How I learned to stop worrying and love the Metro

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I was at my bus stop waiting to be transported to the ol' salt mines, when down the street, I saw the bus approaching. Then a moment later, another bus of the same route right behind it.

As the buses approached, my fellow bus stop people and I could see that the first one was pretty full, with several passengers already standing in the aisle. So it was no surprise when it drove past us without stopping, as drivers on my route will often do this if they have a lot of passengers, and know there's another, emptier bus close behind. The second bus, we could tell, had barely any passengers on it.

Then the second bus blew past us as well.

There was a brief moment of Did that just happen?, followed by some muttering and grumbling, followed by really vivid revenge fantasies of sprinting to the next stop, pulling that second driver out of the bus, and beating the living shit out of him, while shouting, "Bet you wish you'd stopped for us now, don't you, motherfucker?", before hijacking the bus to go back and pick up my fellow stranded passengers. (At least, I'm assuming everyone else was having this fantasy. I know I was, and I'm a sane, rational person, and that's the kind of reaction any sane, rational person would have, right? Right?!?) Then we waited a whole 15 minutes before another bus arrived.

But as infuriating as that incident was, and as much as I've enjoyed warm, fuzzy thoughts of slowly torturing that second driver to death using a variety of medieval torture devices (again, as I'm sure all my fellow emotionally stable passengers have) I realize it was just an honest mistake. Maybe the driver was caught off-guard by the first bus not stopping for us, and couldn't hit the brakes in time. Maybe he was daydreaming. Maybe he just figured we were all standing at the bus stop for reasons totally unrelated to wanting to board a bus. Whatever. Mistakes happen.

But the bottom line is, something like that, and God only knows how many other fuck-ups Metro commits on any given day--and I think it's fair to mention that only a tiny percentage of those fuck-ups result in people getting killed--don't change the fact that Metro is still one of the best public transportation systems in the world.

So stories like this sort of annoy me. I know that in a perfect world, every Washingtonian would have a Metro stop right outside our front doors, fares would only be a dime, and trains would be 100 cars long so we could all stretch out. But it's not. It's an imperfect system that obviously needs improvement, but statements like "I hate Metro right now," and suggestions like "stop people from cursing and fighting," don't seem especially productive.

And then there's the constant obsession with increasing revenues, which some people seem to think would actually be spent improving service, and not just going towards Metro executives' bonuses or yet another useless consulting deal about how Metro can improve service.

David Alpert, who runs a blog about transportation and development, http://www.greatergreaterwashington.org, suggested that Metro consider a policy that imposes a higher, third fare level for riders at the peak of rush hour. Many are federal government workers, he said, whose commutes are subsidized.

So...hard working Americans see their fares go up, while tourists and various slackers and hippies who aren't even awake during the peak of rush hour don't pay anything extra? Come on. Also, additional fares just mean additional federal subsidies, which means additional taxes, so everyone's just going to end up paying more one way or another.

My advice is, stop stressing out about Metro. Most days, it's good. Some days, it's bad. And occasionally, you get carried off on a stretcher or in a body bag. It sucks, but that's the reality of public transportation. Deal with it.