Results tagged “metro”

The plan includes an "adverse weather map," and improved transit alerts via email. A text message option would be a lot more useful for riders, though, at least until they start installing laptops at every bus stop.

There's a feature in the Seattle Times today about the #7 bus that seems to be celebrating it as a "colorful" part of Seattle history, but also makes the claim that "most" and "many" #7 riders prefer it to the light rail. Try as we might, we can't find any numbers in the story to back up that assertion. We emailed reporter Phillip Lucas, but it bounced back undeliverable, user unknown. We've also called Metro's community relations line three times this morning, but no one's picking up. We'll update if it's the rapture and no one else is at work this morning. UPDATE: It's not the rapture. But here's Publicola's ECB, an actual #7 rider, going off on exactly how colorful the route is.

Looking at a projected two-year shortfall of $213 million, Metro Transit is in a position to scrimp, save, and make some serious cuts and changes. So what do we get? Proposals, proposals and more fictitious proposals--that (sigh) will save the day--from the King County Council.

The Seattle Times has a complaint from a Redmond woman who was taking two kids to the fireworks on the Fourth. On holidays, Metro's policy is that kids ride free with a paying adult. But it turns out the Fourth is not a holiday...well, not a Metro holiday. Metro's holiday was the Third of July, which as you know celebrates the day the Founding Fathers settled on the parchment for the Declaration of Independence.

"23" by jean-marc luneau ( lolitanie ), from our Flickr pool

Normal-looking-but-totally-crazy woman: (Begins singing, quietly at first) "Jesus loves me, this I know..." (and then much much louder) "...for the Bible tells me so!" Internal: Shit, shit, shit. Listen lady, you're obviously out of your mind, so we'll cut you some slack, but you're not a very good singer.

In the bus tunnel, at least, where there's smoke there's not always fire. In fact, there may not even be smoke, as KIRO reports: "Tunnel traffic was rerouted to surface streets and the entrances were closed, but no fire was found, said Linda Thielke of Metro Transit." Doesn't sound like commuters were told why their routes were disrupted, so if you're curious, now you know. A tipster tells us: "Our 550 was just exiting the tunnel around 7:30 a.m. when the dispatcher announced over the driver's headset that the tunnel was closing and all tunnel bus drivers need to take the surface streets. (Our bus was full of sleepy commuters and was pretty quiet so I totally eavesdropped). At this point, our driver made some comment along the lines of 'good thing we just missed it'."

There must be some deep-seated rage that manifests during a ride on Seattle Metro buses. Recent Metro reports show that the rate of "incidents" per rider is the highest it's been in a loooong time. Seattle's top five sketchy buses (174, 7, 358, 106, and 36) have all seen their fair share of of chaos. The war stories are real from those who ride the bus. We have seen the shenanigans that goes on; take your pick: fighting, pervs, arguing, peeing, assaults, flashing, boozing, and the random acts from your local bat-shit crazy. We just hope the pretty new Link (that opens in 66 days) won't end up with stats and stories like these.

Commonsense prevails, as the seven Puget Sound public transportation agencies--that includes ferries too--have joined together to start rolling out their new "transportation baby," a collaborative regional fare system.

• Giganticasscity has photos and reflections on a rectangular brown house in the Central that may or may not be doing a great job of fitting into the neighborhood.
• Orphan Road is discussing the possibility of distance-based Metro fares ($0.10 for 4 blocks sounds pretty good!).
• White Center Now has a juicy account of yesterday's turn of events, involving public intoxication and the Seattle Police Department.

We can vouch for this because we've been IMing with a friend of ours who is on the Amtrak Cascades train to Portland, and other than getting false disconnection notices, it's working like a charm. We filled him on the Seattle Metblogs story about Seattle atheists buying ads on Metro. That seemed like a good use of WiFi. Tell Portland! The atheists are coming!

