According to the mayor of Gresham, Oregon, 40 percent of robberies and drug crimes — as well as 80 percent of gang-related police calls — in his city take place within a quarter mile of a light-rail station. He made this statement in an interview with conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson.
Vandalism and burgleries are also a problem, according to this article in the Oregonian.
The mayor didn’t say anything about violent crime, such as the recent beating of a 71-year-old man by a 15-year-old boy with a baseball bat.
But this in case if you are diabetic, a person with diabetes issue should Continue to website purchase viagra online get restriction in taking sugar in their diet. Fights Diseases and Boosts Immune best viagra in india http://heritageihc.com/welcome.html System The Amazon rain forest contains some of the richest soil in the world. All the ingredients used for the preparation of aphrodisiacs are all over the World Wide Web. generic soft viagra Visit Your URL Vitamin C and tadalafil 20mg price beta-carotene: Vitamin C and improves blood flow to the reproductive organs. TriMet blames the problems on the neighborhood, not light rail. “The transit system reflects the community it travels through,” said a transit agency spokesperson. “They have a lot of poverty, unemployment and gang issues, and occasionally that will come onto the train system.” Of course, the reason why that neighborhood has poverty is that the region’s planning-induced housing shortage has gentrified Portland’s low-income neighborhoods and pushed the poor into subsidized transit-oriented developments.
In addition, the Gresham police say that many criminals are”commuting in from other areas” on the light rail. As the Gresham Outlook says, a “contributor to crime in Gresham is the MAX light rail.”
Gresham is about 22.2 square miles and there are seven light-rail stations in the city, so the land within a quarter-mile of those stations covers about 6 percent of the city. So is the fact that some kinds of crime are seven times more likely to take place near light-rail station than in the rest of the city indicate that light-rail brought those crimes into the city? I am sure some people will say it does not, but it sounds pretty conclusive to me.
TriMet’s solution is to install more cameras. Since TriMet has too few security guards monitoring its trains, the city of Gresham is going to have its own police officers patrol the trains. Thus, taxpayers have to pay one more time to keep the light rail rolling.
Before MAX came to this neighborhood, it was a pretty good blue collar neighborhood. I know I grew up close to it.
It was a modest low density neighborhood with hard working people raising families with big yards. Most people were proud
to live out there.
Then came light rail, followed by density mandates and the neighborhoods lost it’s identify. The mostly modest homes with
yards, some very big yards became apartments, row houses and infill. The old residents slowly moved away and the character
of the old neighborhood moved with it. The single family homes were replaced with the density mandate along Burnside, the
new Light Rail corridor.
This neighborhood was one of the first areas that the planners planned for high density along the tracks and what did it bring?
It took 20 years of planning to change a good neighborhood to what it is today.
What? MAX doesn’t have licesned peace officers? Are you serious? I thought they were standard for any transit system.
Interesting that the cities’ share of the safety and crime-prevention costs for the light rail portion of the Seattle-area’s Proposition 1 (RTID/ST2) tax proposal has never been made clear, or even surfaced…
You can bet that the crime prevention costs have not been budgeted for by the cities involved, so how will passengers feel about just a camera protecting them from assault or robbery on the Sound Transit light rail line? It hasn’t been effective yet….
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