Hatred: An Introduction
Oliver and I have launched a new initiative here at the Liquid List. As Oliver once explained when he founded the current incarnation of this site, there aren't many actual lists associated with it. The Liquid List, while bad-ass as far as domains go, isn't really as much about making lists as it is about speaking freely.
To that end, we're launching with this post an elaborate new ongoing campaign: People We Despise. Being despised is sometimes worn as a badge (presumably by people like Karl Rove), but we think that being despised is something to be avoided, like the Ebola Virus or Ann Coulter. So if you get on Liquid List's Despised Hall of Shame, know that it's a bad thing.
Oliver's got some strong thoughts on this, but to get the ball rolling, I thought I would helpfully point out someone who has pissed me off about a hundred times already this week, and who generally functions in such an utter state if idiocy that I wonder if he and his colleagues haven't been lobotomized: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority General Manager and CEO Richard White.
What has Mr. White done to deserve this dubious honor? Well, if you happen to dwell in the National Capitol Region and ever need to travel by mass transit, you already know. The overall strategy of Metro is puzzling: For surface transit (buses) it appears to be designed to reach as few riders as possible, with an elaborate series of confusing bus routes, poorly marked and managed bus stops, surly drivers and vexing tardiness which inevitably leads to ghetto-izing bus usage, because anyone who can afford to get there any other way, does.
The subway, meanwhile, is managed about as well as a third-grade science project where all the hamsters die. So while the stations are very clean, they are also cold, slippery, and since bizarro-post-9/11 regulations requiring the removal of all in-station trash receptacles have gone into effect, are gradually becoming littered with kleenexes and newspapers. When the stations were built nearly 30 years ago, they chose some sort of tile that appears to offer as much traction as Calphalon commercial non-stick cookware. As a result, people are falling down like an army of town drunks. And don't even get me started on the drunks.
But White doesn't get this award for just these choice items. No, he deserves this special recognition because of the management of Metro, plain and simple. Riders throughout the system complain, during regular service (not the snow emergency we've been wrestling with, which I will get to in a minute), of short-sighted, half-cooked, lazy policies. There should be no four car trains during rush hour or other periods of high ridership. While ridership has steadily grown for years, Metro hasn't committed to all six-car trains all the time. Ridership surveys are also a joke: Metro employees stand by stations and note on a clipboard what time a train arrives, how long it is in the station, and when it leaves. They don't capture the number of riders on the train, how effective the driver announcements are, what the station experience is like, if the elevators and escalators work or anything else. Of course, overall ridership is reflected by farecard turnstiles. However, when stations serve more than one train line (like all the stations between Rosslyn and Metro Center, for instance) there is no way to count which color train riders are boarding.
In normal times, Metro sports all the hallmarks of an unmanaged behemoth, with a bunch of stupid things happening that everyone knows are stupid, but nobody bothers to make a policy about. A few years ago, a lady died walking up an escalator because the only working escalator was set to carry passengers down into the station. After that happened, Metro announced that whenever escalator outages brought a station down to one escalator, it would carry passengers up. Shouldn't that have been common sense?
Every day, riders deal with this stupidity. One day all the escalators at the Dupont Circle station's North exit were out of service. If you didn't want to walk up about 230 steps, you had to cross the station to the South side, ride the escalator up and then walk across the circle. I don't have a problem doing this, but presumably some of Metro's very young, very old, or in poor health riders were screwed that day. Routinely, escalator maintenance work (the escalators are always getting worked on) causes entry paths for Metro to be blocked, obstructed or closed all together. Workers leave open dangerous trap doors in the middle of the sidewalk, poorly inform riders of the changes to come, and spend an awful lot of time standing around looking at the two guys who are working.
Management problems go all the way to the top. In the last seven years, Metro has purchased and installed new escalators in several of the highest ridership stations, only to have those escalators revealed as flawed. The new escalators have been totally replaced at enormous cost, while the older escalator systems have continued chugging away at other stations. A massive order of Metro train cars was discovered to be badly flawed, and the cars that replaced those ones were found to also have a flaw (which was revealed when a rider was almost dragged into a station wall). All of these and a dozen other snafus have forced Metro to continually fret about runaway costs and make noises about raising fares, presumably while White and the rest of the gang sit around with their fingers in their ears so nobody points out that the skyrocketing budget got up there because we've had to do about a hundred things twice. Station quality has decreased and though capacity has held steady, it is far outpaced by ridership levels. About the only thing Metro has done right is add the smartcard system to all the stations. Of course, adding it to the buses has so far only happened on some of the vehicles serving about a dozen lines in Arlington County. The rest of us, it appears, will still have to grab a transfer and produce a quarter, scare up a dollar and a dime, or wait in terrible long lines to buy tokens from the mean women in the booths at Metro Center, or pay an extra fee to buy them from one of Metro's pitifully staffed "Commuter Stores."
