Wednesday, November 07, 2007

UTA people missing in action at Railvolution...

As I said a couple of weeks ago I was very busy over the last week and a half. First I took Amtrak to Reno and attended a conference. Then I flew down to the Miami area to attend Railvolution that was being held in Miami Beach. In fact I was one of the presenters on Saturday.

I have plenty of material from these trips and will go over it over the next few weeks along with other important information but something I have to mention about Saturday.

On Saturday I was kind of curious how many UTA people were going to be in my session but end the end no one from UTA showed up even though there was several there from UTA. I saw the people leaving on the mobile workshops and no UTA people. Look into the other sessions that day and still no UTA people. So where were they? After all, they were attending a conference on taxpayers money so shouldn't they be held accountable for attending every workshop during the 4 days?

Now hopefully I am wrong, that I just missed seeing them, but some people were joking that most of the attendees went to the beach instead of the sessions on Saturday. 700 people were supposed to be attending the conference but I saw few people walking around on Saturday so it makes you wonder.

Now hopefully I am wrong they happened to be hiding somewhere but I do think when they attend a conference on taxpayer money they should be held accountable to attended every session during the conference or have to pay it back.

So what is the answer???

3 comments:

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

I know a lot of people flew back early. Also, I didn't realize you were going to be at Rail~Volution. I would have stopped by and said hi.

James W. Anderson said...

Yes it is possible they had to come back early, but that is also par for the course for them, they even left a hearing before it was scheduled to close...it was their own hearing to decide (and they had already made the decision, it was a sham) to truncate Route 811 near downtown Provo rather than the 1985 voter mandated East Bay location that has since mushroomed since it was first used for the express routes since 1985.

To see more about some of the more serious internal problems and some of the external impact on riders, and how they are not really a 'quality endorsed system', see my blog here.

http://utahtransitauthority9001compliance.blogspot.com/

John Dornoff said...

I have taken the 811 a couple of times since they truncated it and noticed the bus has a hard time trying to turn onto University from its layover spot.