Sunday, May 22, 2011
There's public policy, and then there's public policy meeting reality and being caught on video: unsuckdcmetro blog's head's up re shocking video
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Threats to cut post-midnight hours of D.C Metro by bureaucrats, eager to win budget battle, only antagonizes their bosses more -taxpayers!
Washington Post video of 2011-02-14: Metro after midnight
Local Metro riders voice their opposition to the proposal to scale back the late night weekend hours of operation.
Story at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2011/02/14/VI2011021401373.html
More related photos and anecdotes at the WaPo blog, Story Lab -the sort of thing the Herald and Sun-Sentinel should already have but don't: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/story-lab/2011/02/metro_after_midnight_if_they_c.html
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The Washington Post
Metro's proposal to end late-night weekend trains rankles Washington's party crowd
Sunday, February 13, 2011; 10:12 PM
After Metro transit officials proposed last week to trim their budget by ending late-night rail service on weekends, Washington Post staff writers J. Freedom DuLac, Brigid Schulte, Annys Shin and Theresa Vargas spent the wee hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings riding the trains to gauge reaction.
It's 1:15 a.m. on Sunday, and George Dizelos is at the Dupont Circle Metro station, waiting with two friends for the Red Line to Bethesda. It's late, but it's early.
"I've missed that last train before," he says of the 3 a.m. bar-hoppers' express. "Like, you go to Big Slice or whatever to get some pizza, and then you have to take a cab home. And it costs $20." That's the equivalent of four Yuenglings at the Big Hunt, the bar where they've spent part of the night.
Read the rest of the article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/13/AR2011021303061.htmlThe story above is proof positive that there's nothing quite like a bunch of government bureaucrats so eager to get their way in a budget battle, that they'll threaten to ruin a good thing and openly antagonize their clients and bosses -citizen taxpayers.
This emerging story in Washington over cuts to post-midnight hours on weekends is the transportation version of a fight between a municipality and govt. employees over a new proposed budget, where you can absolutely count on the Police and Firefighters to instantly vocalize worst-case scenarios where someone's grandma and her cat will soon go up in flames because overtime costs need to be trimmed.
By the way, as some of you may well recall, I was living up in the D.C. area when they FINALLY expanded the Metro hours past Midnight in the first place.
That long-overdue move caused an instant jump in enthusiasm for the system AND an instant jump in businesses all over the region within a mile or so of most Metro stops.
In particular, it was a godsend for many of the small but popular Arlington County restaurants I regularly patronized along Wilson Blvd., esp. near the Clarendon Metro, that could suddenly serve people who lived much farther away, and usually couldn't get there earlier due to trasnportation or time constraints.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
UnsuckDCMetro's post on poor management of D.C.'s Metro system and its parallels to our part of South Florida are hard to miss. Accountability is MIA.
It's a story that was first picked up by WTOP Radio in Washington, the All-News station, and then picked-up in turn and linked to on The Drudge Report.
http://www.wtop.com/
Listen live at: http://www.wtop.com/?sid=599366&nid=162
The one and only Drudge Report: http://www.drudgereport.com/
It lays out for all to see the sort of incredibly irresponsible behavior and CYA attitude of both
both its employees and management and the sort of nonchalance that has plagued WMATA for years, part of the reason, undoubtedly, that UnsuckDCMetro came into existence.
When you're a transportation agency that has recently seen people die, needlessly, it would seem to me that half-assed doesn't really cut it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro
My comments continue after the post:
Monday, January 3, 2011
How 'bout some iPotties Instead?
There was a lot of Metro news over the holidays.
Metro started random bag screening, they paid a communications firm $1.2 million to help market themselves through "guerrilla marketing," they managed to get the government to give them $150 million with no apparent additional oversight, and they doled out cash and iPads to executives on the finance team.
Read the rest of the amazing post at:
http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-bout-some-ipotties-instead.html
Having taken the Metro into downtown D.C. for work for almost 15 years from my home on Capitol Hill, then Tenleytown and finally Arlington County for 13 years, this story is NOT exactly Breaking News, per se, to most observant transit riders standing at underground train stations.
In fact, I think I can pretty well guess where the worst offenses took place.
UnsuckDC Metro http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.
story on Dec. 16th that is scary as hell, and will ring familiar to anyone living in South Florida who is observant in the ways that government works -or doesn't.
For those of you living in South Florida who have been following my thoughts in this space for four years, tell me that the actions described in the above post don't sound EXACTLY like the sort of obtuse thinking coming out of Hallandale Beach City Hall for years under the Joy Cooper and Mike Good/Mark Antonio regime, where their primary goal has always been to obfuscate, and to look at everything BUT the real problem here -genuine lack of accountability and ZERO punishment for continual, unsatisfactory performance:
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mystery Worker Removed Barrier at Tenleytown
So much for taking some time off for the holidays.
On Nov. 16, several Metro riders were greeted with a scary sight at Tenleytown.
As they climbed what appeared to be a run of the mill broken escalator, they arrived near the top to see a gaping hole where some steps were missing because the escalator was under repair.
Read the rest of this jaw-dropping story at:
http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.
If you read that post, too, it's hard not to think about all the many, many longstanding issues and problems around HB that have NEVER been 'fixed' or resolved to anyone's satisfaction, least of all, ours, even while city tax money continues to flow out to sleep-walking contractors and city employees, but where are the tangible results?
