At the dawn of the Internet, one of the oft heard promises was that people would have greater access to information. Certainly, information and data seems to be everywhere.

A challenge for us all is having the time and wherewithal to process this data into something understandable and usable.

We've blogged about this before, but we think it bears repeating. TriMet's Performance Dashboard provides everyday folk with the easily understood graphics to gauge how well TriMet is operating.

The dashboard provides graphics with 12 month data on ridership, operating cost per ride, on-time percentage, collisions and tax and farebox revenue.

For example, below is the graphic on boardings for 2010 and 2011: 

If you want to dig deeper, TriMet provides monthly performance reports and monthly statistics for each indicator.