My name is Tammi, and on January 27, 1995, I was in an auto/pedestrian accident. As a result of the accident I received a severe traumatic brain injury and pelvic fracture. Life is more of a challenge now, my hobbies are very therapeutic for me so I do not have to take as much medication.
Two weeks ago I was ask to do a survey on housing for the Disability Law Center, my respond. Why? Because UTA as nothing but cut bus routes making very poor bus system, its makes it very hard for the disabled and Elderly to have a good quantity life.
Having housing for the disabled and the elderly only works if there a good bus system.
The needs are keep growing because of baby boomers and the war. More and more soldiers are coming home disabled, and they will not be able to drive.
Is the disabled and the Elderly going to have to go live in a Nursing Home at Taxpayers Expense, if they do not have the support that they need to live in the Community.
A Good Bus System does not Earn the UTA Executives the Excessive BONUSES at TAXPAYER EXPENSE.
Showing posts with label What are Taxpayers Paying for. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What are Taxpayers Paying for. Show all posts
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Monday, May 31, 2010
What kind of Transit System does Utah Transit Authority have
Why is John Inglish Salary $339,000 and the rest UTA Executives Salaries are real Excessive. UTA has a very Efficient Transit System.
UTA has a Good Bus System in Down Town Salt Lake City, Avenues and University of Utah. The rest of the areas UTA service has a very poor Bus System.
UTA is trying to get other "Entities" involved in Public Transportation for the Disabled and the Elderly. It is very likely Taxes would be increased and service for the Disabled and the Elderly would be cut. Other "Entities" are not and should not be in the Business of Public Transportation, this is UTA's Job.
Though Mismanagement and Aggressive Elimination of Bus Routes and Fare Increases UTA is Destroying the Bus System. UTA has Very Poor Customer Service and many of the Bus Routes are not Running Schedule do to very Poor Planning by the Planners at UTA.
August 2009 Changed Day Sandy Trax, end of the Line would be Energy Solution Arena instead of Central Station the Saving would be $2.5 Million Dollars to Help Pay for more Direct from Sandy to the University of Utah Trax End of the Line to Central Station, Individuals could of Transfer to a University of Utah Train that goes to Central Station or got off at Gallivan Plaza taken a Bus to Central Station. But do to Complaints UTA Restore Service Back to Central Station. Taxpayers are having to Subsidized Trax and FrontRunner. Taxpayers Subsidize FrontRunner $1800 for every Passenger a Month. $$BIG BILL$$
UTA has a Good Bus System in Down Town Salt Lake City, Avenues and University of Utah. The rest of the areas UTA service has a very poor Bus System.
UTA is trying to get other "Entities" involved in Public Transportation for the Disabled and the Elderly. It is very likely Taxes would be increased and service for the Disabled and the Elderly would be cut. Other "Entities" are not and should not be in the Business of Public Transportation, this is UTA's Job.
Though Mismanagement and Aggressive Elimination of Bus Routes and Fare Increases UTA is Destroying the Bus System. UTA has Very Poor Customer Service and many of the Bus Routes are not Running Schedule do to very Poor Planning by the Planners at UTA.
August 2009 Changed Day Sandy Trax, end of the Line would be Energy Solution Arena instead of Central Station the Saving would be $2.5 Million Dollars to Help Pay for more Direct from Sandy to the University of Utah Trax End of the Line to Central Station, Individuals could of Transfer to a University of Utah Train that goes to Central Station or got off at Gallivan Plaza taken a Bus to Central Station. But do to Complaints UTA Restore Service Back to Central Station. Taxpayers are having to Subsidized Trax and FrontRunner. Taxpayers Subsidize FrontRunner $1800 for every Passenger a Month. $$BIG BILL$$
Sunday, October 18, 2009
What Utah Transit Authority doing with our Tax Dollars
Utah Transit Authority has good bus service in down town Salt Lake City, Avenues and the University of Utah. UTA has destroyed the bus system in the rest of Salt Lake County.
UTA has destroyed the bus system so much, making it harder for the working class to have good job, disabled and the elderly to go where they need to go. I have a friend that lives in down town Salt Lake City that is disabled, she has a hard time taking a bus by her self so she her grocery shopping at Ride-Aid, she can't get enough food that is nutritional, there many other individuals can only shop at convenient store. When a good bus service is taken out of neighborhoods there is a increase of Poverty and Crime.
Utah Transit Authority complain the Paratransit is so costly. Has Taxpayers we need to start asking why does UTA start working on reducing need for Paratransit? UTA needs to get accessible vans and small buses to go into neighborhoods to help encourage people to take the bus and take individuals to the main bus routes and to trax. UTA needs to work on barrier free, benches and shelters. UTA needs to expand the bus system, increase the frequency of buses and lower fares and also charge for parking at park and ride lots, to help increase ridership on buses.
This would reduce Costs and Need for Paratransit. This would help reduce traffic grid lock. This would be transportation for all. Also help out our Environment.
