-under-construction Portland-Milwaukie light rail line. In September, Clackamas voted heavily in favor of an measure that forces a county-wide vote on public light rail decisions—likely killing any future rail lines in Clackamas, if the current political environment holds.

This is coming to TriMet:

The ad is being run by a group called the American Freedom Defense Initiative (please take a moment to laugh at their logo), a far-right group affiliated with Stop Islamization of America, who have also bought bus ads in New York telling Islamic Americans to reject their religion.

The current "savage" ads are running all over the country, supposedly in response to the factual pro-Palestinian ad proclaiming UN's count of Palestinian refugees. It's worth point out that many Jewish groups aren't happy the Freedom Defense Initiative new race-baiting ads.

TriMet has long-feared a situation just like this. Until 2009, the transit agency banned political ads from its buses and trains. But they were sued by Oregon's Kaluk Tribe and the ACLU, who argued that TriMet's refusal to run an ad about a salmon-and-dam debate violated free speech rights. When Washington DC's transit agency refused to run the "savage" ads last month, the American Freedom Defense Initiative filed suit against them, on similar grounds to the free speech argument that won the Karuk's salmon a spot on TriMet.

In the Oregon case, the court determined that TriMet can't pick and choose what sort of ads to run—it has to take everything or nothing. If it takes nothing, TriMet would lose out on its $4.8 million annual ad contract.

However, I wonder whether these ads could lead to any of Portland's Palestinian-immigrant population to file a civil rights violation complaint against TriMet on the grounds that riding a bus adorned with a banner calling them a "savage" would subject them to discrimination. Just a thought.

The software that runs TriMet's TransitTracker app—allowing riders to get realtime information on when trains will actually arrive—will likely be down for two to three weeks thanks to some asshole who crashed their car into Transit Tracker's nerve center. Or, as TriMet says it:

A single-automobile crash at the Rose Quarter Transit Center on Thursday, Oct. 4 destroyed key communication equipment for the MAX system, disrupting TransitTracker. The equipment feeds train tracking information to the TransitTracker system. For MAX, a device in the rails sends information to the TransitTracker system when a train passes over it so the system generates a prediction on when the train should reach specific stops. Since the crash, TransitTracker for MAX trains systemwide can only show scheduled arrival times. The crash itself did not involve TriMet.

Until the connector is fixed, TriMet will only have scheduled times available, so if a train is running late, you'll never know. UPDATE: Just to clarify, Transit Tracker is broken for the MAX, but should still be working for buses. Also, I was joking about the "asshole" part. The person who crashed is most likely a very good person.

A 19-year-old is in jail today after allegedly stabbing a TriMet driver on the 33 bus line to Oregon City last night.

According to the Oregon City police, the suspect, Austin William Vanhagen, was talking on his cell phone on the bus at around 11pm and then began randomly shouting loud racial slurs. The bus driver, who was African American, pulled over the rig and the suspect got off the bus. The driver closed the bus door, but Vanhagen allegedly pried it back open again and stabbed the bus driver in the stomach. Three passengers rushed to his aid, two of whom also sustained stab wounds and one of whom was bitten before they were able to hold down the stabber.

This afternoon, retired driver Al Marguiles posted the audio of a breathless bus driver describing the attack over the TriMet scanner—listen to it to get an insight on how absolutely scary this incident was.

TriMet announced today that the driver, who requested to remain unnamed, underwent surgery this morning. His condition is unknown. Good luck to him and the passengers who rushed to help him.

This all makes our recent round-up of true tales of TriMet terror look like, um, a pretty good time in comparison.

Always uncensored TriMet bus driver Dan Christensen has a ridiculous story up on his blog about a night on a bus bound for Clackamas Town Center. It involves a drunk guy, some youths, and a "your mom" joke and is a good view into just a piece of the shit that TriMet drivers have to negotiate on a daily basis. The post starts off rather rambly, so scroll down to the "TriMet Disclosure" section.

Here's a snippet:

What follows is not Trimet policy but a story of how I solved one of these bouts of racial stupidity. It may not have been the Trimet way; it may not have been the smartest way; but it did work. I made my goal: everyone got where they were going without trouble.

“What are you looking at?”

That phrase is a warning sign that trouble is on the way. It’s like passing a road sign that says:

“What are you looking at?” Exit 2 miles
“Yelling Match” 5 miles
“Racial Slur” 7 Miles
“Fist Fight” 10 Miles

Over the years, you learn is that once people take that exit you have to work doubly hard to get back on to “Normal Highway.” So it’s best to never let things veer off that way.

h/t to Portland Afoot!

Here in Portland, people have a... well... complicated relationship with TriMet. However, maybe it would be less complicated if TriMet was more like the "Midtraffik" bus system in Denmark! According to this commercial, they are REALLY doing something right!