Fare enforcement? Remember, nobody is required to pay a fare to go into a Tunnel station, or even to be on the boarding platform. However, one fare-related measure could have relocated the attack away from the track, if not prevented it.

Fare-collection personnel, equipment, and gates could be placed on Tunnel mezzanines, and platforms could become “proof of payment zones.” Additional benefit to doing this would be to increase operating speed for trains and buses alike.

After seven every night, it can take up to five minutes to get a bus out of a Tunnel station while everybody pays their fare at the farebox. A delayed bus also means a late train.

So forward that to your King County Councilman, the County Exec, and the Sound Transit Board. Civil or not, transit can’t let this happen to people, especially in its own showpiece station.

Thanks for comment.

Mark Dublin

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/video/mediacenterbc3.html?bctid=65855483001

I suggest hiring more Sound Transit police. How to pay for it? Enforce the fares vigorously. Take a look at DART (Dallas’) efforts. About $1.1M in fare evasion fines works out to about 24 enforcement officers ($30K *1.5 gross up for benefits). What really grabs one’s eye is the dramatic drop in removals from transit – 37K to about 8K per year. It appears fare enforcement is helping in a big way!

http://transportationblog.dallasnews.com/dart%20police%20year-end%20report.pdf

One tactic, however, both to make your action effective, and for real self-defense: always start with a smile and a courteous request. And the more serious the problem, the more important this approach.

On the Route 7 in the days I mentioned, I always addressed my young passengers individually as sir and ma’am, or “miss”, and collectively over the PA as “ladies and gentlemen.” Especially immediately before and after unobtrusively calling for the police.

Remember, manners were originally invented by tribal warlords in lawless places- so they wouldn’t have to kill each other every time they met, but could honorably put off the duel until they’d killed somebody with greater priority that particular day.

Thanks for these last two answers.

Mark Dublin

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/412796_bus01.html

Dec 1 2009 – A woman who shot a man in the chest in downtown Seattle in April was acting in self-defense and won’t be charged with a crime, King County prosecutors said Tuesday.

The 26-year-old man was shot in the chest but rushed to Harborview Medical Center and survived his wounds.

The shooting took place after a bump on a Metro bus escalated into angry words, obscene gestures, and, finally, the man charging the woman even though she showed she had a gun.

Prosecutors said in the statement that that Sara Brereton, 31, “acted in defense of herself, her children and her partner” by using “her legally licensed handgun.”

Ten years before I joined Metro, I drove a cab in Detroit for a couple of years, at the time when Detroit had just pitched over into its plunge into its eventual fate of Hurricane Katrina without the water. I must have been crazier than the hero of that movie.

The cabdriver had plenty of reason to want that sidearm in his own workplace- though it probably wouldn’t have done him any more good than it would have been done me the night he tried to help me. Most murdered cabdrivers get shot in the back of the head. At the end of a twelve hour ill-paid shift with no health coverage.

Those guys need to belong to ATU Local 587- wages, benefits, work rules protection, and transit police protection included.

What’s the whole answer? Like I said, that one needs another posting. But in a nutshell: in 1950, city life in Germany looked a lot like Detroit’s does now. Same with at least parts of many other US cities, including our country’s capital.

In the eighties, so did Pittsburgh, before the rubble of this country’s steelmills was clearead away. There weren’t any corpses in the wreckage of those mills, or the car plants in similar condition in Detroit. But generations jobs lay buried under all that rust and broken bricks.

If people like the fathers of the problem kids on my bus that night could have
kept those jobs- and remember, non-white people were just barely starting to be allowed into those jobs when they vanished- then people like those kids who jumped the 124 driver might have believed they had a place in the respectable world.

Twenty years after the airforce leveled those enemy cities, a massive infusion of US money and attention saw to it they were bebuilt to full modern prosperity, and Axis countries were all US allies. Forty-three years after Detroit started to collapse the place is still in ruins.

We know how to turn our societie’s enemies into friends- there’s a new book by Richard Reeves about the Berlin Airlift, and there are libraries-full on the Marshall Plan. That’s how you make buses, cabs, and cities stop being hostile territory.

Mark Dublin

So – the Transit Police aren’t there.

Now what?

This suggests to me, Ben, that undercover Metro cops aren’t effective deterrents, or that issues aren’t minor on Metro buses. And my experience on Metro confirms this.

Only objecting to the idea that Metro orders anyone to get hurt.

Well, we are specifically prohibited from carrying anything normally defined as a weapon – and the book says specifically that a “weapon” is not only things like firearms, pepper spray, nunchucks, etc. – but anything USED as a weapon.

Metro policy specifically prohibits any driver from using anything – including their thermos or trying to fend off an attacker by giving them paper cuts with transfers – to do so.

Metro also perennially puts out this dual message: fares matter/fares don’t matter. Valid passes matter/valid passes don’t matter. State the correct fare/don’t state the correct fare. Etc.

So while Metro does not in fact “order anyone to get hurt” (who does?); it sure as heck sets up a deliberately two-faced policy system filled with ambiguity and largely leaving drivers on their own to exercise “good judgement” – without of course offering any real training or guidelines about what official expectations come into play in conflict situations. In other words – Metro (the institution) covers its bureaucratic butt by talking out of both sides of its policy mouth.

