On a different note: I got stuck in the watery mess this morning on the blue line. Here's a copy of my e-mail to Metro. For you entertainment.
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Heho,

I too got stuck with a delay this morning on the blue line due to the water on the tracks. In stead of sending you another fuming e-mail about the massive delay, I will give you some tips for improvement.

My trip was from Franconia-Springfield to Rosslyn.

* Provide information to passengers *before* they enter a station. The first notice I got was on the train while riding out of the station. Some passengers may opt for alternative transportation. I don't know if the VRE tracks were impacted, but I could have taken VRE to Crystal City or L'Enfant. Personally, I turned around at Van Dorn and looked (in vain) for the 380 bus to the Pentagon at Franconia-Springfield.

* Keep your website online. I called my wife for information on the 380 bus. In the 15 minutes that it took me to get back from Van Dorn to F-S, she was unable to access the wmata website.

* Make sure your employees are knowledgeable. I asked an employee in the bus bay where the 380 stopped. She informed me in broken English that the station manager would know. I asked the station manager, he did not know and walked off. Later, I found out that the 380 does not stop at F-S anymore, despite the indication it does on the map in bay G.

* Provide alternative transportation from other stations. Why were there not by-pass buses from Franconia-Springfield straight to the Pentagon? This would have saved many people a lot of time.

* Tell your employees customers are no dogs. At Braddock Road, the situation was abysmal. Metro employees were barking unintelligible and non-sensical orders at customers. Two examples.
- One employee was directing traffic in the station, pointing people straight into a stagnant crowd, while there was open space behind him.
- Outside the station, an employee was barking that passengers had to move to the right because that's where shuttle buses left. At the very same time, a shuttle bus pulls up to his left, and lets people in. This was not a freak accident. The next 30 minutes, many more buses pulled up to his left.

Employees who give barked and incorrect information lead to chaos, because nobody knows what is true and what not.

* Provide actual information about different directions of shuttles. In the train we were told shuttles would bring us to Reagan. In the end, I got on a bus that brought me to the Pentagon. Much better for me, but I only found this out after I got on the bus and some employee barked PENTAGON a few times in the bus.

Why not announce in the train that shuttle service is provided both to Reagan and to the Pentagon, and that Reagan buses will stop here, and Pentagon buses there? Why not have someone there with a sign?

* Have the shuttles indicate their destination on the front. Shuttles now stated "shuttle", "out of service" or some random text. This led to a lot of confusion.

These points are all points that are just a matter of having plans before something goes wrong. Plans that include ways of providing correct ant timely information to customers.

I hope my e-mail is more constructive that the many fuming rants that you will undoubtedly receive today. If you wish to speak to me in person about my suggestions, I will make myself available.

Yours sincerely,

Jasper

by Jasper on Aug 15, 2011 11:05 am • link • report

A higher gas tax or none at all, I don't think that should have any bearing on whether the federal government funds shares, because they shouldn't. If a local municipality wants to do that, fine.

by Fitz on Aug 15, 2011 11:19 am • link • report

I am not at all surprised that the Franklin School sits empty. This stagnation of the historic downtown building site is both sad and predictable. You could have had a charter school or law school there, with the renovations well under way by now. Instead we have none of the long-promised revenues from a boutique hotel and schools are scrambling for space in the peripheries of the city.

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/8202/downtown-needs-a-school-more-than-a-boutique-hotel/

by Steven Glazerman on Aug 15, 2011 11:27 am • link • report

If you're wondering why HD Woodson needed to be rebuilt...

by andrew on Aug 15, 2011 11:40 am • link • report

@SG

Disagree. We need fewer not-for-profit properties unless they start paying the full market tax rate. The public school system already has more buildings that it needs, and our distinguished collegiate education system is taking unfair advantage of the district. Similarly all of our NGO's and not for profits are bleeding the city dry as they slowly acquire useful properties and make them useless.

