RantWoman will conclude her trifecta of triumphal transit misadventures this week with an account of her experiences connected with an epic effort by the King County Council and Metro staff to hold a public town hall meeting about transit in the heart of Light Rail Land. RantWoman wants to commend everyone, public and officials for showing up. She especially wants to commend councilmembers Gossett and Patterson for staying through the whole speakout, a truly heroic act of patience, posterior fortitude and appreciation for public input.
RantWoman realizes that many currents and issue streams flowed over the evening. RantWoman freely admits she will focus on her fixations and recommends comparing multiple sources, something she herself also will do.
First RantWoman, as a passionate and devoted transit rider must comment on her travel experience. RantWoman's departure for the event was delayed by someone else's interaction with Access, our local paratransit service. RantWoman can assure anyone who asks that many people who ride Access are VERY hard to serve, people with multiple disabilities, communications challenges and interactions with other bureaucracies. Still, RantWoman sometimes finds herself wondering whether the spectacular scenic tour routings and long wait windows for rides are not somehow a plot to keep the service from getting completely overwhelmed by requests from all the people who probably qualify for and need the services. RantWoman realizes she actually knows someone who is a scheduler for Access and maybe she should ask him this in person, or maybe not.
Next, RantWoman caught the last number 8 before half hour headway begins. RantWoman actually had not decided which of two meetings on the number 8 route she would attend--until she got onto the bus and realized her driver had no clue (either) about the cross street for the other meeting she was thinking of visiting.
The first location is a pretty major destination on the route 8. RantWoman was TRYING to make allowances for the post-shakeup fog. With any luck, the driver was about the third day on the job or the third day driving that route. RantWoman took a gallant stab, got off the bus somewhere near the first meeting; RantWoman even solicited some unhelpful "over there" suggestions from someone at another bus stop. IN the end, RantWoman got a very nice walk along new sidewalks peopled by groups of youth obviously nicely connected with new family-sized housing in the area, and wound up at the transit meeting.
Here RantWoman encountered another of those oopses sometimes detected by transit riders. Boo to the event planners for not reckoning on people arriving from the closest bus stop. RantWoman upon arriving encountered signs she could barely read (magic marker anyone?) directing her around the side of the building over something that to RantWoman did not qualify as a walkway to a doorway clear around the building. RantWoman thinks the doorway was more convenient to the parking lot which is fine except that at a forum about TRANSIT, thinking about walking / building access routes for people who actually arrive on TRANSIT would just warm RantWoman's heart.
Next a blindness moment. RantWoman can more or less get around without bumping into things, but faces are total fog. Sometimes for people RantWoman has seen often and fairly closely, RantWoman connects name with a general form or body movement pattern. However, even if RantWoman has spent months sitting across the room in meetings with someone, she may or may not connect their name and their form. This was a transit meeting and of course there were many people connected with the Sounding Board there, but darned if RantWoman had a clue about some of their names. (This did not make RantWoman nostalgic for a previous tech support career where "everyone" knew who RantWoman was but definitely not the reverse.)
Of course since there were many people RantWoman knew there, RantWoman sometimes was attending more to private conversations than to the Death by Powerpoint high points of the faint images on the screen. Nevertheless, a few points stuck in RantWoman's head:
--RantWoman wonders whether the bus train no paper transfer fare situation could be made any more confusing if all the local transit agencies tried. The evening featured one speaker saying something about fares while another Metro employee said something slightly different; RantWoman apologizes because she does not even remember the context exactly enough to be more specific. People--including fare inspectors--are confused about whether Puget passes are valid on Light Rail. They are. People like RantWoman are vexed about travelling with children. When an adult is disabled, does a kid traveling with still pay full fare. Some people's disabled passes provide for an aide to travel with them and RantWoman supposes that would be one way to deal with kids fares. RantWoman does not need an aide but does sometimes ride the bus with Irrepressible Nephew. RantWoman is unclear whether he has a pass because of school but RantWoman mostly does not want to deduct an adult bus fare from her ORCA wallet for a tyke entitled to a youth fare. RantWoman thinks holding some more public information and discussion meetings about this topic MIGHT actually reduce headaches since discussion seemed to indicate both that rules are poorly understood and that they do not necessarily take into account some quite common scenarios.
--RantWoman took note both of the imperatives about budget deficits and service cuts. RantWoman appreciates efforts to make the minimum cuts necessary and to minimize impacts in other ways. RantWoman finds herself thinking an interesting criteria for where to cut would relate to average number of cars per household for different areas of parts of routs. Even though the POINT of expanded bus services is to get people out of their cars, RantWoman would be less inclined to prioritize maintaining service in areas where proprortionately higher percentages of households own cars or especially own more than one car. RantWoman is also not overflowing with sympathy for employers who want people to work at odd hours. Sometimes RantWoman realizes there is public benefit to these schedules. Sometimes the transit system can be a valuable partner; sometimes though providing transit services just facilitates jobs whose wages do not reflect the full cost of the work. RantWoman half wonders whether there should be higher fares at two ends of the transit usage spectrum. Peak hour fares make sense, but if employers rely on public transportation at hours on the very low end of the ridership level, maybe they should also be asked to pay peak hour fares.
