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In response to
"Yep, I drove downtown to get the wife home. All the buses kept driving by her stop completely full. Wow, Trimet never works when it needs to most."
by
Bacon
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The problem is that no mass transit system can be designed to accommodate for these infrequent, but massive, disruptions.
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I'll send you a copy of the joint state/federal Departments of Transportation study after the 2008 snowpacalypse. The executive summary essentially boiled down to three points: (1) To accommodate such massive disruptions, a mass transit system would essentially have to increase staffing and vehicles by 50%, which would keep service mostly intact, but still not at the same levels; (3) no one is going to support a 50% increase in a mass transit system's budget for events that might occur once a year; (3) unlike snow removal equipment, riot police, firefighting equipment, and similar unique use items, a city can't just borrow staff an equipment from a neighboring city.
Maybe it's possible to design and engineer a mass transit system that could absorb such a hit, but no one has been able to do so yet.
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Responses:
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