I’ve figured out one cost-cutting method that Tri-Met is, apparently, putting into action. They’re eliminating one bus at random from the morning commute schedule. Clever!

I got out to the bus stop this morning a full five minutes before the bus I wanted was due to pass a stop five blocks back up the line. My network-synchronized timepiece read twenty two minutes past the hour. I figured I had it made, with enough time to stop for breakfast downtown and get to work pretty darned close to “on time.”

Twenty eight minutes later, during a time of morning in which a bus is scheduled to come along about every twelve minutes, a bus finally arrived: a bus that was too full to accept more passengers! Three minutes after that came a nearly empty bus, precisely on time… for the third bus I should have seen that morning. Wait-a-minute. A bus seems to have gone missing!

This would just be an infuriating start to an otherwise infuriating day but for the fact that this has happened to me not just once, not even twice, but three times in the last month and a half. TriMet? You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do…