Roland Chlapowski: Here's the thing- for people who are so immobile that they can't drive, or who aren't wealthy enough to be able to care for and maintain a car, or have poor vision (which often comes with old age), or who just don't like having to drive, TRANSIT IS THEIR ONLY OPTION.
JK: You have to be kidding - right? Do you really expect people in such poor shape to walk 1/4 mile to the toy train? They would be better served by transportation vouchers which they could use on something practical for them: TAXI FARE - door to door, no exposure to criminals etc. Or jitneys if you guys would allow transit competition in Portland, but Trimet is so inefficient it could not survive competition. Sad.

Roland Chlapowski: Also, many of the wheelchairs that people use today are so heavy and difficult to fold that if they are taking a car ride to get to where they need to go, it almost certainly means that those people are "dependent" upon others for the transportation.
JK: You really need to get better informed:
1. A lady in a class that I just took got to class by driving a van that had a hoist to lift her heavy electric wheel chair inside, where she transferred to the driver’s seat. Again wouldn’t it be better to help these people get cars, than to waste billions on toy trains that don’t serve them to any real degree?

2. Another person wheels his chair up a ramp in the side door of his van and right up to the steering wheel. (Of course he locks the wheel chair into position.)

Roland Chlapowski: My point: Implying that everyone with a handicap would be able to drive free in a camaro if we just stopped spending money on light rail and transit is nothing more than wishful thinking
JK: If we hadn’t wasted $2 billion on toy trains (another $2-4 billion coming) we would have a lot of money for excellent bus service and lots leftover for transpiration welfare as a separate budget item, instead of co-mingling it with ordinary transit expenses.

Roland Chlapowski: , and purposefully misleading wishful thinking at that.
JK: I am getting really tired of your unfounded, out of left field, accusations especially after you have not even bothered to find out how thing really work.

Roland Chlapowski: One of the things that I did as part of this great experiential learning outing was TO WEAR GOGGLES THAT MADE ME HAVE THE VISION EQUIVALENT OF BEING LEGALLY BLIND.
JK: My, how touchy-feely of you. Now why don’t you look for transpiration options to make their life easier instead of using the handicapped as an excuse to feed billions to politically connected developers. (Streetcar = development oriented transit)

Roland Chlapowski: Obviously, cars aren't an option for them - transit is the ONLY option.
JK: Again you show your ignorance. What about taxis and jitneys?

Roland Chlapowski: Also, Jim, exploiting the handicapped and the poor as rhetorical devices to defend your personal driving fetish is worthy of a head shaking.
JK: You are the one exploiting their handicap as an excuse to feed money to campaign donor developers.

Not to mention the fact that one elected official, who just happens to be the region’s biggest toy train advocate, just happens to also work for a company that did work on at least two of our current toy train lines. (I wonder how much Brian Newman gets under the table for that little conflict of interest.)

Thanks
JK