• Hella Bus is back with the rap from unexpected sources, this time flowing from the verbally gifted mind of Mark Trahant, the editorial page editor of the P-I ("until tomorrow," Hella Bus sadly notes).
• Seattle Transit Blog has an opinionated piece on solving Metro's budget gap, with two suggestions that have elicited dozens of comments.
• Seattle 911 is talking about the case of the untaxed cigarettes in Stilliguamish.

We try to resist loading up on bad news first thing Monday morning, but let's just do this quickly and get it out of the way: Publicola records Sen. Maria Cantwell's fight to insert some accountability into the bailout of AIG and others (she was overruled, and now AIG is claiming it has to pay $165 million in bonuses with bailout money because it promised! Out of curiosity, who writes a bonus agreement that puts a company on the hook even with catastrophic losses?) And Schmudget tells us Washington unemployment is forecasted to top out at 10 percent next year. On the plus side, all those unemployed people won't have to negotiate the kind of new, transfer-ier bus system proposed by Seattle Transit Blog. So that's a tiny little win.

Nice! This reminds us of the decorated buses in Mexico. Thanks for uploading it to the Flickr Pool, prima seadiva.

• Big Blog won points with a post about The Bachelor's ex-wife and her YouTubed guest spot as a groupie on local band Out From Underneath's Seattle-heavy music video. Onwards and upwards, Gas Works Park.
• The blog formerly known as bigasscity is quoting none other than ZZ Top while crunching the numbers about Metro's projected budget shortfall and how much money the city could have saved by rejecting the bored tunnel viaduct replacement option.
• Cliff Mass thinks it's "pretty definite": we're looking at more snow, probably on Sunday. Actually, that works well with our schedule. How kind of the gods to check with Seattlest HQ's Google Calendar before sending the cold front!

UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.

A $100m shortfall in sales tax may cause Metro to cut service by 20 percent. Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond--who obviously just saw The Wrestler--called it "a body blow." Why linger at Forever 21 when it's not all that hard to get into Ft. Lewis if you're a teenage girl? But children are the future. And somewhere out there in the Puget Sound, J-pod orcas are still trying to lose the baby weight. Welcome to the world, J44 and L122.

We're high on transit and so is a certain Metro driver who seems to have mistaken route 42 for a rock shop. Dude, you know the 5-0 rides that line. You best conduct business on the 7. It happens to stop near the Columbia City Library, where, the Rainier Valley Post reveals, car prowls are on the rise. It's happening in West Seattle, too, where residents are taking a bite out of crimes. We're ready to fight back ourselves. Someone smashed our car window at Seward Park Monday afternoon. Now we're prowling Craigslist and pawnshops for our stolen laptop. If you see an iBook G4 with the serial number scratched off, buy it--no questions asked--and we'll pay you back, k?

Seattlest looked up at a snow-covered skylight and wondered whether anyone would catch their bus. Sure enough, some are running late. Good thing we went to REI on December 26 and scored some of these.

On Sunday, February 1, regular Metro fares will increase by 25 cents. Their handy fare revisions chart [pdf] goes into more detail: kids, senior citizens, or disabled riders won't have to pay any more than previously to ride the bus, but regular riders will soon be paying $2 for the pleasure of riding in peak season and $2.50 for peak two-zone rides. Off-peak regular fare will be $1.75 for one- or two-zone rides. Metro blames "a weak economy, record fuel prices in mid-2008 and falling sales tax revenues" for their budget woes, and notes that the fare revision will help them maintain their current system rather than to increase route coverage or frequency. Guess that means fewer quarters in our bank account to spend on jalapeno poppers.

If I was a bear and a big bear too, I wouldn't care much if it froze or snew. But we're not Pooh-bears, we're Seattleites (and Seattlests), and the fact is, our city failed us, failed miserably last month. Ace-of-Grace Crunican, nominally in charge of Seattle streets, actually left town during the height of the storm. Spacey Kevin Desmond, nominally in charge of Metro, went ten days without phoning back to ask SDOT whazzup wid da snowplowz, guys? Clowns, all of them. Most of us came to Seattle because it's a decent place to live, drawbacks of climate aside. We put up with crappy weather half the year and year-round provincialism in exchange for clean air, clean water, clean government. We don't expect betrayal at the hands of incompetent bureaucrats.

