Now, our second report (more to come) on the Seattle City Council‘s second day of briefings on December snowstorm response: This time, we focus on what the council heard from, and asked, Metro director Kevin Desmond. Biggest revelation – It’s clear now where the bus system’s customer-communication system broke down – there’s a major bottleneck. More about that in a moment. First, Desmond opened by stating the obvious: “This was the most severe weather, snow emergency in Metro’s history … We appreciate our customers’ patience and understand their frustration. Nobody likes to wait by the curb for a long time, for a bus that may or may not show up or may pass by because it’s crowded.” His bottom line: Metro has a snow plan, but it had to go out the window because it was written for a less-severe, shorter-duration situation. It’s an “80 percent” (service) plan, but he says Metro needs a “50 percent” plan, one that can be pro-actively put into effect with enough time to warn customers. That observation was just the beginning – read on:

Another difference he noted about the December “snow event” – it affected the “entire county” rather than separate areas as is more often the case, given the capricious weather around here. “The full-county effect taxed our resources significantly … That morning (December 18th), our entire articulated fleet and the trolley network [buses using overhead electric wires] began to fail.” And, unfortunately, he pointed out, those types of buses – which just don’t do well in snow – comprise half of Metro’s 1,400-bus fleet (Desmond said that number includes 100 deployed for Sound Transit). That day, he said, at one point, more than 200 buses were stuck, and Metro managers “had to create an ad-hoc 50 percent service plan we hadn’t pre-established or pre-planned” – basically, they made it up on the spot, but couldn’t even keep to that plan because of changing conditions. In addition to the bus fleet’s inability to handle the snow and ice, he described unplowed roads as a major obstacle, since, particularly within Seattle city limits, Metro operates many of its routes on “secondary and tertiary streets.” Coordinating with 39 “jurisdictions,” he said, also provided a challenge, particularly regarding coordinating which routes need to be kept open.

Last but by no means least on his list of major challenges, customer/public communication. He didn’t try to sugarcoat this one, saying, “It’s going to continue to be a problem in these events” because of “structural” issues.

The main one, as he described it, involves Metro’s Radio Control Center. This is where everything comes in from the field by radio – but he says they have only four radio channels, and that means a huge bottleneck in this kind of event, when “there’s a tremendous amount of information trying to flow from field to service coordinators.” He says a plan is in the works to increase the amount of radio channels. He also mentioned what we reported here during the storm — Metro has a GPS system coming next year so that buses can be tracked in real time using that technology, rather than the current system, which involves tracking them as they pass certain route points – and therefore falls completely off the rails as soon as routes are deviated from.

At that point, Councilmember Sally Clark asked, “What if the radio system went down?” Desmond indicated there’s no “well-developed alternative plan” — most drivers carry cell phones, he said, so they might be usable in a situation like that. But, he retorted, “This is a weather plan, not a disaster plan.” Clark fired right back, “Some people called it a disaster.”

Then, for the second consecutive day, Council President Richard Conlin brought up the method of communication that WSB’ers used quite effectively throughout the storm, when those formal communications channels failed: “There’s another network we’re missing,” he said, “the emerging electronic communication. For example, if you went to the [Seattle neighborhood] blog sites, you would have seen a lot of bus information [communicated during the storm]. If the funneling issue is the constraint, maybe decentralization would help.”

Desmond didn’t disagree, but did express some concern about “collect(ing) that in a coherent way,” while acknowleding “customers certainly want that instant information” — information he says is just not available now because “we have everybody calling in on radios, and that gets jammed up.”

West Seattle-residing City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen said the lack of real-time communication capability could even be life-threatening: “I find it quite alarming. When we hear of major disasters, like 9/11 or Katrina, it’s the lack of communication and lack of capacity of systems that causes so much injury and death … Metro may be one of the systems we rely on, but if we don’t have good communication systems, we’re really stuck and everyone’s left on their own. This has to be something that all the jurisdictions work with you on.”

Within “18 months,” Desmond reiterated, “we will have a significantly enhanced system … this is 30 or 40 million dollars in technology that’s coming.” In the shorter term, though, he acknowledged that there are steps that Metro could take – crosstraining people so more can be added in various roles in that Radio Control Center, and improving the Metro website: “We are still struggling with how to get information from the Control Center into our website and keep it updated on a routine basis.” And he agreed that “unpublished route” was a phrase that didn’t help much of anyone when it appeared online: “We were making up routes kind of on the fly – The website works well for the basic snow plan as currently written, does NOT work well for what happened. … We need to improve our website; I think it does not do justice to what our consumers need.”

Before his section of the briefing concluded, he noted that the King County Council plans its own set of hearings – the first one next Monday – at which Metro will make an even more detailed presentation regarding what happened, why, and what could be done to fix it.

(As noted earlier, this is our second report on today’s three-hour City Council storm-response briefing; the first one, with more on the road-clearing challenges, is here; our report on yesterday’s shorter briefing is here. We plan at least two more reports on today’s briefing – next one, what Seattle Public Utilities had to say about the trash/recycling/yard-waste pickup problems.)