Politics Democrats have owned this state for decades - what do we have to show for it?

But shouldn't our state be a socialist mecca with Democrats in power for literally decades, completely unchecked? Shouldn't our education system be #1 in the nation?

In fact, many of the things that liberals love about Oregon was enacted by a Republican Governor.

 

ho-lee-shit it's really not. Go visit Europe and then tell me that our public transit fantastic. It's completely garbage.

 

I use public transportation here daily and I've been to Europe. While we are not at European standards I challenge you to go spend time in South Carolina or Georgia and use their public transportation. Portland trimet is awesome, safe and easy to use.

 

that a boy!

 

When I lived in Seattle, the mayor lamented how great Portland's Tri Met was and how he wished Seattle had gone that route. Nothing like a good mass transit system.
My only question is with the new fare inspection guidelines passed down by the court, how are we going to get people to pay their fare?

 

Even my wife a teacher for 40 years says unfortunately the school system is broke in this State and the students and parents are the ones paying for it. Benchmarked against other states we are laggards in this area.
If there is not a plan to significantly improve the system from one year to the next it will only get worse.

 

Fare is a pretty low income for trimet anyway. It's a net loss no matter what. If it was up to me it would be a completely free service. Honor system works for me though, I think it will work for most people also.

 

How much money has South Carolina or Georgia spent on public transportation? We have spent millions upon millions on our system, and it doesn't work. It's at capacity and it barely dents our traffic problems. I rode Max for years, and it's completely full. The park and ride parking lots of completely full. It doesn't make a bit of difference. The bus systems are horribly designed and it takes hours to get anywhere.

In Munich, they have an an above ground train that circles the perimeter of the city and then they have underground trains that run throughout the inside of the city. You can get anywhere in the city in 30-40 minutes. In Portland you have to ride downtown to get anywhere, so it would have taken my wife 1.5 hours to get from SW Portland (only 10 minutes from downtown) to Hillsboro. Similarly, it would take me around 1.5 hours to get to Hillsboro from PDX.

The trains are too small. The parking for the trains is too small. And we have spent tooooooooons of money on this system.

 

You've gotta convince people to pony up.
There are places to cut spending and there are places to increase spending and cutting school funding is not a good place to cut funding.

 

The only times I ever saw the Max trains full up were when Blazer games let out.
Now, if the trains are full and the traffic is still heavy, imagine how heavy the traffic would be if Max had to shut down.

 

How much money have European cities invested compare to portland? I would wager it's many times more than us. Europe also has a very mature public transportation system ours is still being added to. In Europe long trips like Hillsboro to PDX will still take a decent amount of time. Again, I am a daily trimet user I don't drive at all. I disagree with your assessment of how inconvenient, packed and slow it is.

 

You definitely don't ride during rush hour. It's packed. But it still doesn't make a difference. Our roadways that haven't been improved in decades are also at capacity. So all those hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent did not alleviate the problem.

 

I've been told that the people that planned the original light rail later feel like they goofed in not having a parallel train that traveled faster and made fewer stops, thus eliminating the milk stop run for those that needed to get to major stop-off points faster.

 

I was a daily rider as well. Hillsboro to downtown and back, every day. Feel free to ride the blue line during rush hour if you don't believe me. Try to find a parking spot past 8 am during a weekday.

 

Health care will continue to be an issue when you have so many people not taking responsibility for their health. So many of my Dr clients tell the same story time and time again. Patient after patient coming in wanting a 'pill' or a Rx instead of eating healthier, exercising, and taking steps to try and be healthy. Of course there are also those who can't help their situation but for a large portion, it has become a lack of effort and they just don't care. So to ask others to pay for their deteriorating condition when they don't really care about it themselves will never work from a fiscal standpoint.

Pre-existing conditions are another hot button. You absolutely take care of those who are say born with a medical condition or are involved in something beyond their control. But again, I'm told of countless examples of people who drink, smoke, do drugs, eat a horrible diet and don't exercise, etc and then want the large majority of their care paid for by people who are paying in to the system and not using it. IE, Paying the exorbitant medical costs for lung cancer when someone has smoked a pack a day or for liver disease for someone who has drank all of their life seems destined to be a plan that will go bankrupt. Covering health care for someone who eats Ho-Ho's and Ding Dongs every day and refuses to exercise and eventually gets so fat they go on disability (an ex sister-in-law) is not good use of health care dollars or Soc Sec because it is stretched too thin as it is.

 

By improving the roads, I presume you mean widening them 'cause the freeways don't have any pot holes. To widen roads, you're going to have to spend a fortune buying up homes and businesses along the route. Then you're going to be faced with worse air that will give a lot of people medical problems.

I see the only solution as being either we all switch to electric cars or we vastly improve our mass transit.

 

I've never had a problem on the Blue Line, parking or finding a seat on the train. I used to ride it round trip to and from every Blazer game. Of course, I qualified for the handicapped seating, which, admittedly, helped. I would sometimes park at the 185th stop and other times at Beaverton Central.

 

So you are judging the whole system on rush hour rides? Europe has a rush hour also, I've have to stand on PDX and Euro trains during busy times. It's not a big deal. I've never missed a train during peak hours .trimet busts ass to add more trains during events also. Blue line is just fine. My only complaint would be all the downtown stops, like Lanny said an Express line would be nice for bypassing downtown.

 

Mass transit CAN work, but our system is not efficient. One thing that Brazil did was create Bus only super highways to get buses around the city quickly, much in the same way that rail systems work. There are ways to do it.

But they should have built a freeway that runs from Wilsonville out to Hillsboro and then into downtown or Vancouver. There were a few freeways that were even planned but never built.

The thing that makes our system inefficient is that you have to go downtown to link up with anything. There isn't a train that runs around the exterior of the city.