Yesterday we posted about Metro's route status updates and suggested you check their adverse weather page for the latest news. Funny story there. We'd walked past a rerouted 10 bus on Broadway--a big branch fell on the bus lines on 15th Avenue East on Sunday night--on the way in to work, but when we checked Metro's page, there was no mention of that reroute. Maybe they already fixed the lines, we thought. But after lunch we spied a 10 bus on Broadway again, so we asked the driver how long his Broadway holiday excursion was going to last. "You know, I haven't heard anything at all on the radio all morning," he told us. "I'm just going to keep driving until someone tells me something."

We realize plenty of people are still steamed about the loss of our public transportation system during the recent snow and, currently, during the widely celebrated "It's almost New Year's Eve" holidays. Most of you are probably at home right now, sipping hot cocoa. Enjoy it! It's the holidays!

The 1, which normally goes up the gentle slope of 10th West, isn't going up the hill at all. Forget about the 3 and 4, which take the eastern flank, up Taylor. And don't even think about the 2 and 13, which take the Counterbalance. Queen Anne, if you live there, is a tight little island. Nice, but not all the people who own QA bars and restaurants and cafés live on the hill; they can't afford it. Even if they can, their staff can't. So you might be able to get a beer at Paragon or a coffee at Starbucks, but don't count on lasagna at Sorrentino's. Thanks for nothing, Metro.

A friendly message from your favorite only bus system: due to conditions caused by the S-word, only half of Metro's fleet is out and about today, almost exactly the same as on Friday, so service will be spotty. Says RPIN, "Metro is focusing on providing bus service on cleared highways and arterial roads, and to major transit centers and park-and-ride lots." They'll add more buses into the mix if the roads clear up later this afternoon, but for now, "Please dress warmly, wear appropriate footwear, and be prepared to wait." Bah. Here's how to ride a bus in the snow, but it sounds like you'll be much better off just walking.

           

Photos from December 17-18, 2009.

In a 6-3 split vote yesterday, the City Council approved the idea of expanding the city's streetcar system. All new lines would run north of Jackson Street: one leading up into Fremont, another into the U District, a third along the Waterfront, and the final along Broadway in Capitol Hill. (Here's the map.) Of course, as Councilman McIver pointed out, "we ain't got no money" yet, and the plans don't mean a whole lot until the funding comes into place.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Metro bus service ("Report Says Metro Runs on People"), we've tracked down two other commentaries. ECB over at the Slog has some illuminating boarding cost numbers to share: "Because so many suburban buses still run virtually empty (while urban buses are crammed past capacity), the cost per boarding in outlying areas is significantly higher—$7.27 in the East subarea, and $4.79 in the South, compared to $3.64 in the West." The Seattle Transit Blog mentions Metro's defense, that the "cost-per-passenger-mile is relatively low."

The Municipal League of King County have judged Metro and found its bus service wanting. For one thing, Metro is too expensive: "Metro's total bus operating costs grew 42 percent from 2000 to 2007, though bus-service hours increased just 8 percent." And for another, its allocation of services seems more politically based than real-world: in short, "Buses should be deployed based on where people travel."

While perusing the wonder that is the Seattle Municipal Archives' Flickr page, we came across this and just couldn't wait to share it with you. Apparently the "Magic Carpet Study" was the name of the research and development that Metro Transit conducted in the early- to mid-'70s into an experimental downtown free ride zone. We gotta say, we would be so much more inclined to enjoy a brief trip on the "magic carpet" ride than to utilize a system with the name Joe Metro went with: the "ride free zone." Just another example of what a groovy place Seattle was in the '70s....We have the distinct feeling that today's transit studies don't have such a nifty name or cover page.