Where's the accountability?
More proof of THAT lack of accountability to the hard-working citizens of this community comes via an email that soon will be going to two of Tallahassee's newest residents, Rick Scott and Pam Biondi, the new Florida governor and attorney general, both of whom I voted for.
In the weeks and months ahead, they are going to know EXACTLY what has been going on for YEARS in Hallandale Beach, Florida.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
GSA's plan for a new Federal building in Broward -know anything about this absurd plan?
sending it out as an email to some concerned
citizens throughout the state watching what's
going on in South Florida with planning and
mass transit.
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Seriously, Davie as the home of a giant Federal building
with hundreds if not thousands of workers?
Wouldn't common sense environmental policy be better
served by a location near an actual or proposed home of
Mass Transit?
All new Federal agency offices in the Greater D.C. area
are required to be near a WMATA train station.
But naturally, this being South Florida, logic goes out the
window and we have to repeat mistakes that other cities
and areas have been avoiding for years.
Seriously, does the South Florida Regional Planning Council
know about thsi dopey plan?
As I've mentioned more than a few times here, I used
to live near the Ballston Metro station in Arlington County, VA,
which was located a block from the NSF (National Science
Foundation), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife HQ and many
federal offices.
That includes the people who guarantee your bank, the FDIC,
just a few blocks away, which happened to be right next door
to the GIANT grocery store I frequented.
Why would you not want to be even consider being integrated,
somehow into Tri-Rail and a future FEC commuter train?
This short-sighted move reminds me of when the headquarters
for USA Today/Gannett foolishly moved from their iconic
tower in downtown Arlington, two blocks from the Rosslyn
Metro station, across the river from Georgetown, and moved
to past Tyson's Corner.
Lots of their employees who lived near the HQ in Arlington
-as was the case with my then-girlfriend- got very
frustrated at suddenly having to drive thru grid-lock traffic
twice a day, instead of simply walking the 10-15 minutes
to work, or slightly longer if they were across Key Bridge
in Georgetown.
Instead of being relaxed when they rolled into work in the
morning, they were already highly-stressed.
Just saying..
Monday, November 30, 2009
Whistleblower's steadfastness + well-timed FOIA requests + Washington Post's Lisa Rein = evidence of public safety at risk re WMATA's proposed Silver Line.
THE MANAGEMENT and contractors involved in building one of the largest public infrastructure projects in the nation -- the $5.2 billion extension of Metro to Dulles International Airport and beyond -- suddenly stand accused of slipshod procedures and casual neglect of critical safety issues.
It's a damning indictment. The senior federal official with direct responsibility for transit has charged the project manager, Washington's airports authority, with submitting an "unresponsive and inadequate" plan to test crucial support structures for a planned bridge that would carry Metro trains over Interstate 66. Other officials with intimate knowledge of the project to build Metro's Silver Line are alarmed that safety tests that should have been obvious and obligatory were neglected or resisted by the contractors, a partnership between civil engineering giants Bechtel and URS. A whistleblower who formerly oversaw construction of the bridge has quit the project. And crucial documents appear to be missing.
These and other serious matters, raised in a report Sunday by The Post's Lisa Rein, have cast a shadow over the 23-mile Silver Line project. They will continue to darken perceptions of it unless they are addressed thoroughly, quickly and with an unstinting focus on safety. To its credit, the airports authority now appears to be doing just that, although it has not laid out its plans in detail.
The root of these concerns is the strength and integrity of a number of existing support structures -- concrete-encased steel pilings driven deep into the ground and each designed to withstand 70 tons -- that are to be used as foundations for the bridge. These foundations, built in 1977 in anticipation of Metro's eventual extension, were all but forgotten until workers came across them two years ago. Project engineers then decided to save money and time by using 11 of them as footings atop which pillars would be built to support the bridge.
It seems plain that the money saved by not having to build these foundations from scratch should be used to test the load-bearing capacity of all the underground pilings -- especially given their age and the apparent disappearance of original construction records. That sort of testing is exactly what Steve T. Mackey, the project's former chief bridge manager, insisted on. Incredibly, Mr. Mackey was overruled by a supervisor, and his attempts to alert the Federal Transit Administration about his concerns were ignored (outrageously) for more than six months; he resigned last year. "I'm old enough to know you don't build bridges without testing," he said.
There are some troubling questions here. One is whether the airports authority, which owns the project and the problem -- and is therefore responsible for a solution -- has the expertise, experience and muscle to manage this project. The authority did little to inspire confidence when, pressed to submit a testing plan by the feds, it merely wrote a cover letter for one submitted by the contractor, known as Dulles Transit Partners. Now the authority says all 11 structures will be tested.
Another question is why Dulles Transit Partners resisted testing every one of the foundations, as appears to have been the case. Was it because of cost, or the risk of disruption to service on the Orange Line or I-66, or because some forms of testing can actually harm the structures?
We make no presumption about the condition of the 11 existing foundations; as far as we know, and based on the limited tests that have been performed, there is no evidence to suggest they are unsafe. We understand that testing all the foundations could temporarily disrupt Orange Line service or require briefly closing part of I-66. It's also possible that tests could trigger cost overruns. What's critical is that the airports authority, as the project manager and owner, comes up with an informed, independent and transparent plan based on the most exacting safety and engineering standards. Nothing short of that will restore the public's confidence in Metro's most ambitious expansion plan to date.
Reader comments at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/