I’ve been to work both yesterday and today, and while the buses have been running, there seems to have been very little information available about Sound Transit services.
I understand the web site wasn’t in great shape because of all the people looking, but that makes it all the more necessary to have a low-bandwidth plan for situations like this. I suggest that immediately, when there’s a major disruption, the agency should drop the regular site (before it gets overrun) and put up something like what’s there now – a simple table of services and notes – each service listed, then a reassuring ‘weekday schedule’, ‘sunday schedule’, or special comment.
There will always be major issues during snowstorms – that’s fine, to be expected. But when the 545 is put on reroute, that specific reroute should be listed. This morning there was nothing about the 545 on the website, but eastbound, it turned right on ninth – before convention place station – leaving a crowd who expected it to skip Bellevue and Olive and had walked down there instead.
Yesterday, 545s were piled up at Overlake on the NE 40th Street exit from 520. Drivers were being told to use that exit to turn around, when the exit was blocked, and had been for some time. Nothing on the web.
If there is a big disconnect between dispatch and Sound Transit’s staff, that’s fine. Say so. Put up a note saying that you’re having trouble finding out what reroutes have been implemented, as the contracted agencies make that decision on their own.
More than anything, though, have a snow site ready to switch over to. Yesterday and today have been a mess, and while the site is decent now, this is the kind of thing that needs to be planned out in advance. Earlier this morning, when people actually needed this information, the site was mostly yesterday’s reroutes. Even now, the routes are out of numerical order, and there should really be a comment for every route, so people can find out if theirs is okay. So next time – have this ready!
I think part of the issue is that these kinds of operation decisions are being made by the service providers — Metro, Community Transit, and Pierce Transit. The first two, at least, were posting updates about the Sound Transit routes that they operate.
By the way, CT should be commended for doing exactly what you said: this morning, they took down their main site and posted a bare-bones list of ongoing service changes. Good stuff.
Lack of information seems to have been just as harmful than the lack of service. A woman I spoke with yesterday had been standing on 3rd waiting for her bus for over an hour and was fuming mad when I told her I thought it was canceled. Her feet were freezing and she didn’t think she could walk home. I’m sure she was just one of thousands that had no idea what to do yesterday (wait? walk? hitchhike? find a cab? find a hotel?).
How do I think they should handle this? Figure out and test a simple, basic route for snow storms – something they know won’t get buses stuck. Change their route numbers by simply adding an S (for Snow), to make it clear there’s been a route change. At the first sign of snow announce via every media outlet available that snow routes are in effect. Maybe even send a 4WD car around to post signs. Ben’s idea about simplifying their web page would fit right into this plan.
What will happen on an actual snow day? People will have to walk further to the snow route. But they’d know there will be a bus there, and it will be more frequent. For instance, instead of having a separate 1, 2, and 13, with the 2 and 13 stuck somewhere on their routes, all three lines would follow the 1S route – just bringing people from the Uptown area (who have walked from all over Queen Anne) to downtown. Service would be fast, frequent, and reliable.
Having a set of simple snow routes makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense for riders to be more flexible. I saw and heard people fuming because their bus wasn’t coming, when buses *were* coming that served their general neighborhood. For example, I heard a person this morning ask a 550 in South Bellevue park and ride “do you go to Swedish Medical Center?” Of course it doesn’t, but you’ll be a lot closer if you just take the 550. Metro needs to do a better job of communicating which routes are running and focus on getting people to major transit centers. I don’t know if you need a whole set of snow routes, but it would be easy to define ahead of time the 50-75 Core routes that Metro will focus on to keep running. Then Metro could work with SDOT and other cities to ask them to deice or sand the roads that that smaller set of routes take.
That said, it is still a challenge to get the information out there. Would you make a whole different set of timetables? Show the route on the normal timetables even though you would rarely use it? Most Metro routes have more some sort of adverse weather routing, but the drivers and supervisors in the field are making decisions on the fly to try to keep things moving at all. It sounds easy to send a 4wd out to post signs but it isn’t – think of how many hundreds of major stops and transfer points that Metro has. Plus, all the available staff are busy trying to free up buses, figure out what can be safely run, and just holding down the basics of the system. I’d rather see a focus on really good web information and news releases to major media outlets than trying to post information on the streets. The situation just changes too fast to make it worth the effort to post information at stops.
Actually, there is no excuse that the full Sound Transit site can’t be available and responsive. You plan for peak traffic, not averages.
Meanwhile, the 545 westbound this morning was running normally, but when I got on at Bear Creek, I was expecting a shuttle bus to take 148th to the Overlake transit center. In fact one was there and the driver was talking to the articulated 545 bus driver who wasn’t aware he wasn’t supposed to be at Bear Creek. Yet this was his second run into Seattle and since he made the first without problems he was determined to drive the full route again.
