Slashdot Mirror

WMATA did an inspection of the jumper cables back in February 2015 and then replaced around 120 or so. They probably thought the problem was resolved at that point. Unfortunately, a new fire earlier this week revealed that the problem has not been resolved.

Alas, in the DC Metro, any drink (beer, coffee, water, etc.) can get you a $100 fine.

Looks like the BART may also ban eating and drinking in the "Paid Areas" with a possible $250 fine and 48 hours of community service.

Alas, in the DC Metro, any drink (beer, coffee, water, etc.) can get you a $100 fine.

Looks like the BART may also ban eating and drinking in the "Paid Areas" with a possible $250 fine and 48 hours of community service.

With respect to the Verizon/non-Verizon service, I had been tracking that (excitedly) at the time. There was an investment package from various wireless companies and a roll out plan for non-Verizon cell service in (1) the top 20 stations for October 2009, (2) all other underground stations by Fall 2010, and (3) all tunnels by October 2012.

They got the first two down, but the third step never materialized, with Metro blaming the wireless companies for not doing the work, and the wireless companies correspondingly blaming Metro for scheduling times for them to install the equipment in the tunnels (which required Metro staff to be there, and necessitated diverting trains around them), but then not showing up as agreed. Here's a story by The Examiner on the he-said she-said stuff. (Note: The Examiner is very right-biased on political issues, but I've found their local investigative reporting to be sound and insightful.)

I have plenty of material for crazy-thing-happened-on-the-Metro stories, but I'll save those for another time.

First, dealing with some idiocy:

But there are good reasons why cities might want to maintain price differences for certain journeys — to encourage people to live in certain areas, for example.

I would *imagine* that BART charges more the longer you're on the subway. Just as pretty much every other system does that's not flat-rate. I wonder if the author thinks that AMTRAK charges more for tickets from DC to NYC than from DC to Philly because he thinks they're trying to encourage Pennsylvania tourism.

With that out of the way, yes, you could save a BOATLOAD by doing this in DC, although I'm sure it violates some ToS and would probably end up with you getting banned from the system. The minimum rush hour fare on DC Metro is $2.10, the maximum is $5.75. So if I'm travelling from Huntington to Greenbelt (for example), and I found someone who was doing the reverse trip, we'd just have to swap cards at Mt. Vernon Square, and we'd each save $7.30 a day, or about $150 a month.

Note that DC Metro is the one where the General Manager, during a period of service cutbacks (due to long overdue track maintenance) and unprecedented rate hikes, bragged about having a record surplus. So yeah. If I could get away with it, I'd totally do this just to "stick it to the man."

It's much, much worse than this in the US. If you'd like to try it yourself, the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority has a nifty trip planner that allows you to determine exactly how time-inefficient public transportation is in the capitol of the US. If you'd like the Executive Summary, I have included a sample trip from the Germantown MD transit center to Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt MD. This represents a pretty typical commute for a DC suburbanite.*

- Bus Departs from GERMANTOWN TRANSIT CENTER at 12:00pm
- - Arrive SHADY GROVE STATION at 12:16pm
- Rail Departs from SHADY GROVE METRO STATION at 12:26pm
- - RED LINE RED LINE Rail towards GLENMONT METRO
- - Arrive METRO CENTER METRO STATION at 1:00pm
- Rail Departs from METRO CENTER METRO STATION at 1:16pm
- - ORANGE LINE ORANGE LINE Rail towards NEW CARROLLTON
- - Arrive NEW CARROLLTON METRO STATION at 1:44pm
- Bus Departs from NEW CARROLLTON STATION at 2:00pm
- - Arrive NASA MAIN ENTRANCE ON GREENBELT RD at 2:29pm

So this one-way trip consumes 2.5 hours. By comparison, Google Maps indicates that this trip by car is 31.8 miles and costs about 41 minutes (via I-270 and I-495.) I have no desire to spend 5 hours per day using public transportation for *any* reason.

* you can save the "move closer to work" snarkiness for someone who lives in FantasyLand.

As someone that lives in the area, I can remember it happening. Amazingly, I thought it happened last year. My, how time flies!

Not in the Wiki summary: they originally blamed the operator and claimed that she must have been texting during the accident. Honestly, the operator may have been, but the entire failure boiled down to the automatic system failing, and thus probably a massively delayed, and unexpectedly necessary reaction on the part of the metro operator.

Of course, this was also with a much older system and older track cars (following the accident, they retired the 1000 series of track cars that had substandard, by today's standards, crash preparedness). And it was not a system that just got stamped within a year of its creation.

Here's a link: http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/news/PressReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=4133
---
(Sorely needed feature: edit a post)

I asked the DC Metro chief about open sourcing their control system code or even just publishing the control data on something like data.gov so that folks could write cool apps (iphone/Andriod/Blackberry/Pre/Web2.0) to encourage riding and make the system safer. He said no because that would allow people to hack into the system's. Instead, they are working with an unnamed "vendor". This is the same excuse a lot of folks (even Darl) gives when wanting to keep things closed.

As to the point about people working 'fuzzy' hours, well this is exactly the kind of situation congestion pricing is trying to encourage, that is to get employers to realize not everyone needs to be at the office at exactly 9am. By encouraging employers to look hard at who really needs to be in the office at that time we can hopefully spread out the road usage over greater time, thus reducing congestion, which will save fuel and reduce pollution.

Also, for those people not living and/or working in a major city I very much doubt they have congestion trouble that needs fixing.

As to the point about people working 'fuzzy' hours, well this is exactly the kind of situation congestion pricing is trying to encourage, that is to get employers to realize not everyone needs to be at the office at exactly 9am. By encouraging employers to look hard at who really needs to be in the office at that time we can hopefully spread out the road usage over greater time, thus reducing congestion, which will save fuel and reduce pollution.

