Bob
My theory is that some of Metro’s fringie-loonies among the part time driver corps come out very late at night and on Sundays, quite likely because they’re barred from doing so at any other time.
One recent Sunday I took a local to get to the WS hub where the 560 and a lot of other routes stop. It runs every hour on Sundays. The driver gave me a ticket with very little time on it, so I asked for an up-to-date one. Boy, was that a mistake.
It soon became apparent that he’d carefully calculated the tiny amount of time he’d set on that ticket. As he pompously explained, he’d started driving the bus in Ballard at noon. Therefore, adding the regulation two hours to that, and subtracting the length of time that the route normally takes to get from Ballard to WS, which was an hour and a quarter, but also taking into account more time for the considerable lateness of the bus, anyone who was intimately familiar with the Driver’s Regulations could obviously see that of course there was hardly any time remaining. There arose a hint of a crazed gleam in his eye, as if doing this to some random elderly pasenger was a moment of his highest enjoyment.
So on the way back from my errands I walked home from the bus hub, a mile and three quarters with my bag of groceries. Just so I wouldn’t have to pay that tinfoil trumper another fare just to hear him tell me something like that all over again.
I took it pretty slow and rested a few times and my knees held up okay. I do support Metro, but it’s harder to support it when it’s run like that.
Whoever wins in November, ontime service is so lousy now at Metro that something has to change. I believe it would be a great improvement if our WS routes ran independently of routes in other areas.