The Street Smart Summit idea: B.S. vs. action

Dennis Jaffe points out that I neglected to comment on his idea for a regional summit on pedestrian-vehicle issues. I commented thusly:

The summit is a good idea. But you need my kind of thinking. You know, my core competency is "brutal honesty."

Not the typical pap like "year of customer service" by this year's chair of the WMATA board, Charlie Deegan. See "Metro chair seeks friendly face," from the Examiner.

Did you read the thm comment in the blog about the bus-ped crashes? Biting.

THM wrote:

...I can't shake the feeling that this is a tragic but predictable outcome of a bus driver culture that isn't really committed to excellent service.

Driving a bus has got to be one of the hardest jobs at Metro. But there are things that are under a drivers' control that seem to go wrong too often.

Early buses for one: at times, this has been epidemic on the A4/A5 buses that I take most often. Each driver seemed to use his own schedule: some days the bus would show up 4--7 minutes early, other days it would be on time, and sometimes it would be late. Particularly infuriating is when you've planned to get to the bus stop 4 minutes before the schedule says the bus leaves, it leaves 5 minutes early, without you, and then the next bus (which is supposed to come in 20 minutes) is running late. And the pattern of early buses persists even with repeated complaints to Metro by several different individuals.

The item you posted recently about a bus driver using "the other f-word" and not apologizing, and with details about the inability of Metro management to really do anything about it for fear of union grievances, fits with a picture of a culture of recalcitrance, as if us riders are supposed to be grateful that we have a ride at all.

That there is so much to complain about bus service is the result of the fact that, despite at least two "year[s] of the bus" being declared in the past six years or so, nobody really cares about the bus side of things at Metro. A long, hard, top-to-bottom look at bus practices, in light of the recent series of pedestrian deaths, would certainly be the right outcome, if for the wrong reasons. Of course since it's Metro, they'll probably find a way to make things worse.

This is one of the Street Smart ads that I don't think is all that effective. But then, I've been sideswiped by a pickup truck with a bumper sticker reading: "I'd rather be biking."