Add two more costs to the exhorbitant price of light-rail transit: crime, and the cost of preventing such crime. Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending $560,000 dollars adding security cameras to five light-rail stations — that’s $112,000 per station.
“Crime activity,” says the Gresham police chief, “has increased in the areas along the platforms.” This is hardly news. A decade ago, the Milwaukie police chief told me that police throughout the Portland area knew that the opening of a light-rail station would be followed by an increase in property crime in the vicinity.