UTA has destroyed the bus system so much, making it harder for the working class to have good job, disabled and the elderly to go where they need to go. I have a friend that lives in down town Salt Lake City that is disabled, she has a hard time taking a bus by her self so she her grocery shopping at Ride-Aid, she can't get enough food that is nutritional, there many other individuals can only shop at convenient store. When a good bus service is taken out of neighborhoods there is a increase of Poverty and Crime.
Utah Transit Authority complain the Paratransit is so costly. Has Taxpayers we need to start asking why does UTA start working on reducing need for Paratransit? UTA needs to get accessible vans and small buses to go into neighborhoods to help encourage people to take the bus and take individuals to the main bus routes and to trax. UTA needs to work on barrier free, benches and shelters. UTA needs to expand the bus system, increase the frequency of buses and lower fares and also charge for parking at park and ride lots, to help increase ridership on buses.
This would reduce Costs and Need for Paratransit. This would help reduce traffic grid lock. This would be transportation for all. Also help out our Environment.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
"Investigate Utah Transit Authority Ethics"
Introduction: UTA has used a masterful propaganda campaign to keep the public and decision-makers in the dark about what they really accomplish, about the true total costs of new rail projects, about who pays what for roads and transit and about their reliability as stewards of $20 billion dollars in taxpayer "investment" UTA uses ignorance and misinformation as weapons against us.
1. UTA is using junk data to justify spending billions of car-driver-paid dollars for transit "investments" in questionable trains.
a. The highly critical Legislative audit of UTA from January of 2008 noted that "Poor ridership data has been a problem for several years".
b. This bad data has saturated the transportation planning for a decade and during debate on three-transit sales tax hike elections totaling billions.
1. UTA Chief Operating Officer, Jerry Benson, in October 2007 Michelle
Warburton article in the Deseret news stated UTA had bad data going back to 1995.
2. "We remain concerned that the faulty ridership data is still being used to justify major investments in the transit system".
a. What is Major Investment? billion$ of dollars paid by car users
1. Many more rail projects are planned and wanted without decision makers or the public knowing what they will really cost or accomplish.
3. UTA has mislead us as to the total long term costs of trains. They have baited and persuaded politicians to buy into rail transit with early estimates only a fraction of future total costs.
a. TRAX extension to the Airport, Draper, Mid Jordan and West Valley will cost nearly $3/4 billion each throughout their 40-year life spans.
b. Full build FrontRunner will cost over $4 billion.
4. UTA routinely reports its ridership in a form that overstates its transportation value.
a. The Legislative Audit criticized UTA for reporting ridership in "boardings", a measure that overstates the actual transportation value of those trips. UTA should, they said, report in "linked trips" a measure that is most nearly comparable to car trips. The Federal Administration and transit researchers have also stressed the desirability of using linked trips.
5. UTA habitually overstates or misrepresents gains in transit ridership over time. They carefully omit the details which regularly would show the irrelevance of those "apparent" gains.
a. UTA reported that TRAX had shown an 11% gain in ridership for October 2008, compared to 200. But they neglected to mention that most of that gain, likely 80% of that apparent gain was due to opening three new TRAX stations and FrontRunner since last year. The news stations would generate, perhaps, 500 hundred of the new rides. In addition, about 5,000 of those new riders were due to the trips dumped at the Intermodal Station by the $2/3rds-billion dollar FrontRunner trains each day.
b. Actually TRAX ridership has been nearly flatgoing back to late 2004
after accounting for gains that accompany new additions of stations and extension.
6. To gain taxpayer approval for the multi-billion tax hikes in 2006, UTA purposely misrepresented gross estimates of likely future TRAX extension (and other linked rail and bus rides) ridership as though they were the best data NET estimate.
a. UTA gave to the Downtown alliance data for their 2015 Transportation report claiming 25,000 to 30,000 riders a day on the MidJordan TRAX line by 2025. This claim was pushed by the DownTown Alliance, the Salt Lake Chamber and their "Speakers' Bureau to convince the public that this TRAX extension would do a lot to help congestion on our roads. But the Federal Transit Administration has just repeated 3-year old best-data analysis showing that this line will only carry 3,700 New Transit Trips daily by 2030 (WFRC data shows trips on southwest valley roads will increase by 1.25 million by 2030 (from 2001)
7. UTA continues to falsely claim transit helps clean our air or our worst pollution problems. This is not true.
a. The Legislative audit has stated that UTA is a net polluter of NOx BUSES cause so much excess NOx that they wipe out modest gains from VanPools and TRAX, leaving UTA upside down by 185 tons of excess NOx a year.
1. To mislead the public, UTA sums its excess NOx with its savings in lower prioity and less health damaging pollutants. It then declares, on balance it reduces pollution. But the EPA, UDAQ and WFRC all state that NOx is the key and worst pollutant.
b. UTA has claimed that FrontRunner reduces the worst pollutant NOx. This is false.