Of course, Metro this week has been spectacular in its failings. Again they demonstrated no foresight: a huge storm was forecast and the cars required to meet the capacity of the weekday ridership levels are stored above ground. Why not keep the cars in the system so they are available when riders need them after the storm (when ridership will surely be up because the roads are so treacherous)? Metro seemed to answer: "Nope, Let's keep them in the snow, so we can't reach them. Then we'll run mostly four-car trains, at fifteen to twenty minute intervals, serving customers at 50-60% capacity and not serving the people on the inner stations at all because all the trains will be totally packed." Metro didn't run empty trains through outer stations so that riders closer to town had a train to board. Instead, it just kept running trains from Vienna, Franconia, Shady Grove, Glenmont and New Carrolton, and they filled up and took on no passengers for three to five stations until the big downtown exits like McPherson Square and Dupont Circle. This from the nation's second-largest transit service.
So for these reasons, The Liquid List of Despisal's inaugural mention goes to Metro Chief Executive Officer and General Manager Richard White, along with his staff, including Lem Proctor. But here at the Liquid List of Despisal, we like to give you something to do. Here's Metro's "Contact Us" page. More importantly, Metro's Board of Directors is made up of County Board or City Council Members from Maryland, the District and Virginia. These are your elected representatives, and they pretty much have to listen to you rant and rave. Give them a call:
Arlington County, VA
Fairfax County, VA
Alexandria City, VA
Montgomery County, MD
Prince George's County, MD
The District of Columbia
Finally, I hate to end a rant like this without something uplifting, or at least sight-gag funny. So when you visit Metro's front page, take note in the upper left hand corner of the screen. For some reason, Metro chose as the emblem of its web presense, its look-and-feel anchor, a Photoshop-hack job of one of DC's dear pandas swelled to the scale of Godzilla and about to eat the White House. You can click on the image below to bring up Metro's front page and see it for yourself.
Oliver and I have launched a new initiative here at the Liquid List. As Oliver once explained when he founded the current incarnation of this site, there aren't many actual lists associated with it. The Liquid List, while bad-ass as far as domains go, isn't really as much about making lists as it is about speaking freely.
To that end, we're launching with this post an elaborate new ongoing campaign: People We Despise. Being despised is sometimes worn as a badge (presumably by people like Karl Rove), but we think that being despised is something to be avoided, like the Ebola Virus or Ann Coulter. So if you get on Liquid List's Despised Hall of Shame, know that it's a bad thing.
Oliver's got some strong thoughts on this, but to get the ball rolling, I thought I would helpfully point out someone who has pissed me off about a hundred times already this week, and who generally functions in such an utter state if idiocy that I wonder if he and his colleagues haven't been lobotomized: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority General Manager and CEO Richard White.
What has Mr. White done to deserve this dubious honor? Well, if you happen to dwell in the National Capitol Region and ever need to travel by mass transit, you already know. The overall strategy of Metro is puzzling: For surface transit (buses) it appears to be designed to reach as few riders as possible, with an elaborate series of confusing bus routes, poorly marked and managed bus stops, surly drivers and vexing tardiness which inevitably leads to ghetto-izing bus usage, because anyone who can afford to get there any other way, does.
The subway, meanwhile, is managed about as well as a third-grade science project where all the hamsters die. So while the stations are very clean, they are also cold, slippery, and since bizarro-post-9/11 regulations requiring the removal of all in-station trash receptacles have gone into effect, are gradually becoming littered with kleenexes and newspapers. When the stations were built nearly 30 years ago, they chose some sort of tile that appears to offer as much traction as Calphalon commercial non-stick cookware. As a result, people are falling down like an army of town drunks. And don't even get me started on the drunks.
