Tuesday, September 1, 2009

A MAX Ride along the Mall

Well, that was sluggish. It takes over 10 min from Union Station to PSU, I mean thats not bad, but it just seems slow. So my first compliant is, "SW/NW 5th/6th Ave" does NOT need to be in EVERY stop and announcement! I know I am on 6th, this is the Transit mall, its runs on 6th? They could Drop the number from all but 1 stop, Union Station Inbound. The 5th and Mill St says PSU Urban Center on the sign, but no such announcement, assume your at PSU. The MAX operator wanted to be as redundant and let us know that 5th and Mill is the last stop and everyone needs to get off there, he did this about 5 seconds after the auto announce said the exact same thing, we get it!

And the situation from 3rd/Glisan to the Steel Bridge Jct, what a bottle neck and poor timed situation. We had to wait almost long enough to make a stop to turn left onto Glisan from 3rd. Then the trains were all stacked up inbound as we all are waiting for an outbound to clear up. Some operators are bound to go nuts at this little section of track.

The Couch and Davis stops are unnecessary.

The announcements are missing a few lines, like the transfers opportunities at Yamhill/Morrison. Maybe the fact this is a Yellow Line (save for the one just past Union Station Outbound).

The mall is finishing up, the shelters are almost all in, and now some curvy wind glass thingys are popping up. They are fairly tacky to the design, really. Many stops have 2 seats.....T..W..O. Is that all this is riding, 8 people an hour at each stop?

I am posting new videos of both directions on the mall, for the world to see really. The nice thing is how smooth it was, and easy it is to Xfer to/from the streetcar and to Union Sta. I look forward to seeing how it all pans out once it all up and running.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey there again.

Going to ride the yellow line on the new Transit Mall soon.

I really like the new design for the MAX stations along the new transit mall. I hope Trimet start replacing the signs on the existing Blue and Red Line transit mall. The red looks really out of date.