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So there RantWoman was one night watching volcanic eruption videos, one of RantWoman's fave diversions from other horrors of the current timeline. There was a volcano erupting in Grundjavik for several days. The eruption was the kind of slow meltdown that opened wide features and crept closer and closer to a village until part of the village had to be evacuated.
That eruption has faded from RantWoman's media streams, but along with the eruption videos YouTube sent RantWoman several videos of things one might do while visiting Iceland. The videos featured a certain amount of rugged hiking, sometimes in rainstorms, as well as ordinary daylife activities such as going to the grocery store or swimming in a completely non-chlorinated geothermally heated pool.
The rugged hiking sometimes in pouring rain sounds like maybe not the biggest sell, but a possible trip to Iceland in June when days are longest still intrigues RantWoman enough to do a couple posts turning over the idea of entering the contest.
RantWoman, as has already been established, is a bit of a nerd who spends a lot of time on the bus.
During today's bus travels RantWoman's mind wandered again to the recent King County fare enforcement officer report and to RantWoman's own experience riding around for more than a month with a demagnetized ORCA card, a card that only very occasionally produced the beep indicating that the card read properly when tapped.
(Please do not tell RantWoman about paying her fare on her phone. Between a white cane, a purse, and whatever baggage RantWoman is carrying, taking out a phone and waking it up to pay a fare is more than RantWoman even wants to attempt.)
RantWoman currently has a small couch on a cord around her neck but the whole time her card was not beeping, RantWoman was pulling the card out of somewhere and trying to tap it. RantWoman is white and bathes regularly so maybe drivers just believed her when she said she had a pass. Or sometimes, the imperatives to stay on schedule outweigh more detailed inquiry.
That entire time, RantWoman had in fact paid for avalid pass, online through the MyORCA app. At some point, possibly after RantWoman encounterd a fare enforcement officer, RantWoman followed directions on the back of the card and called an 800 number. RantWoman was referred to her local transit agency. The person RantWoman spoke to looked up the number of transactions which had registered for the previous month. It was substantially lower than RantWoman's estimate of the number of her trips. Then it registered with RantWoman that she just needed to get her disabled pass replaced.
RantWoman imagines that her situation is probably a small minority of situations that look to drivers like someone has not paid a fare. RantWoman has no idea whether these comments are helpful in deciding what the report actually means, but here the info is anyway.
Silly RantWoman. RantWoman still naively hopes that asking a search engine for a specific document will immediately yield a link to the document, AS THE FIRST LINK in the search results. Thankfully, the Urbanist article and the KIRO radio links below this video both have a direct link to the Metro fare enforcement report.
For grins, RantWoman read the whole report. The report is presenting the raw numbers requested in the ordinance that requests the report. RantWoman still has questions not addressed by reporting that only looks at the numbers.
RantWoman has ridden every route addressed in the report at least once and usually on a round trip in the last 12 months. So RantWoman's opinions are informed by lived experience. RantWoman considers fare payment a mark of good citizenship, an indicator that she has her own act more or less together. RantWoman always just pays for a disabled pass because that is so much easier than payment for each ride.
RantWoman may have encountered fare enforcement once on Metro and once on Sound Transit during the study interval. At some point RantWoman's disabled pass got demagnetized and whichever fare enforcement officer RantWoman met looked at the ORCA app on her phone, and told her she needed to get a new card. Since then, RantWoman's card has reliably beeped as expected when tapped.
RantWoman wonders where the estimate that 30% of passengers don't pay fares comes from. RantWoman's estimate would be more like 20% based on what she can observe. However, some of the routes surveyed are so crowded during peak times of the day that people literally cannot get to the card reader to tap their cards. These same routes have plenty of capacity at other non-peak times. By peak times, RantWoman means both regular commuting hours and times when there are concert or sport events RantWoman is VERY glad people take transit to.
All of the routes listed are heavily traveled frequent routes, with frequency as high as every 6 minutes. So, one obvious way to look at raw numbers of fare enforcement contacts would be to look at some kind of ratio, say, of contacts per 1000 boardings.
During non-peak hours when the bus is mostly empty. but when the bus is almost empty, if passengers are clean and well-behaved, RantWoman is just FINE with people using the service, especially if their destination is something like a governmental or social service. Well, passengers who get on the bus carrying a bathtub sized latte and can't pay their fare get a disapproving look and the acknowledgment that one can't pay a bus fare with, say a Starbucks gift card.
RantWoman is aware that transit services are paid for in large measure by sales taxes which are highly regressive. If people can't come up with bus fare because they have paid sales taxes, RantWoman still figures they have at least partly paid their way.
Several media reports note that many of the people who received citations are "experiencing homelessness." If they can't pay bus fare, is anyone surprised that they don't pay fines either? Clearly though, actual payment of fines is not necessarily a great indicator of program success. Fare enforcement officers are also supposed to help direct people to options to be able to pay fares and to other relevant resources.
