Mayor Charlie Hales found himself playing a very familiar role during a slightly awkward council discussion today on what seemed like a mysterious new expense in Portland’s streetcar contract with TriMet: chief booster for the city’s troubled East Side extension.
After it was finally explained why the contract is climbing from $1,244,950 to $2,089,816—to pay for operator training, through available contingency cash, and hopefully paid back through federal grants—Hales first found himself defending the arrangement.
“This is an accounting transaction,” he said.
Then, after listening to some strong skepticism of the project from Commissioner Nick Fish—who went through the litany of woes facing the street car extension, including funding issues, low ridership, mechanical delays, and “charitably,” cars running “at less than full occupancy”—Hales mounted a sales pitch that must’ve felt familiar.
Hales, after all, helped push for Portland’s original streetcar, which opened in 2001. And he spent the decade or so afterward working for HDR Inc., selling other cities on the intertwined forces of streetcar lines and dense development.
“This is a success story,” he said, touting the “American-made” streetcar-manufacturing industry that local company Oregon Iron Works is building from scratch. “It’s a requirement [for federal grants] and it’s a risk. And that’s the reason we have to be vigilant and do careful oversight even while we’re innovating.”
He also quoted Machiavelli, saying any new system earns the “enmity and opposition of those who don’t benefit” while receiving the “lukewarm support” from those that do.
Next up is fully completing connections from the downtown streetcar lines to the East Side line (they’re already joined at the Broadway Bridge) through the new TriMet bridge going up near OMSI. Hales was rather bullish about what that would mean.
“I don’t think we’ll have a problem with empty vehicles,” he said, possibly to imagined patriotic marching music. “We’ll have a problem with not enough vehicles.”
Here’s another relevant Machiavelli quote:
“Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But let this happen in such a way that no one become aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand to be produced immediately.”
Hales is biased, but I think he’s right. The CL loop streetcar should get busier when the bridge is finished. Right now it just goes to a dead end at OMSI.
If we learned anything from the Bush Administration, it is that you never admit something was a bad idea, no matter how costly and obvious the boondoggle becomes! Never admit defeat!
In fact, I think we should pay Trimet $4 million, just because! Let’s put an underwater streetcar down the center of the Willamette River! Why? Because transit is always always good, and no transit project is ever too expensive or foolhardy. Every transit project is a solid gold stroke of genius by definition.
technically we already have both problems, frequency has been hurt because not all the streetcars are done so they don’t have enough, but few have been inconvenienced because ridership is very very low. I don’t understand why the mayor continues to obfuscate the actual reasons for the streetcar though, which have nothing to do with moving people around more slowly than most of them could walk to their destination, and everything to do with encouraging pearl district like economic development. We won’t know if it is a success for awhile, and honestly I think that due to the alignment it may not work on the East Side, but lets not pretend that the street car is about transit.
It is simply not credible that it takes over $2 million to train a few schmucks to operate a trolley. This is one of the most baldfaced and outrageous scams yet perpetrated by the transit cartel.
“We’ll have a problem with not enough vehicles.”
Yeah, they’re called busses, and there’s not enough of them in outlying and poor communities because of this hideous waste of money.