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A TriMet ticket vending machine on a MAX platform along downtown Portland's transit mall.

(Joseph Rose/The Oregonian)

It gets old.

With the MAX train's cyclops headlight approaching the station, you slide a credit card into the ticket vending machine. It spits back an "Out of Service" taunt.

As someone who rides TriMet for a living, I've lost track of how many times I've been faced with that message. (Maybe 100?)

Malfunction. Rejection. Confusion about what to do next. As the transit rider walks away, cue the lonely-piano ending theme from

Despite a waterfall of complaints about broken machines on

and Reddit feeds, Oregon's largest transit agency has long trumpeted that the machines are on average up and functioning more than 90 percent of the time.

Well, as Ray Terrill found, there are lies, doubledecker lies and TriMet statistics about its

.

"As Stephen Colbert would say, there's 'truthiness' to that 90 percent number," said Terrill, 32, a daily MAX rider who crunches databases in the Port of Portland's IT department.

The self-described numbers nerd got his hands on 12 months of TVM outage data and analyzed it. TriMet's glowing reliability average, he discovered, masks some serious issues that prevent many riders from buying a fare at a time when enforcement officers are increasingly handing out $175 fines.

Among other things, TriMet uses a "smoothed out average" propped up by a collection of machines that rarely go down, Terrill found. But there are scores of clunkers experiencing hundreds of unscheduled outages every year.

Hard Drive

Joseph Rose

covers commuting for The Oregonian and writes a weekly column.

For example, a machine at the Sunset Transit Center, one the system's busiest stations, went haywire more than 250 times in the year ending April 18.

Systemwide, the vast majority of unplanned outages were hiccups that lasted less than 15 minutes, but the average was more than nine hours Terrill discovered.

On Friday morning,

, complete with a list of the best- and worst-performing machines.

TriMet officials responded by saying they aren't intentionally misleading the riders. Still, they admitted, it's probably time for a new approach.

The 90 percent uptime "is not reflecting customer experience," said spokeswoman Roberta Altstadt. Calling Terrill's exercise "helpful," Altsadt said TriMet was already planning to start digging further into outage data, including more frequent field audits.

Here's the thing about Terrill: He's not trying to embarrass TriMet. He says he loves the system. He simply wanted to help fix a problem.

As someone who dances with data for a living, he said TriMet's boasts about the high reliability of TVMs always seemed out of step with the real-world frustrations of many riders.

Telegraph to TriMet's $150,000-a-year managers: This guy is proof that there are young geeks who relish the idea of crowd-sourcing cures for some of your budget-battered system's everyday pains.

If only TriMet would be less prickly with releasing public information.

Deservedly, the agency brags about how it has unleashed its departure-and-arrival source code so that programmers can create some

.

But rather than get a quick download from a government data website such as

, Terrill was forced to file an onerous public records request. He excluded more than 75,000 outages of 5 minutes or less that were likely scheduled maintenance and daily upload of financial transactions.

Interestingly, three of the 10 most reliable machines (all with uptimes over 99 percent) were on WES commuter-rail platforms in Beaverton and Tigard, where machines aren't used as much as those at typical transit stations. Meanwhile, the staffed downtown

was the second-best performer.

Then there are the far-flung jalopies.

For example, westbound East 162nd Avenue MAX station was down 35.5 percent of the time.

"If I had downtimes like that at work," Terrill said, "I'd get fired."

Incidentally, the federal governments requires 99.999 percent uptime from phone companies.

Terrill's analysis gets uglier. For instance, 4,797 outages lasted longer than 10 hours. The eastbound 122nd Avenue MAX station reported about 630 separate outages over the year. TriMet didn't even try to defend that. It can't.

What Altstadt did say is that TriMet spends about $2.5 million a year for TVM upkeep and is in the process of replacing 120 of its oldest machines, with hopes of replacing the technology with a full electronic fare system by 2018.

So what should you do if (when) you encounter a broken machine?

"We want to encourage riders to pick up some extra tickets when buying their groceries," Altstadt said, "so they'll have tickets on hand and won't have to rely on the machines."

That's one solution I guess.

-- Joseph Rose