So one obvious question: what is the trend about people getting signed up for low income or senior / disabled fares? And can the trend be linked to the work of fare enforcement officers? RantWoman has seen firsthand how just having a bus pass, reliable transportation can help people manage all the inconveniences of homelessness and get them on to paths toward more stable situations. It is not obvious to RantWoman how one might illustrate this point with numbers, but it should be considered when evaluating the fare enforcement program.
Here though we also come to the public safety concerns that are part of the push behind fare enforcement and to driver comments that people causing problems tend also to be people who haven't paid their fare. RantWoman would definitely look more deeply at that concern.
RantWoman is not at all charmed by drug use on buses or near bus stops. If it were up to RantWoman people also would not smoke tobacco or weed near bus stops. Worse than drug use though are assaults and verbal abuse. RantWoman would be interested to know whether presence of fare enforcement officers reduces on-board crime, either compared to runs when there is no office present or overall.
RantWoman also wants to know more about the increase in fares collected overall. Is that because informational programs are reaching the people they are intended to reach? Is it because more people have figured easier ways to pay their fare? Is it possible to quantify whether the fare enforcement program has contributed to the uptick in fare revenue.
First, SPOG president Lim (?) apparently has not noticed issues such as ICE agents in masks and unmarked vehicles doing all sorts of tactical driving nonsense, swarming and ramming cars, failing to ducment, lying to children to entrap parents... Should RantWoman go on?.
Today there is new reporting about people being hired into ICE , given badge and gun with nowhere near the level of vetting and training that SPD officers go through. And now SPD is expected to collaborate with these frauds in the name of protestor safety??
How far does anyone think that "collaboration" should fly?
At the Portland ICE facility, there is now an understanding that Portland police will interact with protestors about anything that is not federal property.
RantWoman has no information about protests at any ICE facility inside Seattle. Scratch that: recently someone was detained at immigration court while showing up as required at a hearing. Save that point for a different post.
RantWoman is not plugged into any protestor networks involved in the kind of swarm protests that rocked news cycles in Minneapolis, but at this point, RantWoman encourages people thinking about protesting not to be naive, to be aware of what they are getting into.
And if police are worried about protestor safety, show up with body cam and dash cams ON. Be prepared to document situations. Start there. And do not try to spin collaboration with out-of-control thugs as "public safety."
Is it okay to admit that the barrage of AI "slopaganda" related to the war in Iran are a bit of a guilty pleasure?
Some of the videos are so dead-on that RantWoman wonders where the authors are getting their cultural insights?
In some cases, RantWoman would be just fine with the content if it were not for the certainty that the content is coming from forces that probably do not have US interests at heart and are happily playing into multiple fractures in US society.
Never mind all that.
RantWoman has one simple question: as long as all the videos are all AI-generated anyway, can't SOMEONE add an audio description track for all the viewers who can't follow the frenzy and probably couldn't stand some of the imagery even if we could follow it?
Pretty please.
Here are a few examples just to fire up everyone's literary instincts and try to tackle the visual complexity.
Nice music. What is on screen?
RantWoman realizes that the audio experience is a little less frenetic if RantWoman listens at noraml speed than if she were to listen at her usual 1.5x
At least some of the clips here have subtitles but RantWoman is thinking of Bad Bunny's halftime show and all the different rounds of cultural examination she has seen about it. Do some of these clips need that much cultural interpretation too? OR based on subtitles RantWoman manages to read, is it safe to just file it as dueling war propaganda in the same bucket as the Secretary of #WarCrimes praying?
Also, this YouTube channel has some other items possibly of interest.
RantWoman attempts to replicate some information provided visually but not obvious from the verbal explanation.
The video does not have any terrifying suggestions such as "do three sets of 1- repetitions and do that more than once a day." Instead, RantWoman recommends working up from 5 or 10 reps at a time.
1. Extended a rm raises from touching the knee to shoulder height. The text does not mention overhand / palm down or underhand / palm up. RantWoman can tell the positions work different muscles and would say both versions are probably beneficial.
2, 3. March in place. From seated position, knees bent, thighs parallel to the chair: raise and lower first one knee then the other. Raise arm opposite of the knee being raised. The video shows two versions, one where fists get raised to shoulder level and the second where arms get raised straight overhead.
4. Raise leg, clap under. Alternate with the other leg.
5. Raise leg and reach to touch toe with opposite arm. RantWoman likes the demo because one doesn't have to do it perfectly and the exercise still counts even if one misses their toe.
Interests: Digital Inclusion, Languages and language access, walkability, accessibility, disaster preparedness.
When in doubt, laugh about something!
http://rantwoman.blogspot.com
PLEASE NOTE: I use both screen reading and screen enlargement. I would love to say Blogger is screen-reader friendly, but I am in no position to comment!
