August 2009

In a post at Seattle Transit Blog we find the veritable epitome of how organizations think:

“The first thing to happen will be productivity improvements that don’t reduce revenue hours. The example that kept coming up was reducing layover at the ends of each route. Although cutting layovers will reduce reliability, and possibly lead to labor trouble due to shorter breaks, when the alternative is cutting trips it’s attractive to planners.”

Lets be perfectly clear- nothing improves reliability like a second chance, and the layovers are that second chance for the transit agency. Problems can be noted, supervisors can be called, and, if the bus reaches the layover late, the cushion of time may still allow it to leave on time for the next run.

The organization, as an organization, doesn’t see and can’t quantify any of this. Unlike any actual person, the organization thinks it’s perfectly all right for drivers to miss lunch or drive for hours without using a bathroom.

Historically, unions have provided the pushback against this penny-wise-pound-foolish thinking, with legislators taking cues from unions. The railroads themselves, a century ago, were perfectly content with systems that killed 7000-10,000 trainmen yearly, and did not adopt safety couplers or other safety appliances that were widely available.

The organization, having used buses so they could add more routes, now leans toward reducing the reliability and safety of those buses to maintain those extra routes. If we were a poor country that might be a painful compromise, but we’re not poor, and it’s just a mistake. The kind of mistake that organizations tend to make.

Recently I was very much struck, by discussions at Seattle Transit Blog and Publicola by the fact that nobody deemed to realize the Number 7 bus might be a candidate for extinction, at least as an electric trolley line.

Everything we know points to the fact that the #7, and probably the other trolley routes, might dieselized in just a few years. The #7 stands out as being a route in a historically underserved part of town that parallels the LINK. It seems obvious from numerous comments that Metro is taking a ‘hands off’ approach to problems on the buses there, allowing problems to fester.

But there are other factors involved. The electric trolleys are ‘different’ from the other Metro buses and, organizationally, that’s never a good thing in a large agency. Management cannot help but think that the expenses of the electric overhead are unique to the electric lines, that the electric buses can’t be used on non-electric routes, and, perhaps most galling, that the people who keep the electric buses running have special skills that make them hard to replace, which is to say, in the language of the American workplace, hard to bully.

It’s no secret that the electric buses are in danger. Metro hasn’t ordered any new ones, and, when asked about this recently, Kurt Triplett said he�s �not proposing to make that switch� and that we have �3 years to make that decision� because the current trolleys have that much life left. Let me translate that for you- they’re not planning to buy new low-floor electric buses, and about three years from now they will announce that, because they’ve made no efforts to maintain the service, the ETBs will be discontinued and replaced by diesels.

Be assured, if Metro was going to buy new ETBs and keep the service running, they would be working on it now.

And what is the response in the ‘transit community’? Well, so far, there is none. In fact, if those buses had to run on the amount of interest the transit community has shown for them, they’d all be parked and waiting for a tow truck. I’ve seen no recognition that the overhead wire and the substations supplying the juice are either a great investment, or an unbearable expense, depending on how they’re managed.

The original interurban to Tacoma ran out Rainier Avenue S., and small communities on the route were eventually swallowed, and then for decades neglected, by the City of Seattle. It would be appropriate for Metro to make the #7 one of the best routes in the city, both as restitution, and recognition that this part of Seattle will see the most growth and improvement in the future (because they’re starting from so far behind, well, duh!). What seems more likely to happen, though, is that the #7 will be the first route to lose the wire, “because it parallels an existing service”.

Don’t let bad things happen to good buses.