(12/18/08 photo by Raymond Overgaard)
This morning, we published a reminder about this week’s reduced Metro service – planned long before Snowmare ’08 – and additional information from a Metro spokesperson regarding why the online “bus tracker” didn’t work reliably during the peak of the snow/ice woes. Since Metro is a county-provided service, your elected county leaders are the people in a position to hold the agency’s leadership accountable – and one of them, West Seattle’s County Councilmember Dow Constantine, who chairs the council’s Transportation Committee, posted this comment below that post:
I hear you. I, and plenty of others here at the King County Council, am very focused on fixing the problems that plagued transit riders during the recent snowfall. Because of the condition of the roads, Metro managers had to leave most of our articulated buses out of service during most snow days, which meant that the system was operating at only about 50 percent capacity.
I salute Metro’s employees for their diligent work under extremely adverse conditions. However, I was also dismayed by the serious communications failures I learned of from the media, my constituents, and my bus-riding employees. I wrote to Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond two days before Christmas outlining my concerns with the goal of meeting with him personally in the first week of January and arranging a County Council briefing shortly thereafter. The issues I raised in my letter included Metro’s phone and website communications, the difficulty of getting information on modified (snow) routes to bus riders, bus frequency to popular destinations, and the general issue of areas which were completely unserved by transit during the snowfall.
Although the Seattle area rarely gets a snowfall of this size or duration, we need to learn from both mistakes and successes and to improve performance under adverse weather and other emergency conditions.
One more Metro-related note: The agency spokesperson who has proactively worked to get us information about some of the system’s issues during the past few weeks, Linda Thielke, did come up with a page that includes more details on the upcoming technology upgrades to make Metro buses more trackable (she had mentioned earlier that GPS location would be in place by 2010) – read about the “smart bus” plans here; online references we found independently say it’s a $25 million project.
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