Thursday, February 19, 2009

It's Surreal


UPDATE: According to the Orange Line Twitter feed, service on the line is apparently still disrupted. While we imagine that's no longer the case, it'd be nice if they tweeted that they'd fixed the problem!

We haven't been keeping this blog for very long, and we don't use Metro every day, but over a very short span of time, we've already had the pleasure of three major delays or problems on ONE line, the Orange Line. Here's one, and here's another.
Today, it was because "a piece of track equipment derailed before the rail system opened this morning," according to a Metro press release we got once we were at work nearly an hour late! Missed an important meeting to boot. Thanks Metro!

We also thought, well, perhaps we should have joined Metro's Orange Line Twitter feed and perhaps that would have saved us some headache. We, along with a whopping 241 other people who follow the feed, would have known something was wrong, but not the extent. Metro doesn't seem to realize there is a limit to the number of characters allowed in a "tweet." Nothing about delays mentioned--at all!

It's beyond the point of ridiculous for a major metropolitan mass transit system to have this many failures.

Just look at the past four work days:
Unacceptable!

Then add Metro's good cop/bad cop routine about how great they were over the Inauguration and then trial balloons about possible service cuts, and you get a picture of a transit system in crisis and woefully mismanaged. At this point, you have to wonder if funding given to Metro is just money down a rat hole.

Aren't there any other people out there who' d like to help us document stuff like this? Personal stories pack so much more punch! Doesn't have to be long, just a sentence or two about something that struck you on your commute.

In other news:
Gotta love GGW's optimism on a day when Metro can't even get the basics down. Check out their "fantasy" Metro map.

Photo: John Morris

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

anyone heard back from the investigation for the last derailment in 2008?

Anonymous said...

I just found your blog. I'd like to start by saying I like your attitude - the attitude that the customer's are truly getting
shafted (and we are, in more ways than one). Metro sucks in almost every possible way, period. It appears that you, like me, are really tired of having to deal with constant
delays and mechanical failures (amongst the numerous other system shortcomings). I applaud your effort to blog this.

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