Recent Stories with tag metro

Pity the bus never showed. On the plus side, photocoyote found something productive to do while waiting for it. Fresh from the SunBreak Flickr pool. Join up! Add your photos!

One day in seventh grade, I was waiting for the #14 bus across from Washington Middle School when three teenage gang members approached this kid in my class. One gang member, who was wearing brass knuckles, suddenly punched the kid in the temple, knocking him cold.

A few teachers came out to check on the kid, who soon came to and staggered down the alley leading to Odessa Brown Childrens' Clinic, vowing revenge. No Metro security guards were there. No hidden cameras caught the scene. And so KING-5 didn't cover it. The Seattle Times was likewise silent.

Which is why you haven't heard about that beating until now, unlike that of a teenage girl in the bus tunnel, which occurred in the presence of Metro security people who did nothing to stop it, and a surveillance camera which caught the whole episode on tape. That sickening beating has sparked a fresh round of city-wide Metro-targeted outrage.

But consider this--if Metro hadn't deployed security to the bus tunnel, would a fight between teenagers even be a story? If Metro didn't have video surveillance, would the TV news be reporting it? The bad publicity Metro's getting stems from the agency's attempt to do the right thing.... (more)

(Photo: Lucas Anderson)

When you step onto a Metro bus operated by Nathan Vass, I guarantee you will step off smiling.

For Vass, a smile is all he asks. Vass is a 23-year-old Metro operator, one of the youngest to win the Operator of the Month award in both age and seniority. He's also probably the most interesting young bus driver you will ever meet.

Not a lot of 21st birthday dreams consist of a Metro application, it's safe to say. But Vass had buses on his mind. (Twenty-one is the youngest a Metro operator can be, and his age was the last thing stopping him from fulfilling his dream.) "As a kid, the bus was a symbol of going wherever the hell you wanted to go," he explained.

Vass had a vast knowledge of bus history and information well before he became an operator, and knew Seattle was where he wanted to put that knowledge to use. As the birthplace of on-bus bike racks and wheelchair lifts, Vass said, Seattle is "an amazing system." Compared to what he described as the "grid-like routes of L.A.," Seattle's routes, he said, actually line up with people's travel patterns.... (more)

Last week I sat down to talk with King County Metro chief Kevin Desmond about how technology was affecting Metro's interactions with customers and its infrastructure. Besides the popularity of third-party services like One Bus Away, we talked about smart cards, social media, and audience participation.

I brought up the question of continuing the downtown Ride Free Zone during a budget crisis, and Desmond had clearly already been thinking about that topic:

"We're going to experiment with offboard payment at the major stations on the Rapid Ride line. Community transit will also experiment with it on their Swift line. The problem is fare enforcement. You can get on via the back door with your ORCA card, but there's nothing stopping you from pretending to swipe a smart card."

While light rail is typically limited to a few lines and enforcement is a matter of a few inspectors, Desmond pointed out that "in the bus environment, we might have 900 to 1,000 buses we would have to monitor. But we do have federal money... (more)

By coincidence, the same morning I sat down to discuss the success of private bus guides like One Bus Away with King County Metro's general manager Kevin Desmond, One Bus Away released its iPhone application.

The question I had was this--given Metro's well-documented budget woes, was there more than customer convenience to be gained from letting private software developers take on a larger role?

OBA is the brainchild of Brian Ferris, a grad student in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. Ferris is studying human-computer interactions, so in a sense, Seattle's bus riders are living inside Ferris's experiment.

"What he's done is terrific," said Desmond, who is thin, monologue-prone, and data-driven. In fact, data is the next thing he brings up, pointing out that OBA runs on top of Metro data. "The issue for us with the private developer world is how can we better meet their needs. What standards should we use? We're planning a developer's workshop, probably in late October."

OBA's website and iPhone... (more)