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Tagged: transit

City life

CTA driver screams, then silence

So, this just happened: my Blue Line train may have been about to derail or be hit by an oncoming train. Not the way I was hoping to get home, frankly.

I’m riding on the train from O’Hare. It’s a moderately full train since the station was rather full when it pulled in. But everything’s fine, we’re moving.

We pull into Jefferson Park station. It is about 12:05.

Now we’re pulling out of the station. The driver comes on the PA and says: “This train will not stop at Montrose. If you want to go to Montrose, you’ll have to OOOOUUGUHHHHH!!!!!!!” and the train jerks to a halt.

And then the PA goes dead.

Well! No explanation as to what the hell that was. I immediately start to feel that something is wrong. But I’m in the fourth or fifth car, and I can’t see all the way to the front.

The driver does not come back on to explain it. It is obvious that something bad has happened or there would be an explanation. We’re sitting there a good five, six minutes. I stand up and gather my luggage. I start thinking, I’m going to have to evacuate mid-car.

We’re not all the way out of the station. I’m in the middle of the train, and I am still in the station, next to the platform. That seems safe. It’s not dark.

I chat with some guys from Boston. At this point it’s been a good twelve minutes or so; still no explanation. I’m texting people to say I think I’ve been in an incident.

My thesis is either that somebody jumped in front of the train, or the driver was attacked by a passenger. Either way, I don’t want to meet up with whatever caused that. I start thinking I’m going to open the doors manually and get off, because she hasn’t come back on to tell us what’s happening.

Then we hear the usual beep beep beep, “This train is experiencing –” and then that message cuts out too. I’m about done with this.

Finally. The driver comes hustling through the train from front to back. I ask her what happened. She says, “The train will be moving shortly!”

She never gets back on the PA. The train then starts running backward through the station. Stops again. The doors fumble and then finally open for good.

That is when I immediately bolt, because the hell with this.

I go up to the fare booth and ask what happened. The booth people, they don’t want to say. “You said you were at Montrose?” I said, “No, guys, the driver said we aren’t stopping at Montrose and then she screamed. What the heck happened?”

Here is what happened, according to them: As part of “Your New Blue,” CTA is single-tracking Blue Line in this area. That is why the Montrose station was going to be skipped: they’re working there. The driver ran a signal leaving the station. She screamed when either she realized her mistake or when the automatic safety system shut down the train. The booth guy said, “She screamed because she’s a rookie. The downtown control center called her and said, ‘Did you run a signal?’ Basically, you were about to either derail the train or be put on a collision course with an oncoming train on the single track.”

That is why she came running to the other end of the train: to back us up out of the danger area.

This was obviously very scary. You don’t expect to hear a driver scream into a PA at midnight — and then not explain it. I’m thinking either it’s a heart attack, a suicide, or some crazy passenger has just attacked the driver and is coming for us. It was ridiculous for her not to come on and tell us what happened — at least eventually.

More to the point, and it goes without saying, she should not have run the signal. She should have been careful around the construction zone.

And have we not had drivers blow through signals before on Blue Line? It seems like all the incidents involve Blue Line. Remember the Ghost Train? The stories about drivers posting through Cumberland without stopping because they were asleep? And the classic O’Hare escalator crash. Thank God no one was killed. And no one was killed tonight, including me.

I really hope this didn’t happen the way it was explained to me. If we were put on a single stretch of track where we could have been hit by an oncoming train, that is a huge safety lapse. This whole episode further strengthens my resolve never to be in the first or last car of a train. It’s just not worth it.

I may follow up with CTA to find out what happened. If I do, I will post about it again.

City life / Political / Solely personal

Recent events and COTA observations

In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been over the last several months, I’m still here.  Moving downtown has had the effect of joining the witness protection program.  Add to that the fact that I now have a new Rival brand Crock-Pot Slow Cooker and I couldn’t be more home-bound.  So here’s an update from Bill.

I got a parking ticket last week from the good folks at the City of Columbus Parking Violations Bureau. I realize I’m ruining any future political aspirations by admitting this in such a public forum, but I have to explain how it happened.  The short version of this story is, the meters on the new 670 cap are enforced from 7am until 10pm on Saturdays, except for the fact that they’re not enforced from 4pm to 6pm.  (Logical for a day that doesn’t have a rush hour, isn’t it?) Anyway, I tried to get out of it because I didn’t bother to read the sticker carefully and because the meters just a hundred feet away shut off at six, but it didn’t work and they sent me a nice all-caps letter telling me to pay up.  Oh well — it was my mistake.  Anyway, gentle reader, be careful parking on that bridge.

I have to give a shout out to the good people at the Mozilla Organization.  I got their new Firefox browser and it is really good.  In fact, it is the first web browser since Netscape 2.0 I’ve liked better than Internet Explorer.  It’s based on the old Netscape code, in fact, so it’s nice to come full circle.  They’re pitching it as a good alternative to the security nightmare that is Internet Explorer.  Even if you don’t worry about that, though, it’s really fast, and it has tabbed browsing, great keyboard shortcuts, and this wicked cool orange fire logo.  Best of all, Windows SP2 makes it pretty seamless to replace IE with Firefox.  So, click this button, and if you like it, then, all right.
Get Firefox!