But White doesn't get this award for just these choice items. No, he deserves this special recognition because of the management of Metro, plain and simple. Riders throughout the system complain, during regular service (not the snow emergency we've been wrestling with, which I will get to in a minute), of short-sighted, half-cooked, lazy policies. There should be no four car trains during rush hour or other periods of high ridership. While ridership has steadily grown for years, Metro hasn't committed to all six-car trains all the time. Ridership surveys are also a joke: Metro employees stand by stations and note on a clipboard what time a train arrives, how long it is in the station, and when it leaves. They don't capture the number of riders on the train, how effective the driver announcements are, what the station experience is like, if the elevators and escalators work or anything else. Of course, overall ridership is reflected by farecard turnstiles. However, when stations serve more than one train line (like all the stations between Rosslyn and Metro Center, for instance) there is no way to count which color train riders are boarding.
In normal times, Metro sports all the hallmarks of an unmanaged behemoth, with a bunch of stupid things happening that everyone knows are stupid, but nobody bothers to make a policy about. A few years ago, a lady died walking up an escalator because the only working escalator was set to carry passengers down into the station. After that happened, Metro announced that whenever escalator outages brought a station down to one escalator, it would carry passengers up. Shouldn't that have been common sense?
Every day, riders deal with this stupidity. One day all the escalators at the Dupont Circle station's North exit were out of service. If you didn't want to walk up about 230 steps, you had to cross the station to the South side, ride the escalator up and then walk across the circle. I don't have a problem doing this, but presumably some of Metro's very young, very old, or in poor health riders were screwed that day. Routinely, escalator maintenance work (the escalators are always getting worked on) causes entry paths for Metro to be blocked, obstructed or closed all together. Workers leave open dangerous trap doors in the middle of the sidewalk, poorly inform riders of the changes to come, and spend an awful lot of time standing around looking at the two guys who are working.
Management problems go all the way to the top. In the last seven years, Metro has purchased and installed new escalators in several of the highest ridership stations, only to have those escalators revealed as flawed. The new escalators have been totally replaced at enormous cost, while the older escalator systems have continued chugging away at other stations. A massive order of Metro train cars was discovered to be badly flawed, and the cars that replaced those ones were found to also have a flaw (which was revealed when a rider was almost dragged into a station wall). All of these and a dozen other snafus have forced Metro to continually fret about runaway costs and make noises about raising fares, presumably while White and the rest of the gang sit around with their fingers in their ears so nobody points out that the skyrocketing budget got up there because we've had to do about a hundred things twice. Station quality has decreased and though capacity has held steady, it is far outpaced by ridership levels. About the only thing Metro has done right is add the smartcard system to all the stations. Of course, adding it to the buses has so far only happened on some of the vehicles serving about a dozen lines in Arlington County. The rest of us, it appears, will still have to grab a transfer and produce a quarter, scare up a dollar and a dime, or wait in terrible long lines to buy tokens from the mean women in the booths at Metro Center, or pay an extra fee to buy them from one of Metro's pitifully staffed "Commuter Stores."
Of course, Metro this week has been spectacular in its failings. Again they demonstrated no foresight: a huge storm was forecast and the cars required to meet the capacity of the weekday ridership levels are stored above ground. Why not keep the cars in the system so they are available when riders need them after the storm (when ridership will surely be up because the roads are so treacherous)? Metro seemed to answer: "Nope, Let's keep them in the snow, so we can't reach them. Then we'll run mostly four-car trains, at fifteen to twenty minute intervals, serving customers at 50-60% capacity and not serving the people on the inner stations at all because all the trains will be totally packed." Metro didn't run empty trains through outer stations so that riders closer to town had a train to board. Instead, it just kept running trains from Vienna, Franconia, Shady Grove, Glenmont and New Carrolton, and they filled up and took on no passengers for three to five stations until the big downtown exits like McPherson Square and Dupont Circle. This from the nation's second-largest transit service.
So for these reasons, The Liquid List of Despisal's inaugural mention goes to Metro Chief Executive Officer and General Manager Richard White, along with his staff, including Lem Proctor. But here at the Liquid List of Despisal, we like to give you something to do. Here's Metro's "Contact Us" page. More importantly, Metro's Board of Directors is made up of County Board or City Council Members from Maryland, the District and Virginia. These are your elected representatives, and they pretty much have to listen to you rant and rave. Give them a call:
Finally, I hate to end a rant like this without something uplifting, or at least sight-gag funny. So when you visit Metro's front page, take note in the upper left hand corner of the screen. For some reason, Metro chose as the emblem of its web presense, its look-and-feel anchor, a Photoshop-hack job of one of DC's dear pandas swelled to the scale of Godzilla and about to eat the White House. You can click on the image below to bring up Metro's front page and see it for yourself.
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