--BOY does WA need tax reform. Despite the piteous howlings of a certain property tax crybaby, WA is quite comparatively undertaxed relative to nearby states. More to the point, sales tax is a really dumb way to finance both transit and roads. Mid-recession when sales taxes are way down, WA is facing gridlock from both transit cuts and limited need for more road capacity. Even if we spend every penny of available resources on roadbuilding, there is not enough space in some parts for more roads. Just building roads in an age of oil shocks and climate change is dumb in the extreme. If building transportation infrastructure affects the value of different kinds of property, RantWoman sees absolutely no reason the property owners should not share in the costs of their windfall. Long story short: RantWoman enthusiastically supports efforts to get the legislature to provide other ways to fund transit besides sales tax. Generating a coherent movement in this direction out of the rest of the evening's speakout may be a challenge, but what the heck, RantWoman comes at problems lots of ways!
--Next we come to complaints about transit and Franklin High School. RantWoman identified some issues and wonders about another. First is the fare confusion issue already mentioned.
RantWoman heard complaints that sound like Franklin High school students being hassled on the train for "riding while brown." Metro staff spoke of a month of cutting people slack about fares before fines kicked in. RantWoman would point out that that month expired weeks before school started and people's travel patterns certainly shifted with the school year. RantWoman does not particularly think the affected youth are any more prone to horse around and press limits than her own peers were but does easily imagine how school has just started and the shakeup is a week old so RantWoman would recommend a couple more weeks of cutting people slack and warnings around the high school.
RantWoman further notes that the bus shakeup likely had a big impact on students' schedules. The Mount Baker bus facility is further from the high school than the previous 42 and 48 stops and the intersection students are required to cross is a bigger problem at least to RantWoman. RantWoman has no idea how many students ride the 14 but that route also changed a lot. Finally people mentioned only a short bus on the number 8. Transit planners insist the biggest operating cost of buses is the driver; RantWoman would say by all means let's get buses with enough capacity for the load onto the routes.
RantWoman as an adult is fully capable of flaking out and running late so she is not completely unsympathetic to schools' concerns about students planning ahead enough to avoid tardiness. RantWoman also thinks the school and transit authorities should work out some ways to verify when tardiness really is not the students' fault. Bottom line: RantWoman wants enough transit capacity to get kids to school on time. She also wants kids in school learning something not sitting in juvie because of tardiness or out on the streets shooting each other. Get them there on time!
--As an aside, RantWoman is going to bring up another topic. Over the last couple years, RantWoman has visited a whole bunch of transit-related public-input sessions. Despite being very heavily represented among people who use, depend on, grow up to operate public transit, youth of color are, to say the least, not over-represented among people who visit these sessions. RantWoman realizes this kind of activity requires a certain level of nerd fortitude. There is also a learning curve to assimilate enough of the necessary jargon to follow discussion, Decision thresholds of years and decades can be hard to put one's brain around. In short this kind of event is definitely not for everyone. However, RantWoman knows students have service learning requirements. There should be provision for students to fulfil their service learning requirements by attending and participating in some of these meetings. If the school system is going to rely on public transit for a lot of its transportation needs, there should also be ways for students to serve on all the different advisory boards that provide public input to transit planners. RantWoman is familiar with some of the issues that come up when one tries to include people under 18 in public processes or activities. RantWoman thinks the issues are solvable and the input would be valuable.
--At the bus stop on the way home. RantWoman got to interact with another reality of those assembled, the logic of the one-seat ride as well as a voice from an oral history project in one of RantWoman's old hoods. First the voice, recognized from among the most ardent and loquacious speakers. RantWoman recognized both the voice and the line of thinking from a certain internet oral history project and confirmed as much on our walk to the bus stop.
Several of the speakers had spoken about walks in the dark. The Boys' and Girls club is TWO BLOCKS along well-lighted sidewalk to the Columbia City Light Rail station. Well, the two blocks of sidewalk will shortly be turning into some kind of construction mess for new housing and RantWoman has no intention of vouching in advance for walkability during construction. The more interesting point is that both RantWoman and the voice from her former 'hood chose to wait for a bus because of the single seat ride issue.
RantWoman's ride would be about 10 minutes, her companion's considerably longer, all the way to the end of the number 8. RantWoman thinks that the Light Rail plus something from downtown MIGHT have been marginally faster. However, aside from the walk to the station, the number of stops near the Light Rail that would pick up Queen Anne buses is limited and there are no signs of commercial life on Third Avenue except one valiant fast food place while one waits. RantWoman considers herself pretty tolerant of urban life; she suspects neither she nor her bus stop companion would recommend those particular stops at night. Add half-hour headway or the need to walk to another stop to connect other buses that might go to one's stop. Can anyone imagine why it would NOT be nicer just to sit on a more ore less warmer bus better sheltered from many parts of the night?
