On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 11:24:41PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > How much are the city/state/feds subsidizing TriMet? Right now, about half. Normally, nearly nothing or less. TriMet only goes net-loss and extra subsidy when it's building new rail lines, but usually makes headway for a year after that to then break roughly even. Yellow Line is expected to open in May, IIRC. > How much of the operations of TriMet have been contracted out to > private enterprise to lower the goverment's expenses? LIFT (door-to-door bus service for the handicapped by reservation only) is contracted out to Laidlaw. > I bet that if a city/regional transit system is even close to > breaking even, then an honest private enterprise could turn a > profit. (By honest, I mean that the city managers weren't bribed, > or given large campaign donations, and the company isn't using > Enronesque accounting practices.) Come to Portland, give it a shot. Nobody's stopping you from trying it yourself. I think government pretty much mops up after the services that aren't "sexy" enough for private enterprise to think of it (rapid transit, police, fire) and should take control of services everybody needs (schools, health care, utilities) that private enterprise has abused (price-fixing, racketeering, etc). That should be the new threat to businesses behaving badly: Shape up or we take it. -- .''`. Baloo <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> : :' : proud Debian admin and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system
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