I feel compelled to discuss the recent dust-up in the papers about COTA and its last-ditch attempt to save its light rail dreams.  This week, MORPC agreed to help COTA borrow $4 million for an environmental study on the line.  At the same time, the Federal Transit Administration reminded us that its support for the COTA rail plan came with an expiration date, and the support ends soon because COTA never came up with the local matching funds to build the line.

COTA is therefore taking one step forward and one step back.  Some of my friends, and some letter writers in the Dispatch, have suggested that we need to get this sales tax moving so that we can regain federal approval.  Faithful friends and readers of mine will know nobody likes the idea of urban rail transport — or anything that supplements the highway in our cities — more than I do.  But as I’ve been saying for years, COTA’s been so mismanaged that I just can’t support a tax increase until it cleans up its act.  Firing the censured manager Ron Barnes was a great first step, but the agency has a lot more to do to rebuild the public confidence.  How about starting with firing drivers who run red lights?  And fixing the signs that still don’t make sense?  How about a web site that works?  When COTA takes basic steps such as these and improves its existing operations, I’ll be able to push for the tax increase.  Until then, I vote no.

And finally, on a related issue, I believe it’s a mistake for COTA to depend on the sales tax to raise its revenues.  Because a light rail system is a fixed, physical infrastructure improvement, and it does primarily benefit those landowners in the region of the corridor, the economically optimal funding source would be a property tax — say on those landowners within two miles of the route plus all of Downtown.  This undercuts some of the legitimate argument of those who say they would never use the system and shouldn’t have to pay for it.  (However, any decreases in air pollution would benefit the region as a whole, so there should be some way to recover that benefit through a more broad-based tax.)  The other main argument I have with a sales tax is that it is regressive, which means the poor spend the largest share of their income meeting the burden of the tax, and the irony of that is that better transit service benefits the poor more than anyone else.  The sales tax giveth away and taketh back.

The last COTA levy, which was countywide, predictably had its greatest support along the North High Street corridor and lowest support in the low-density south.  The tax increase could have passed comfortably in certain quarters of the city.  COTA should explore a funding mechanism, some kind of special district, that would put the cost on those who would use the service and who demonstrably wanted it the most.

City life

COTA fallout

I just read in the Dispatch that COTA has chosen not to go to the November ballot for more money. Ron Barnes is quoted as saying, “Let’s become efficient before we even talk about the levy.” This sounds good, and I’ve already been saying that if I had to vote on it today, I would oppose giving COTA any more money. That really hurts me to say, because I very strongly believe in the cities and in public transportation. But I have little confidence in the management today. They may say they need more money to do a better job, but there are plenty of free things they could be doing and they’re not.

Another letter from a COTA employee criticizing the management appeared this week in the paper also. I’ve been looking for a response to either letter, which I definitely welcome.

Also this week, one of my friends pointed out that not all of the maps were removed from the downtown bus shelters. Some stops, in fact, still have maps from 1998. That’s even worse than no map at all.

I feel bad, because I want this agency to succeed, so I’m uncomfortable being critical, but at the same time, I can’t very well just say that more money will solve everything.

City life

COTA and self-aggrandizement

Sometimes complaining isn’t only fun, it actually could get a little attention. I read a column by a man who had been on a COTA citizens’ advisory committee, who was disillusioned by the closing of the committee, and also by his view of COTA’s apparent perception of itself as an agency that provides useful transportation only to the poor and the disabled, ignoring hundreds of thousands of average people.

So I wrote a letter to the editor in response, and today the Dispatch printed it, at the top of the page, next to a cute little picture of a bus I think they drew just for me! They did only a tiny bit of editing. For my out-of-town readers, here is the edited version:

I couldn’t agree more with Michael Meckler’s recent Forum column in The Dispatch about the failure of the Central Ohio Transit Authority to see the full potential of its service.

In 2000, COTA announced its new Commuter Check program, which let employees receive part of their pay as tax-free transit vouchers. It’s a great deal for employees, employers and COTA. But in four years, COTA has not managed to bring the program to Nationwide, where I work Downtown with 7,000 other employees.

Nationwide, Downtown’s largest employer, told me it was too expensive to participate. COTA should be stepping up and covering some of the cost if that’s what it takes to attract this kind of ridership, but you don’t see this kind of initiative on the part of COTA.

Recently, Nationwide announced it would move 480 suburban employees Downtown. COTA should be at the suburban location every day, forcing bus schedules into the hands of anyone who walks by. This is a golden chance for them to easily target hundreds of new commuters, many of whom will have no idea where to park. The agency should be getting them on board from the very start, and offer anybody moving Downtown free rides for a month.

But COTA doesn’t seem to care about attracting new riders.

  • Most buses seem to carry schedules for a route other than the one you’re on, or no schedules at all.
  • Its Web site, even after a much-trumpeted redesign, is still awkward and hard to use.  Try following its advice and typing “Broad and High” into the trip planner. You’ll get a list of 44 different choices; Broad and High is 11th on the list. And they finally added maps of all routes only recently.
  • They ripped out the maps from all of the Downtown bus stops years ago and replaced them with useless, broken digital displays.

I know that some people, against all odds, do take the initiative to track down maps and schedules, find their bus stop and become regular riders. But it’s too rare. More often, I hear stories like Meckler’s, that he tried to stick with it for years but finally gave up.

COTA is like a cult in reverse: Nobody can come in and everybody leaves.