Results tagged “kingcountymetro”

• Creativity strikes again! Wallyhood reports of a gold papier-mâché sculpture found in Gas Works Park with a note, saying it was gifted to the citizens of Seattle. It's the type of guerilla art that just warms the heart.
• In an international six degrees of separation kind of way, a reader from Seattlest's sister site Shanghaiist helped identify the mysterious mustache man with amnesia. All of which goes to prove that you should never, ever underestimate the power of the Ists.

Reading through Lucas from Neighborlogs' coverage of a King County Metro budget meeting, we're left with the uncomfortable feeling that we read the phrase "deferred maintenance" one too many times. Besides fare increases (to $2.25) and bus service suspensions, Metro's Kevin Desmond says "Metro will greatly reduce the number of buses it purchases, and speed, reliability and asset maintenance programs will be cut." [Emphasis added] We know! Reads like a line cut from Drag Me to Hell, doesn't it?

At about 6:50 this morning, Metro's bus tracking service crashed, which meant that MyBus and OneBusAway were not delivering fresh data. Meteorologist Cliff Mass was having none of it, and made a call: "They promised that they are going to replace the servers of the bus track information system and this problem, which inconveniences hundreds or thousands of us unnecessarily, will be taken care of during the next month or so." Metro's press release sounds appropriately chastened: "Metro is already looking to next season by pursuing additional steps that can be taken to keep riders better informed of transit disruptions. Those actions include: redesigning elements of the Metro Online website; beefing up emergency event staffing plans for the Customer Information Office; adding additional staff to track and post bus reroute and service disruptions online; and exploring the use of emerging public communication tools to help disseminate information." Ooh, exploring! That's like when you get on a bus operating on an unpublished reroute!

When that 25-cent fare increase hits in March...let's see, gotta calculate up...carry the exponent...Metro could be making 1,925,000 extra dollars per year (not really, we're just multiplying 0.25 by 7% of total boardings, for a quick estimate). A peak 1-zone fare will be $1.75, so make sure you're carrying around three quarters during commute times.

Coming home from work on the bus last night, we got to thinking about how even getting to vote on a light-rail package this year is going to be an uphill fight. The dire prospects for light rail anytime soon pushed us to extrapolate the costs to our psyche of waiting during the ride home.

The Seattle Transit Blog reported (and Seattlest echoed) the fact that 3rd Avenue Downtown is going to remain a transit-only corridor during rush hour way back in June, but since the press release just came out and it'll probably be in the papers tomorrow maybe we should revisit it.

A King County Metro bus driver was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of peeping into a woman's apartment window in Ballard. Fresh off the heels of their whopping 4.3% ridership increase announcement (*yawn*); now this mess. Good news is that with this guy behind bars, his bus may actually be able to pick up a few more riders...

Stupid cone of silence! King County Metro doesn't read Seattlest. They never link to us. (We bet they steal our posts, too.) So we're pleased to see them getting busted by the Weekly for not having a useful bus map. Cries out newcomer Kauffman:

Seattlest started the day today confronting an email from a mystery man known only as "Shamus Whitepants" bearing a link to a story too obvious to bother replying to so we just deleted it. Later, we found the same link on the stranger blog. Seattlest tries to ignore stories like these in so much as we generally try to avoid confronting the horror that is our existance in the post-Dot.com/President Dubya era, instead choosing to focus on more productive efforts, like crying alone in to our ever-present coffee mugs of watered down Jim Beam and Pabst, mixed together.