Incident report for fare evasion? Unless the passenger raises a stink likely to result in a complaint – I’d be filling out paperwork most of the morning every single day. 3 key? Not according to the training folks, regardless of what O’Rourke says.

About twenty years ago, I was northbound on Rainier Avenue at the wheel of a 40′ Flyer trolleybus, around ten on Saturday night. There were about a dozen passengers aboard: maybe six adults, all sitting ahead of the rear door, and a half dozen or so young people who’d just boarded together. One boy of about sixteen was carrying what looked like the leg of a small wood chair.

There had been sufficient violence in that area, chiefly involving high-school age people, that Metro had finally decided to add some serious policing to the Route 7. At Gennessee St., just north of Columbia City, the coordinator called me.

“Just to let you know,” she told me, “the police have been watching those kids who just got on your bus, and there’s a patrol car following you. Just keep me briefed on the situation.”

At the next stop, three men waved to me. I pulled over, and they boarded- small, thin, wiry men, no coats on a miserably cold, rainy November night, and their workpants and T-shirts were torn to shreds. All had major cuts and bruises.

“Senor, may we have a ride?” one of them asked. “We don’t have any money.” Leaving them outdoors in those clothes would have been negligent homicide, and besides, I couldn’t imagine any trouble out of them in their visible condition.

I shut doors and continued north. A second later, I looked in the passenger mirror, and saw something that reminded me of one of those old Saturday morning cartoons out of the ‘thirties, with everybody back of the rear door rolling around the screen like Popeye the Sailor and Bluto in a bar fight.

Evidently my three new passengers had immediately gone back to finish their night’s previous business with my rear-seat passengers.

Mindful of the police car coming up, I pulled the bus over at Rainier and Andover, giving the coordinator location and situation as I rolled in. I opened both doors, turned in my seat, and told the uninvolved passengers police would be there shortly, and they were welcome to come forward in the meantime.

None of them moved. They didn’t seem scared, just tired and disgusted.

I stayed on the radio- reception was bad that night, and the coordinator was especially concerned that the police know if any weapons had appeared. I told her about the furniture-leg.

When I looked up from my radio conversation, a tall man of about thirty-five in dark civilian clothes was standing in the aisle beside my seat. I asked him: “Are you a police officer?”

He didn’t answer me, but started shouting up the aisle as he raised a revolver that could have classed as artillery, probably forty-four magnum and not snub-nosed. The condition of the weapon didn’t inspire confidence in the gun-owner- blueing worn off the steel, the grip wrapped in black electric tape.

“Are you a police officer, yes or no?” I persisted.

His answer: “No, but I’ve got a permit to carry this. I know what’s going on here. I read the papers!”

I also knew that armed police expecting trouble were due to arrive momentarily, and I had to consider what could happen to somebody behind a steering wheel a foot from the gunman when he saw several police officers who looked just like everybody else in Rainier Valley running toward him in regular neighborhood clothes.

I had some serious transmission to accomplish over a radio full of static.

Luckily, the people fighting at the back of the bus didn’t even notice either him or his revolver. There were a half dozen innocent people, including at least one woman, between he back of the coach and the front of that barrel. I knew somebody back there had a chair-leg, but no proof that was all they had.

Nobody in the fight paid the man or his licensed firearm any attention. But one of the midcoach passengers, a man in denim work clothes of about forty, suddenly woke up- he’d had a lot to drink. He got out of his seat, stuck out is chin, and advanced right into the barrel of the gun.

“You pull that thing on me, you better be ready to use it!”

One more thing to tell the coordinator to tell the police over a very bad line.

In the end, it was everybody’s lucky night. The fight went rolling and tumbling out the back door into a large parking lot. The man with the revolver decided nobody on the bus was interested in being protected, and got off the bus and went back toward his taxi. Last I saw of him, a plainclothesman was searching him for other weapons.

As soon as the other police got the ragged men off the pavement where they were surrounded and being kicked by their opponents, by way of gratitude the three men attacked the police. As the plainclothesmen dragged them past the door of my bus in handcuffs, one of them shouted to me:

“You see?! You Americans always stick together!”

From the kids’ arrival on board to the police car’s departure, probably five minutes had passed. On TV it would have made a good comic relief scene in an episode of CSI Seattle- if they ever get tired of Vegas, Miami, and New York.

But as an argument for civilian firearms aboard transit, it’s either a dud or a misfire, whichever is less effective. The least bad thing that almost happened was that one working man could have killed another one for no reason whatever.

On TV, when you pull a gun, everybody does what you tell them. The guy in denim might have had one too many, but he put the real truth into one sentence. The cab-driver was nowhere near ready to shoot anybody. He just thought showing the gun would put him in charge- script always says so. But real life is improv.

The only people on-screen that night that belonged having firearms took care of the situation with their badges, their handcuffs, and their bare hands. Have I answered your question?

Mark Dublin

City funds a fair amount of bus service already and pays for the free ride area

Uh – no, actually the City does NOT pay for the Ride Free Area. They contribute toward it – at a fraction of the actual cost of providing the service.

If you’re talking about providing transit security under a City plan – there are jurisdictional and other issues to consider, but I’d be interesting in hearing how that might work.

I agree that the City should not sit on their hands. McGinn can start by either paying the full cost of the Ride Free Area – or agreeing to end it.