1.FrontRunner Locomotives will burn 1.8 million gallons of diesel a year, (full service conditions outlined by UTA's Mr. Steve Meyer) Every gallon yields 139 grams of NOx according to the EPA. This totals 279 tons a year of NOx. FrontRunner diesels will, like the UTA buses wipe out all gains from future TRAX extensions and further deepen its excess NOx pollution deficit.
c. A 2005 pollution analysis by WFRC and UDAQ engineers showed that UTA buses emitted 2% on-road NOx pollution. But with two FrontRunner extensions, UTA transit vehicles will emit over 5% a much NOx as all cars and trucks on the road. They are not helping!
Michael T. Packard Electronic Engineer and Safety Consultant
1. UTA is using junk data to justify spending billions of car-driver-paid dollars for transit "investments" in questionable trains.
a. The highly critical Legislative audit of UTA from January of 2008 noted that "Poor ridership data has been a problem for several years".
b. This bad data has saturated the transportation planning for a decade and during debate on three-transit sales tax hike elections totaling billions.
1. UTA Chief Operating Officer, Jerry Benson, in October 2007 Michelle
Warburton article in the Deseret news stated UTA had bad data going back to 1995.
2. "We remain concerned that the faulty ridership data is still being used to justify major investments in the transit system".
a. What is Major Investment? billion$ of dollars paid by car users
1. Many more rail projects are planned and wanted without decision makers or the public knowing what they will really cost or accomplish.
3. UTA has mislead us as to the total long term costs of trains. They have baited and persuaded politicians to buy into rail transit with early estimates only a fraction of future total costs.
a. TRAX extension to the Airport, Draper, Mid Jordan and West Valley will cost nearly $3/4 billion each throughout their 40-year life spans.
b. Full build FrontRunner will cost over $4 billion.
4. UTA routinely reports its ridership in a form that overstates its transportation value.
a. The Legislative Audit criticized UTA for reporting ridership in "boardings", a measure that overstates the actual transportation value of those trips. UTA should, they said, report in "linked trips" a measure that is most nearly comparable to car trips. The Federal Administration and transit researchers have also stressed the desirability of using linked trips.
5. UTA habitually overstates or misrepresents gains in transit ridership over time. They carefully omit the details which regularly would show the irrelevance of those "apparent" gains.
a. UTA reported that TRAX had shown an 11% gain in ridership for October 2008, compared to 200. But they neglected to mention that most of that gain, likely 80% of that apparent gain was due to opening three new TRAX stations and FrontRunner since last year. The news stations would generate, perhaps, 500 hundred of the new rides. In addition, about 5,000 of those new riders were due to the trips dumped at the Intermodal Station by the $2/3rds-billion dollar FrontRunner trains each day.
b. Actually TRAX ridership has been nearly flatgoing back to late 2004
after accounting for gains that accompany new additions of stations and extension.
6. To gain taxpayer approval for the multi-billion tax hikes in 2006, UTA purposely misrepresented gross estimates of likely future TRAX extension (and other linked rail and bus rides) ridership as though they were the best data NET estimate.
a. UTA gave to the Downtown alliance data for their 2015 Transportation report claiming 25,000 to 30,000 riders a day on the MidJordan TRAX line by 2025. This claim was pushed by the DownTown Alliance, the Salt Lake Chamber and their "Speakers' Bureau to convince the public that this TRAX extension would do a lot to help congestion on our roads. But the Federal Transit Administration has just repeated 3-year old best-data analysis showing that this line will only carry 3,700 New Transit Trips daily by 2030 (WFRC data shows trips on southwest valley roads will increase by 1.25 million by 2030 (from 2001)
7. UTA continues to falsely claim transit helps clean our air or our worst pollution problems. This is not true.
a. The Legislative audit has stated that UTA is a net polluter of NOx BUSES cause so much excess NOx that they wipe out modest gains from VanPools and TRAX, leaving UTA upside down by 185 tons of excess NOx a year.
1. To mislead the public, UTA sums its excess NOx with its savings in lower prioity and less health damaging pollutants. It then declares, on balance it reduces pollution. But the EPA, UDAQ and WFRC all state that NOx is the key and worst pollutant.
b. UTA has claimed that FrontRunner reduces the worst pollutant NOx. This is false.
1.FrontRunner Locomotives will burn 1.8 million gallons of diesel a year, (full service conditions outlined by UTA's Mr. Steve Meyer) Every gallon yields 139 grams of NOx according to the EPA. This totals 279 tons a year of NOx. FrontRunner diesels will, like the UTA buses wipe out all gains from future TRAX extensions and further deepen its excess NOx pollution deficit.
c. A 2005 pollution analysis by WFRC and UDAQ engineers showed that UTA buses emitted 2% on-road NOx pollution. But with two FrontRunner extensions, UTA transit vehicles will emit over 5% a much NOx as all cars and trucks on the road. They are not helping!
Michael T. Packard Electronic Engineer and Safety Consultant
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