I left work at five minutes past five PM. About fifteen minutes later I ran across the Hillsboro Airport Park-and-Ride lot to catch the MAX, bound for home. This was one of the shiny new trains which look like someone elongated the hell out of a new-model VW Beetle.

Between Quatama and Willow Creek we experienced a panic stop for no explained reason, and we waited between stops for five minutes or so. Okay, this sort of thing isn’t too unusual, so it seemed like no big deal. Then we got to Elmonica, and we waited. And waited. Five minutes into that wait, the operator tells us that the train ahead of us is having trouble and “momentarily” they’ll have it moved out of our way.

We sat there for half an hour. Well, okay, most of us stood rather than sitting: It was a standing-room-only train when I boarded the thing.

So, there are problems with these sleek-looking new trains. Chief among them? The designers clearly didn’t expect anyone to ride them who were in possession of lower limbs. The mid-car seats face either a bulkhead (with no place for your knees at all if you’re at the “window” seat) or reversed seats that are placed so close to you that nobody can actually sit across from you, ensuring that either half of those four seats go unoccupied or that everyone’s knees are between someone else’s legs.

Classy, isn’t it? But wait, there’s more!

Four of the mid-car benches are at the same elevation as the rest in that section, but without the raised flooring to rest your feet on… so unless you’re really tall, your legs just dangle there. And if you are tall enough to sit there, you won’t want to because (again) there’s no legroom unless you’re in one of the four aisle seats. And nobody wants to sit in the “window” seat at those benches because…

• No legroom
• No window
• Nothing to look at but a slab of white plastic bulkhead

The raised sections at each end of the train aren’t much better. I like the idea of the extra seating at the non-operator-cab end of the train, but everything else about those sections is designed as if someone took the worst parts of the existing low-floor train designs and exaggerated them. Everything’s more crowded, and now they’ve sunk the aisleway a few inches so you’ve a much greater chance of stumbling into your fellow passengers and/or one of the myriad metal bars.

I’m utterly, thoroughly underwhelmed by these new trains. In the future, if I’m faced with the choice of boarding one and it looks like all of the not-completely-crappy seats are taken, I’ll just wait for the next one unless I’m under severe time constraints.

Yes, it’s that bad. TriMet has committed an epic fail with these stupid, garish, unfriendly, noisy new trains.

Anyway. Just to make my commute a bit more fun, we had not-one-but-two dogs on the train (bookending my escape routes, of course) and one utterly brilliant bint decided to take her bike and park it in the middle of the aisle among the mid-car seating area. I mean, it’s not like people sitting there want to be able to get off the train at some point, right? Never mind getting jabbed by handlebars!

I left work at five minutes past five PM, and got home at twenty-five minutes past seven PM.

I’m glad that tomorrow is Friday.