The district needs more fulling paying employers, including property owners. Obviously we need to stop giving tax breaks to developers, but a temporary tax break to get a building up and generating tax revenue is appropriate.

by ahk on Aug 15, 2011 11:40 am • link • report

Fitz, the local government does fund these programs. They used local money matched with discretionary funds from the federal government. Those funds were given to DC an Minn to do with as they pleased within a defined framework. DOT decided that these programs fit within that framework (CMAQ in DC's case, an experimental bike/walk fund in Minnesota's). So, what you're arguing for is that states should have less discretion in how to spend this money and more government oversight. I don't see that as an improvement.

by David C on Aug 15, 2011 11:45 am • link • report

@Jasper, Thanks ... You've helped remind me why I'd rather be in control of the when and where parts of my commute in the U.S. versus relying on a bureaucracy to do it for me. Granted, there are countries in the world where the bureaucracy works very well ... And that is in my opionion ecause the workers really care about their customers and put their customers first. But you're never going to see that happen here in our Metro system. They'd have to fire the whole lot first and then work rebuild an employee base with culture of pride in one's work vs. just looking for a paycheck. Note that it's not a matter of paying them enough. I'd bet they're making far more than their counterparts in those parts of the world where mass transit really does work. Some problems can't be solved by just throwing money at them. And this is definitely one of them. I'll let you in on a secret why I rarely take public transportation in DC. Many many years ago when I first came here as a freshman at a local university from my mid-sized city with no public transport ... I boarded my first bus ride in this BIG city with a little trepidation that I was on the right bus going in the right direction ... And I nicely asked the bus driver if this was the blah-blah-blah route and whether it would be heading for blah-blah-blah and how would I let him know I wanted to get off at that stop? His response ... ? "Sit the hell down and get out of the way. People need to board this bus. You'll figure it out". We have a real problem here that goes way way back.

by Lance on Aug 15, 2011 11:50 am • link • report

GGW: Did you guys purposefully send out individual feed links for each article mentioned here? I got 10 RSS articles instead of the usual (clean and concise) 1 morning links feed.

America: I apologize for Cantor and Cooch. I voted for neither.

by OX4 on Aug 15, 2011 11:53 am • link • report

@OX4:
Yes. There was a technical glitch this morning that caused the links to be published separately. It has been resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience.

by Matt Johnson on Aug 15, 2011 12:00 pm • link • report

OX4: It was an error. The links went out as individual posts by mistake. We corrected it, but it's not possible to delete items from an RSS feed; if you take them off the RSS XML, Google Reader still shows them if it's already loaded them into its data store. Sorry about that.

by David Alpert on Aug 15, 2011 12:01 pm • link • report

@ Lance:You've helped remind me why I'd rather be in control

You have control over traffic and traffic jams? Wow.

by Jasper on Aug 15, 2011 12:10 pm • link • report

@ahk

Businesses are not the only property owners that generate revenue. High quality schools attract income- and property-tax paying middle class families who would otherwise move to the suburbs when their children reach school age.

Also, keep in mind for a given school-age population, we *will* have property-tax-exempt school buildings somewhere in the city. I am very much in favor of leasing or selling off school buildings, including and especially DCPS buildings, that do not make sense to keep in inventory.

Meanwhile, walk, bike, or drive through Franklin Square and let me know how that boutique hotel is working out. Ask the owners of local businesses like Ports of Piraeus how much they like an empty building taking up the rest of the block. Maybe something is in the works that we don't know about, but I'm skeptical. The historic preservation requirements are going to make that building just as untenable for private development as it could be for public use, so I shudder to think how large those tax breaks will be for private developers.

by Steven Glazerman on Aug 15, 2011 12:35 pm • link • report

@Jasper, yes using my GPA and the radio I can control the time I travel and the route I choose AND can adjust on the fly ... something you proved this morning is not nearly as possible when you depending on one group of 'others' for EVERYTHING related to your commute.

by Lance on Aug 15, 2011 12:43 pm • link • report

*GPS

by Lance on Aug 15, 2011 12:46 pm • link • report

Very small technical issue, but when I subscribe to "all comments" in a mobile safari reader also having some problems pulling up individual comments. happened around the same time as comment policy change? Not a big deal, but you'd might like to know.

by charlie on Aug 15, 2011 12:47 pm • link • report

@David C wrote:

So, what you're arguing for is that states should have less discretion in how to spend this money and more government oversight.
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Since the federal government already has a vested interest in deciding how that money may be spent, which you described as the framework, then limiting the scope of how that money may be spent is hardly adding more oversight.

by Fitz on Aug 15, 2011 12:49 pm • link • report

@ Lance:using my GPA and the radio I can control the time I travel and the route I choose AND can adjust on the fly

Sure. Please share your secret of how to control the time you travel from Georgetown to Tysons on a day that I-66 is closed. Sure you can try the GW Parkway, US-29 or US-50, but those will get stuck as well within no time.

