It gets mighty muggy in the 6800′s by International District Station.

It is simply a policy to state that food is not permitted. There is no fine for eating on the bus here.

Of course, Washington DC is a different story. Eat and be tazed!

Brian Bradford
Olympia, WA

I meant to say Jay Street/Boro Hall.

Brian Bradford
Olympia, WA

So whenever you bought an unlimited-ride MetroCard, the card became garbage after its valid period expired.

And I can say that with the frequency in which I used my MetroCard, that is probably a good thing.

My typical commute:
Walk from Franklin/Pacific to Franklin/Fulton Brooklyn
C Train at Franklin/Fulton Brooklyn to Hoyt/Schermerhorn Brooklyn
F Train at Hoyt/Schermerhorn to 179th Street, Jamaica in Queens
N22/24 at 181st/Hillside to Roosevelt Field Mall
N16/35/45/51 at Roosevelt Field Mall to Nassau Community College
Shoe forklempture on campus
N16/35 at Nassau CC to Hempstead Terminal (TC)
N31/32 at Hempstead Terminal to Mott Ave Far Rockaway in Queens
A Train at Far Rockaway to Franklin Street
B48/49 at Franklin/Fulton to Franklin/Pacific

You may wonder why I go in a big circle. Lets just say I don’t like doing the function at the junction (in my case, changing between local and express), also the N31/32 ran kinda flaky in the mornings.

Sometimes I treated myself to the LIRR at Nostrand. It shaved 2 hours off my commute.

King County has one very large radio system in which there are 14,000 users share. In the early 90s and before, various agencies each had their own frequencies. After a while there were no more frequencies to give out, so it was determined that something must be done. The solution was to implement a trunked radio system. This operates on the theory that not all users will be talking at the same time. All of these agencies now share a pool of frequencies, and they are assigned on the fly as needed. Since no particular group is assigned any frequency, users are assigned what’s called a talkgroup. This is nothing more than a unique number that the radios look for. An example is Seattle Fire’s dispatch “channel” which is talkgroup 1744. When a user presses down the push to talk button (known as keying the mic) their radio sends a signal to the controller, which has a list of which frequencies are in use. It finds an unused one, and sends the channel number to the user’s radio. It also tells all the radios listening to that talkgroup to switch to that frequency. Now I’ll try to bring this back to transit.
Inside the DSTT there are two intellirepeaters. They carry (radio) traffic for the security guards, transit PD, and anyone else that normally uses this trunked radio system. If Seattle PD or Seattle were to respond to an incident inside the tunnel, their radios would work just like normal, even though the tunnel cuts off all signals from the ‘outside world’–because their radio system is being repeated inside the tunnel. This is good. The signal is heard throughout the tunnel because there are special cables installed, sometimes known as “leaky coax”. These cables are have intentionally poor shielding so that the radio signals will radiate off of them. This isn’t the most efficient way of providing radio communications, but it works great in tunnels.

This massive trunked system operates in the 800 MHz band. Older flavors of cell phones also operate in the 800 range, albeit they use different blocks. Other flavors for cell phones can operate in 900 MHz or 1900 MHz or others–I don’t really know, I don’t care about monitoring cell phones.

So–the answer comes down to one word: interference. Cell phones can wreak havoc to public safety radios. If you don’t believe me, do a search on Nextell inserting an “h” between the t and e.
The radio system in the tunnel is there to protect life and property. Do we really want to risk our lives just so we can listen to five iterations of “like, oh my god!”. No. Public safety comes first. If someone suddenly has a heart attack on the platform, I’d rather they be able to call dispatch and get a Medic unit started than to be able to send text messages while I’m waiting in the tunnel.

Stupid analogies aside–adding cell reception might cause interference to the mission critical radio systems, and it might not. There’s no way to tell without spending a few thousand to a few million, and frankly, it’s a very low priority for the city and county radio shops and cell providers.

Oh and did I mention LINK has 8 or so channels of their own? You can even listen to them outside of the tunnel, provided you’ve got some sort of receiver (like a scanner) that’ll do Motorola trunking.

—-

What I also wanted to mention is that the leaky coax is specially tuned to the frequencies that are going to be used, in this case the non-SMR portions of the 800 MHz band. You couldn’t shove cell signals on there without a huge RF mess, which would make the Seattle radio techs very, very upset.

Obviously our tunnel is rather small, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to get a similar deal for cell service in the tunnel, especially with the extra passengers who will be riding Link. $3M/year is a lot, but we should be able to get $100-200k, I would guess, based on the ridership estimates.

While it sounds hard to get hired on as a full timer that’s not all bad. At least you know that the folks that stick with it are likely going to stay and really want to do the job.

OT may not be that big an expense. The actual salary is typically only about half the cost for an employee. Hiring more people, even part time w/o benefits can be expensive (training, screw-ups, etc.).

;-)

Another idea: Many Park & Rides are virtually empty on weekends. A system could be setup to rent space for all kinds of activities. Farmers’ markets, arts & crafts fairs, swap meets, hiking shuttles (Metro or Private run), bike rentals for park & rides near trails (Issaquah or Issaquah highlands?). A system of approving activities that do not conflict with local businesses would be important.

Presumably the driver summoned the police as soon as he noticed what was going on. But it takes time for them to arrive. Kudos to the passengers for stepping in and preventing further harm to the woman.

Semi drivers have to back up their vehicles regularly as part of their job while we rarely back up a coach, except in the yard. We need to be more sensitive to issues involving passengers and need the passenger endorsement. They are different jobs with different skill-sets. There are common elements and having a CDL B can’t hurt if you’re going for a CDL A. However, if somebody wants to be a truck driver, they’re not going to go work for Metro.

For every person who you say comes to work for Metro while “just job hunting for something else” there are several who do that but then end up staying for many years. I and plenty of other drivers could make more money elsewhere, but driving for Metro offers variety, a choice of all kinds of different work schedules, and opportunities for advancement (Supervision, planning, light rail, etc…).

My point is that there are some opportunities to save money on overtime now while giving newer drivers an opportunity to make enough money to get them by until they can go full-time. There are issues in negotiating that point that I don’t understand, but I can at least point out the opportunity.

People can screw up the A/C when they open windows, but I usually can see that they are open and explain that the A/C works best with the windows closed. It can take a while to cool down after a layover in the sun, but people seem patient if you explain it.

Oh, and there are plenty of times where the A/C doesn’t work. But Metro seems to be buying buses with non-operable windows so I guess we’ll have to get used to it…

For the route t-shirts, I have to do a separate font for the back displays.