Also, for those people not living and/or working in a major city I very much doubt they have congestion trouble that needs fixing.

The tracking of American citizens via RFIDs is already a reality in the US. Infact, after moving to DC, I have found that they have a nifty little Metro-transit Card they call the "smartip" card. You just pump it up with a bit of dough and just wave it around on terminals to take the Subway or the various buses around. Of course you can use cash if you like, but the convenience of not needing to carry money coupled with the seconds of time saved makes it very tempting to have one. You can either purchase one online and they'll mail it to you (and have it registered under your name automatically) or you can buy one in the commuting store for cash and be at least slightly anonymous, that is until you make the mistake of adding money onto it via Credit Card or unless you register it (the convenience of that is that they will refund your money if you lose the card so long as it's registered). All of this is done using the very non-controversial and citizen funded Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, aka WMATA

In the US, they learned that they don't need to force you via laws to take your rights away, not at first anyways... they just use convenience and fear as the main motivation factor and low-and-behold the vast majority of citizens will gladly surrender any of their rights. Then, after they've suckered in the majority, they just pass laws democratically by utilizing their new found minions and as such, there goes the rights of every other poor sap.

http://www.electroauto.com/

sells and electric-car conversion kit. An inventor in korea has developed an electric generator from sea water

http://www.1000inventions.com/detail2.php?id=942

There are at least a dozen of these types of inventions out there. This is the only one I know of being looked at for commercial scale production. During the Y2K scare there was a small-scale commerically available version of this called the EnviroGen generator.

There is a company in India Reva producing a in-city car (tops out at 35 MPH). Most in-city trips top out at about 35 MPH. Plug this types of cars into a well designed mass-transit system such as DCs Metropolitan Transit bus/train system or Denver's Regional Transit bus/train system and you have a descent solution.

http://www.revaindia.com/

http://www.wmata.com/

http://www.rtd-denver.com/

That's weird. I had never heard of the Trip Planner. I always used The RideGuide. Why, I wonder, would WMATA have two different ride planners on the same website? Good to know our DC tax dollars are hard at work.

I know the Washington, DC metro offers a similar service on their website. Metro

The DC Metro system has had a trip planner availabe for years now:
Metro Trip Planner

I always though that most major metro areas with well-developed public transit systems had something like this.

This just looks like an ultrasonic animal repeller to me. Here's an easy Google Search that shows how common they are. The thing is, anyone with decent hearing will hear these ultrasonic devices too -- and yes, they are extremeley irritating, to the point of being painful. My parents live way out in the country and use one to keep deer away from their garden, and another one to keep their neighbor's cats away from their parked cars. Having to suffer around 2 of those things any time I visit my folks, I can easily recognize the high-pitched agony-inducing devices now.

And as a result, I suspect there is a powerful one in use at the Huntington metro station. It's cranked way up, frankly to the point that I worry about hearing damage when I walk through the protected area. I can hear the sound just inside the entrance, aimed right at the turnstyles (slightly stronger at the side near the fare card machines). In this case, I imagine they're using it to keep birds and squirrels out of the station. The station itself is in a surprisingly wooded area, nestled into the side of a small hill. I'm sure they found an ultrasonic animal repeller was the only thing that worked at keeping critters out of the station. It nearly keeps me out too ... it actually makes me feel slightly nauseous if I hang around in that entrance area too long.

I mean, really, various on-line resrouces even tell us where the bars are that the congressional staffers hang out at!! What would this country do if the Senators and Representatives had to read those thousands of pages of documents themselves!?

I don't even want to think about what would happen if the terrorists thought about using THIS map.

Think carefully about giving up your freedoms; you won't get them back.

Note: I found a GFDL map of the Metro here.

The WMATA RideGuide lets you enter a starting point and a destination and offers you multiple routes using rail, buses and walking.

Heavy Rail is pretty good, and so is the light rail and busses.

IMarv

The DC Metro system handles rush hour perfectly fine. My sister lives there and I visit her about 5 times a year for a week at a time and get around almost exclusively by the Metro. The trains crisscross in the most popular areas for a reason. The city is set up to make it convenient to live anywhere in the area and still ride the train (and more rails are being added to loop the perimeter).

A related issue is that of linking up major metropolitan areas.

Who decided that San Jose should get a Light Rail system that is wholely incompatible with BART. If they had thought for maybe a second, the entire Bay Area could be linked by one complete system.

The same goes for Baltimore's Light Rail and Washington's Metro. Sure, they're about 25 miles apart now... but eventually they'll converge. When they converge they'll be incompatible.

I'm no transit expert, but it seems like it is COMPLETELY RETARDED to have adjacent metropolitan areas building incompatible systems.

And what crackhead decided to build Seattle's Bus Tunnels. That's just weird.

Las Vegas' Monorail (that's right, MONORAIL!) will be cool but doesn't go very far and is a couple of LARGE blocks off The Strip.

I would love not to have to drive every day, but I live out where housing is somewhat affordable. The train out here is on the other side of town, which requires a car to get to anyway, take 1.5 hours to get me to downtown DC. Then I have to take the Metro to some place elce in the city

I have since stoped working in downtown DC. The time is just not worth it.

You can find plenty of almost affordable housing in the 25-50 mile range from the city, & there is a decent subway system - Metro - once you get nearer to the city (ther are plans to extend it further out).

In the downtown area of the pseudo-town of Silver Spring, MD (it's sort of spread out all over the place), the penguin is kind of an unofficial mascot. There is a mural outside the Metro station which shows a typical Metro train populated by penguins instead of humans. What's really relevant here is that a couple of the "Pedestrian X-ing" signs in the city show a male figure, a female figure, a child figure and, yes, a penguin (emperor?) crossing the street.

-J