You may feel you have more control, but in reality traffic in DC is so saturated that if one road closes, all other options get stuck as well.

You misunderstood my complaints. I was not complaining about the fact that I had a delay. Weather happens. I can not blame metro for that. The problem was that the part that metro did control sucked. Just as when you drive, and a road gets closed, you will be angry at the inefficient police officers (miss)directing traffic.

by Jasper on Aug 15, 2011 1:09 pm • link • report

limiting the scope of how that money may be spent is hardly adding more oversight.

I guess it depends on how you define oversight. My take is that being less flexible with this spending is more oversight, but I can see how one would define it differently. Regardless, it all beside the point. Even if you're right on this facet, it doesn't change the overall point which is that the feds give this money to localities to spend as they decide. So, in effect, this is local money.

by David C on Aug 15, 2011 1:53 pm • link • report

What happened to the breakfast links?

by k on Aug 15, 2011 1:59 pm • link • report

@k:
These are the breakfast links.

by Matt Johnson on Aug 15, 2011 2:05 pm • link • report

@ Matt and David -- thanks. Not really a big deal, just got worried that I'd be even MORE behind on my feeds :)

by OX4 on Aug 15, 2011 2:11 pm • link • report

I know that that section of track is no stranger to flooding, but unless I was sleeping through the worst of it (entirely possible, I sleep like the dead and don't wake until 7 at the earliest), I can say for sure that we've had worse, lots worse, and a lot closer to Metro's hours of operation than last night's late night storm.

I therefore wonder how much the flooded Blue/Yellow line mess had to do with the construction at Potomac Yard? I heard about the mess (in the tunnel between Braddock and DCA, right?) on the radio as I was getting ready this morning.

My bike route takes me through the new bike path/sidewalk along the yet-to-be-opened Potomac Ave, through what will eventually be a residential neighborhood. As I rode by what I *think* is the affected area, the whole place was a muddy swampy mess and I couldn't help but wonder if construction runoff had a hand in it.

by Catherine on Aug 15, 2011 2:54 pm • link • report

I recall reading a piece in the City Paper about Woodson HS 3 years ago and pretty much lost all faith in humanity.

Whose idea was it to build a 9 story HIGH SCHOOL and then NOT maintain it for 30 years? If you think Metro's escalators are a travesty, you should've seen Woodson's!

I hope the students appreciate their new surroundings!

by John M on Aug 15, 2011 3:45 pm • link • report

The idea that DOT should partner with localities to provide BikeShare (or anything similar) is a bit ludicrous in the current environment. We do not have the funds to do so in the Federal Treasury. Therefore, localities are going to have to pick up the slack if they wish...or better yet private industry. There are a lot of 'nice things that seem worth having' but that's what got us into this national financial mess. On this issue, Rep. Cantor is correct. No need to subsidize bike sharing...so let it stand or fall on its own merits.

by Pelham1861 on Aug 15, 2011 5:23 pm • link • report

Per METRO flooding: Heard this afternoon there are flood pumps in the Metro tunnel in that area of Potomac Yards...but lo' and behold they weren't working last night or this morning. Wonder what unionized employee missed that?

by Pelham1861 on Aug 15, 2011 5:25 pm • link • report

Pelham1861,

What DOT funds is Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality improvement. DDOT chooses to use their share of this money to support bike sharing, which helps to achieve these goals. Are you saying that we shouldn't use some of the fuel tax to counter the negative externalities of gasoline use and driving? If so, how should we achieve the goals of reduced congestion and cleaner air? Or should those not be goals at all?

Also, the only reason we "do not have the funds to do so in the Federal Treasury" is because revenue as a percentage of GDP is at a 60 year low. All we have to do is raise taxes to our historical average and that problem goes away. We wouldn't be in a financial mess if we returned our taxes to the totally workable levels of the late 90's.

It was the Bush tax cuts, an optional war and a recession caused by a complete lack of regulation of the housing finance industry that got us into this "financial mess", not bike sharing.

There are a lot of 'nice things that seem worth having'

You mean like clean breathable air?

No need to subsidize bike sharing...so let it stand or fall on its own merits.

That's funny, I say the same thing about farming.

by David C on Aug 15, 2011 5:47 pm • link • report

What's more galling about Eric Cantor's blurb about bike sharing is the implicit argument that bikes aren't transportation (and consequently bike sharing isn't public transit).

by Canaan on Aug 15, 2011 5:48 pm • link • report