[MarkDaMan]

An eliminated Fareless square could potentially severly weaken TriMet and Downtown's health. As a downtown worker who needs to get around downtown daily, not everything is in a walking distance. When I have an hour for lunch, I can get to the square, mall, or food carts on 5th in 10 minutes, when I'm walking it is 15-20. Likewise, when I have a meeting in one office and another across town and 15 minutes in between, I can hop onto any bus on the mall and get between appointments. I can get between my evening class at PSU and not have to leave work before 4:30 instead of 4 if I was walking. To pay a fare for each of those trips a day, would raise my fares to over $20 a week limiting how far I am willing to go around town. When I am transporting around downtown, I'm creating a presence, spending money, adding vitality to our core and giving me more options to support local merchants and food dealers, than just the Subway around the block that I can get to in 5 minutes.

The PR from the fareless square would be lost too. I sat across from two women from Georgia who had just got in from the airport on MAX, checked into their hotel, and were riding to the waterfront from the square and wanted to know where to pay for their ticket. I explained to them it was free and you should have seen the shock register on their faces. I am positive they are going to go back home and will tell their Atlanta friends how wonderful Portland is, how we don't try and scourge every last dollar from people through a sales tax, and downtown's fareless square.

Conventions at the OCC have choose to exhibit here because of the fareless square. In fact, it is even frequently included in the the contract that since there isn't a HQ hotel, attendees get to ride the system for free downtown. It would be a fight to get the people who sell the space at the OCC to give up that little chip of good will.

While the system is abused there are solutions to the problem without eliminating the square. TriMet is considered in a strange way, private property. TriMet has the right to ask anyone to leave their property (trains, busses and even stops and platforms). If TriMet instituted a free ticket for fareless only, inspectors could still check to make sure people have the appropriate documentation for riding the system. Since people would be required to select a free ticket, the free tix could have the limits of the free square well marked. Than TriMet can raise fines for knowingly skipping out on fares outside of the free zone. So, you would have interaction with fare agents checking for your free or purchased ticket, allowing them to 'confront' anti-social behavior with cause, and clean up the system, as well as raising punishments for cheating the system as people couldn't say they didn't know the limits.