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Hesse responds:

Eric: I think some of what you see in the commute numbers is that the Seattle region’s system is geared more towards commute trips (lots of commuter rail and express buses coming in from the outer suburbs), while we try to provide high quality service across the region throughout the day and week to meet the needs of the 80% of non-commute trips made by households on average.

For that reason, we think it’s important to assess ridership across all trip types normalized against the service district’s population (“service district population” is an FTA defined figure based on population within the district boundaries and proximity to transit service).  Both of these data points are available from the FTA’s National Transit Database, which is the data we use for our peer comparisons.

For the 2009 Report Year, TriMet’s per capita ridership is 73 boarding rides per service district resident, while King County Metro’s is 61 and the combined ridership for King County Metro and Sound Transit normalized against the larger regional (Sound Transit) service district population is 50 boarding rides.

posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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I'm Michael Andersen, the local public transit journalist interviewed early in today's program. I thought some of the wonkier comment readers might be interested in this email exchange I had with TriMet's Eric Hesse, an analyst in McFarlane's office.

Eric: I was listening to the OPB show this morning and wanted to follow up with you on one point you made regarding per capita ridership levels in the Seattle and Portland regions.  The data we look at suggests that the Portland region has higher per capita transit ridership than does Seattle, so I’m curious what data you were considering so I could understand the claim.

Michael: Thanks a lot for asking, Eric. I was looking at Census journey-to-work mode share across the metro area. Seattle's at 7.8, PDX at 6.1. At the city level, Seattle's transit mode share is 18.1, Portland's 12.2. As Carlotta pointed out on the show, there are lots of other trips than the work commute, and it seems plausible that Portland would be better at those than Seattle.

*

On the show, I criticized what I see as TriMet's lack of public engagement. But I think Hesse's interest in checking the facts (and correcting my facts, if I turn out to be wrong) is a good sign.

I really appreciated the invitation to your conversation, OPB folks. I'm a longtime fan of TOL.

posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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Rogers + Hammerstein 4 Eva.

I don't know if I can get behind dropping the "City," though. 60 percent of the population voted to add that word in 1989, I'll have you know.

posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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Here are the loudest arguments I hear in support of 67:

1) We need the money for important stuff.

True. But if the legislature wanted to send citizens a spending bill, they could have. They sent a tax bill, so we should be evaluating this as tax policy.

2) Oregon's $10 minimum corporate tax is unusually low and really really old.

Neither of these things makes it inherently dumb. To my mind, anyone who makes this argument is just not being sincere.

3) It will only affect a few big corporations.

Okay, this is a valid argument. But here's my #1 question about 67: isn't almost any corporate tax on gross revenue (as opposed to net profit) basically regressive? It raises the cost for high-volume companies to do business. This will translate into higher prices for the consumer, lower volume for the producer and deadweight loss for the economy ... and the people who end up paying the tax will be the poor as much as the rich.

Here's an Occam's razor proposal of my own: doesn't a corporate tax hike seem like an obvious ploy to raise taxes on consumers without them knowing it?

Taxes are necessary, and Oregon needs more revenue. It seems to me that Democrats should make that case rather than pretending that "corporations" in general are rich villains and using this as an excuse to raise taxes that will, in the end, fall on the public at large.

posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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