I was a little concerned to get on an articulated bus, primarily because of the steep 520 on ramp at West Lake Sammamish Pkwy, but we made it up the hill without problems.
Still, I’m expecting my commute home to Redmond on the 545 will terminate at Overlake and require a transfer to a shuttle to Bear Creek. We’ll see.
It currently states at http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/rr/adverseweather.html that “This route [545] is currently operating its regular route, except it is not serving Bellevue & Olive.” I guess enough buses were able to navigate 520 without issue, so that’s good. Still, it is an icy road.
Well for what it is worth it wouldn’t be that hard to design the infrastructure for transit agency web sites to be able to handle unusual loads like this weather event.
For that matter the WSDOT and metro sites seem to have handled things without skipping a beat.
As if to make your point, IIS has failed on soundtransit.org tonight. Not even a static error page available.
If they’re using IIS that explains everything!
Metro hosts their sites with IIS and they aren’t having any problems. Clearly if you don’t have enough capacity to handle the load then the software you choose as your web server isn’t going to matter much.
IIS? LOL! Right now it’s struggling to load the normal home page. Then “Service Unavailable” and now the browser says “the server unexpectedly dropped the connection”
The Transit Alerts page, if the they can get the server up again, can be found at http://soundtransit.org/x72.xml (For text only version use http://soundtransit.org/x72.xml?t3xt ) On a side note, can ST web URLs be more user friendly? Something like soundtransit.org/rideralerts They’re all a bunch of x####.xml files which in itself looks non-standard.
I hopped Sounder up to Everett to check out the situation up there. The ride was a refreshing change from the awfully slow bus with snow chains. Everett Station looked busy with a bunch of people waiting for the bus to Seattle which was running on a Sunday schedule (hourly service).
For a large transportation hub like Everett Station you would think adverse weather information would be readily available but nowhere was there any notice of reduced service. The transit customer service office was closed all day due to the weather, at a time where people need information the most.
The transit tracker displays at Bellevue TC never seems to work properly, this time showing an IE “page not available” error. They could have overridden the MyBus display with running transit updates. The electronic signs in the transit tunnel stations are nothing more than oversized clocks. Couldn’t they program messages in there?
IIS. IE. I realize we’re in Microsoftland here, but are those really the only options for our transit agencies?
Neither of these things have anything to do with the product being used.
Wow – Now that’s what I call dedication.
Yes, you are correct that seems to be no notification to we poor bus riders standing out in the cold sometimes waiting for a bus that may not be coming.
Last year I felt brave enough to drive from my home near Lake Stevens to my normal bus terminal at the Everett Station. When I arrived there, proud of myself for even making it….I was horrified to find the hill going down to the station a sheet of ice and the parking lot a nightmare to walk across. I stood for approx 45 min in below freezing temps to hear somebody in line say, they just called and found that our normal 5:00 a.m. bus would not be coming. The next bus due approx an hour later. No notification to the approx 20 plus people waiting in line.
For all of us early morning riders (catching 4:20 to 4:50 a.m. buses, and there are several of us) there are no early morning updates or even a number to call the company directly. Come on Sound Transit, you got us…now keep us updated!!
Sound Transit’s website was up with a temporary page and was accessible around 6:30 pm Friday. It has failed again. Sound Transit is now attempting to bring their normal site back online with limited results. Now they’re back to the temporary page. The webmasters and sysadmins must be going crazy. (The embarrassing domain name expiration incident came back to me for some reason.)
Meanwhile, how has web traffic to Seattle Transit Blog been since the snowpocalpyse began? Any noticable increases?
OneBusAway traffic pretty much doubled on Thursday. I know OBA is pretty-small potatoes compared to the traffic of the transit agencies themselves, but I’m imagining they saw similar increases as well.
I know it’s easy to say “design for peak load” but you could probably make a similar argument for the snow plows, sand, ice equipment in Seattle. The reality is that designing for peak load is expensive. While it may be easier to manage for web applications, I’m guessing these guys don’t have nearly the time / manpower/ money of their counterparts in the private sector. It sucks, but I’m willing to cut them a little slack.
The same argument also applies for highways and transit during peak periods.
The fact is, the entire metro online system failed and has major flaws. This current situation is minor compared to any “worse case scenario”. The big question is “Who is paying for this service and who is responsible for the failure”? If we, as taxpayers or metro customers are footing the bill, we must demand the service be functional or be removed from service. If a private company is being contracted to provide the service, we, as customers, need to hold these people accountable!!! There is five inches of snow on the ground…big flippin deal!!!! It’s 9:15pm and I still can’t log onto the metro tracker to get information about route times. Obviously the people who manage and/or monitor the tracker system have taken the day off, when this is the time we “NEED” their services. Someone needs to loose there job over this BS!!!!