First, that reminder: Long before Snowstorm ’08, as we were reminded last week, Metro had been planning to run a “partial holiday schedule” for most of the time between Christmas and New Year’s. That includes today through Wednesday, plus Friday; here’s the list of routes that are affected. (Thursday, New Year’s Day, will be on a Sunday schedule.) (Note added: This morning Metro published a specific page to address this week – check that here.)
Now, the “questions answered” part – over the weekend, we received some additional information from Metro’s Linda Thielke, after she read the “editorial-esque aside” we included in this post – it’s about why bus-tracking didn’t work so well, and why it should in the not-too-distant future – for that and more, read on:
The main question we posed must be answered by local leaders — and we expect discussion, for starters, will ensue; we checked with King County Councilmember Dow Constantine‘s office just before Christmas — since he’s the chair of the council’s Transportation Committee. They promise “a public hearing at the council after the new year.”
But in the short run, what Linda was offering was an answer to the question of why the online “bus tracker” wasn’t accurate. Here’s what she wrote:
Tracker is the only service offered by Metro.
*MyBus and Busview come from the UW.
*All three pull from the same database.
*That database is dependent on the buses being on normal routing and passing electronic readers installed on the streets that track the time they pass those locations. The buses have technology on board that trigger the readers.
*If the bus is rerouted, even for a portion of the route, it can throw the tracking off because the buses don’t pass the expected signposts and are “lost” in the tracking sequence. This includes being on snow routes.
*If routes don’t show up on these programs (which happened during the recent snow/ice storms) that does not mean it is not operating. It may be on alternate routing where there are no sensors to track the coach’s progress.
*This should improve in 2010 when Metro installs a GPS-based vehicle location system to track buses in real time, something we have been working on for a while.
That last one was news to us, so we tried to find more information online; after finally giving up, we e-mailed Linda back to ask if she can point us to more details — she said she didn’t think Metro’s “written much” about the GPS system, but she’ll look.
One more note — we went back into the WSB archives to see what happened in the wake of the last major winter-storm trouble that befell our area — the December 2006 windstorm/January 2007 snowstorm. We found coverage of the February 5, 2007, King County Council Town Hall meeting at The Hall at Fauntleroy. We posted two reports – this short note about people not getting a chance to speak till the very end, when many had left; this longer report somewhat acerbically summing up the entire event. We wrote about it chronologically; about an hour into the meeting, this excerpt:
The first panel of experts isn’t even the utility panel — it’s public health, sheriffs, Metro buses, and King County roads. Their interesting revelations: The sheriff rep noted that Nextel service sucked during the post-windstorm troubles … the Metro rep noted that their “customer communication system” has trouble keeping up with “rapidly changing conditions,” and then elicits the first real laugh of the night by mentioning “We know that sometimes it’ll snow in the North End and be perfectly dry down here and yet your [West Seattle] buses will just disappear.”
The Town Hall meeting also has its own page on the county website, though we can’t get the video files to play. Elsewhere on the county site, we did find this summary of changes made by Metro after the tumultuous 2006-2007 winter – though the date at the top of this page makes it look new, if you check the page bottom, it was actually posted in December 2007.
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