Sunday, September 9, 2012

Community Transit vs. TriMet

TriMet in Portland just raised fares and slashed more service....and now Community Transit in Snohomish County wants to raise fares, and the agency has no plans to restore its Sunday service.

What do they have in common? Well besides both having the highest paid GMs in the Northwest, many of their riders voice their dissatisfaction on their Facebook pages.  See Community Transits & TriMets, fares & poor service seem to be a common theme.

The main difference is...Community Transit isn't building rail....so there should be bigger questions for Ms. Eleanor.

Meanwhile, heres 2009s Salaries at CT, Part 1 and Part 2.

5 comments:

Al M said...

Hmmmmmm?

Erik H. said...

I wonder if there is a coorelation between Community Transit focusing on its commuter routes to Seattle and its Swift BRT line - at the expense of other routes.

I have heard that Swift is pretty much an astounding success - it is the single most heavily used service, and it has a cost per boarding ride of around a buck - that even makes MAX look expensive.

However, Pierce Transit to the south seems to also be getting no love...

Unknown said...

Good correlation. Thanks for posting the salaries. That only covers the second half of the alphabet. Still, the number of those over $100,000 is astounding. A calculation of the number of those with "Supervisor" + "Manager" + "Director" + the other management titles (CEO, Chief Executive Officer) in the numerator with the total staff in the denominator would be fascinating as well. It would seem high from what you posted.

Unknown said...

Good point. Community had the opportunity to save big money by pulling back their routes that cross the county line for downtown Seattle destinations. Their long-range plan shows that's their intention when light rail reaches Lynnwood in 2023. This time, their Stanwood board member convinced the majority of the rest of them to keep running the handful of long Stanwood to Seattle runs, that because her constituents wanted fewer one-seat rides that way instead of several if they were Lynnwood to Stanwood, but that would've inconvenienced them with two buses.
Imagine how much money that would have saved them, however, if they had the courage to truncate at least their longer runs to Seattle at Lynnwood? Would that had been enough for some level of Sunday service? Better Saturday service?
Your partial salary report (about letters M-Z) revealed a high number of six-figure salaries as well as managers, perhaps an additional area of savings. Perhaps their salaries should be more in line with a not-for-profit organization.

Unknown said...

You're still missing part of the salary list. Shift and others are under the mistaken impression that Metro's or Sound Transit's CEO have the highest salaries of the transit agencies in the region. You can prove it otherwise. Perhaps list those three and the sizes of their organizations (employees, buses, vans, paratransit, light rail, heavy rail, etc.)? That might be an eye-opener for so many of the "we trust you with our taxpayer money" people, who are blindly forking it over without asking for even basic accountability.