Advertising is not evil. Bad poetry, however, makes for a very uncomfortable public transit experience.

Ah yes, public transit-- your respite from the world. Never a rolling smorgasbord of human unpleasantness.

i always thought the poetry was the worst part of riding trimet.

Agreed. Advertising is not evil. In fact, as economist Thomas Sowell points out so clearly, advertising actually helps us on a very basic level: when it is successful it brings economies of scale which make products (food, clothing, cars, shelter) more affordable for everyone. That is a great thing. The ironic thing is that most people don't understand it, so instead of being thankful that successful advertising brings down costs of products, and make the poor more wealthy by doing so, many people complain that advertising is greedy and the organization selling the ad space only cares about dollars. With such poetic irony running through the debate, we hardly need any more poems on the buses themselves.

One part of the article which has gone unnoticed in the comments so far is the mention of the payroll tax. As the article notes, Trimet pulls alot of its money from the payroll tax, and so when the economy is down, unemployement is high and the amount of payroll taxes collected drops. So what does trimet do? It tries to increase payroll taxes. This is logical from their point of view, but of course illogical to the economy as a whole. When most every business is struggling, the last thing needed is more of thier money taken away from them. There are two things that can happen: (1) businesses can recoup the loss by increasing their prices and making everything less affordable, or (2) businesses can keep thier prices the same and see thier profit margins creep closer to zero, reducing thier ability hire anyone. So thankfully this payroll tax increase is not going to take place until after the economy is in better shape. But still, the two scenarios laid out above will take effect whenever the tax increase takes place. And worse yet, the tax increase should not be needed when the economy is back in good shape, because if it is, then more people are working and more payroll taxes are being collected. In other words, this tax increase gets political points for being postponed until later, but no such increase will be needed later. So the government is getting an un-needed higher tax rate and political points at the same time.