arc of time

it’s been more than a week since i have been on marta. monday’s sickness and three days in toronto conspired to keep my off of the rails.

but i was right back in the swing of it today. marta really does become like an old habit after a while. you just get right back into the groove of it. all the sights and sounds seem familiar and fit like an old glove.

a few interesting things to note today – someone else was actually at my bus stop this morning to get on the #9. i think this is a first and maybe a sign of growing ridership?

second, the morning driver of the #140 is the coolest. i have noticed that if the train that is supposed to get in to north springs at 7:25 is running late, he waits. consistently he has still been there at 7:33-7:37 waiting on us.

god bless him. good to be back on the rails.

nothing really to report this morning. this was one of those morning where the commute is a dream. the #9 showed up right on time, the north springs train showed up within two minutes of me getting to five points, there were no delays on the rails, i got to north springs with 6 minutes to spare, had time to go to the bathroom and the #140 left right on time.

that my friends is a marta commuter’s dream.

i continue to be bemused by how long it took me to discover the beauty of commuting this way and wonder aloud why others haven’t either. every morning i look out of the windows of the bus/train and watch the cars plying their way along the highway. i know the frustration and boredom that all of those drivers are bound for. and i know they are now paying norht of $3.50 per gallon, which is now something like 17.5 cents per mile, just for gas. the irrationality of entrenched habits sometimes knows no bounds – at least that was true in my case.

speaking of savings, i also won another $25 from the clean air campaign‘s commuter rewards program last month. two months in a row.

oh, finally, speaking of five points, i am absolutely enthralled by the dudes that vend on peachtree street outside the station. i see them every morning pulling all of their wares out of their battered white van. i hope my friends at clfreshloaf are listening, because this author thinks they would make an excellent edition to the profile series.

sorry for the lack of marta posts this week – i have been both busy and tired which tends to cut down on the posting. it’s been a good week on marta, with just about everything running on time and without incident, with one notable exception that i will get to in just a minute.

first, though, i am getting a little surprised at the number of open windows on buses over the last two days. last night on the 140 on of my favorite kids from T.E.A.C.H. decided to leave the window open the whole trip, including the 60 mph drive down ga 400. the damn bus was freezing. and then this morning on the #9 someone had the window open. this may be some people’s answer to the marta cold weather paradox but it sure wasn’t doing it for me.

now on to the aforementioned incident. a couple of days ago i left the office and hopped on the 140. we had a very fast ride down to north srpings – no traffic on 400 and just a few pickups on north point parkway – and we got there at 5:30. 45 minutes to spare to make the 6:15 departure of the #9 from five points.

all was cruising well on the train, and we pulled into peacthree center with 15 minutes to spare for me to make the bus. perfect. no way i wasn’t making it. and then we sat. and sat. and sat. all told we sat at peachtree center for 12 minutes and i ended up missing the bus by about 3 minutes. a small delay that cost me 20 minutes in getting home.

i was pretty pissed sitting on the train until it hit me – the predicatibility of my commute is a MILLION times better on marta than it was in my car. i would say that well over three quarters of the time nothing out of the ordinary happens on marta. when i drove, it seemed like something every night – braves game, accident, construction, you name it.

even weather has very little affect on my commute now. i am really only on the #9 for about 2 miles and early in the morning so even bad weather has no affect. the trains are completely unaffected by it, and the 140 gets to drive on the shoulder of 400.

so far all my complaining about missing schedules it really is a much more predictable way to travel.

case in point – this week my boss missed a meeting because an accident closed down 400 north. he was driving and got stuck. i passed by the accident without a thought on the train.

in other marta stuff, thomas reported on clfreshloaf that marta will be holding a series of public hearings as part of it’s move initiative (pdf with official info here). they want everyone’s input so i encourage you to show up to one and even tell ‘em why you DON’T ride – although you should give it a whirl and take marta to the hearing.

as for me, of course i will be bringing up my pet peeve, the led reader boards.

it’s marta!

let me tell you about the marta cold weather paradox. it is basically this: if you ride the bus when it’s cold, you, by necessity, need to bundle up. however, as soon as you step on the bus, expect it to feel like tahiti and to start sweating as you try to strip off layers.

marta buses may have the most powerful heaters known to man. and when the temp drops below 30 or so, the drivers crank ‘em up full blast. you can’t blame them. after all they are sitting right by that door that is opening and closing all the time.

and it was cold this morning. 26 according to the big coke sign on peachtree. this works out really crappy for me, because the #9 drops off a block and a half from five points and i get on about 6-10 minutes before it gets there. so by the time i get done ubundling i have to bundle right back up to walk to the station.

i have yet to solve this problem so any solutions would be greatly appreciated.

in other news, jeff and leroy were sitting together again, so i guess all of that was just an abberation.

with apologies to phil collins for cribbing the title of this post from him. i missed the massive storm this morning. well, i caught the beginning of it, waiting on the #9 to arrive. there are no shelters near my house, so i found myself huddled on some stranger’s porch waiting on the #9. speaking of which, jeff and leroy were not sitting together this morning, which is somewhat concerning. i have a feeling they have been riding that bus together for years, so i hope it was just a matter of reduced inventory of seats this morning as opposed to any serious falling out amongst them.

the walk from pryor and wall street wasn’t too bad either, which leads me to suspect that the bulk of this morning’s storm hit while i was underground on the north/south train.

i did have to change at linbergh. i was on a doraville train, thanks once again to the non-functional leds. since i was walking down the stairs looking at the train in the station i just had to go ahead and go for it. i suspected it was a doravlile train, but one can never really be sure and the consequences of passing up my train are to severe to consider.

anyway, they point being that when i was at doraville i did here the station attendant announce major delays all over the bus system, which seems to confirm my suspicion that the storm hit while i was in the midtown tunnel.

the buses had recovered by the time i go to north springs though and the #140 left on time and without a hitch.

so reason number 6 billion or so to take marta – ride out the storms. i can’t tell you the disaster those driving faced out there.

something crazy was going on with my bus drivers this morning. for some reason the accelerate/slam brakes quotient was out of control on both the #9 and the #140. i can’t blame it on new drivers either as both were driven by the normal drivers. i wonder if it was me, maybe. i almost fell over walking to the back of the #9 this morning.

i was looking over some pictures i took of my saturday travels on marta this weekend and i was struck by this picture that i took of the inman park bus terminal on the reynoldstown side.

if you ever want to really see how divided our city is underneath the veneer of togetherness here is a little game to play. go to the inman park station. walk over to the inman park side. then walk over to the reynoldstown side. if you do it on a monday or thursday night around 6:20 say hi. i will be the only white dude over there.

two separate worlds.

reco commented the other day about what the over/under on how long till i was back in my car would be. honestly, it’s going to be a long time, considering how much money i am saving, but mornings like this one definitely make it easier to envision.

it was god-awful cold. i mean really cold. and of course, no shelter anywhere near my house. all i can say is if we lived in buffalo i don’t know if i could do this. of course in the end the puppy that refused to go to the bathroom for five minutes was probably a little worse that the wait at the bus stop.

i just made the #9 too. i forgot my lunch and looked down at my blackberry to see it was 6:33. the #9 comes at 6:38 almost liked clockwork so i decided to go for it. if you have ever seen a moderately built, seriously bundled up white dude running in bad shoes with a back pack on at 6:30 in the morning, you might know how comical i looked.

ben sent me a link to this ajc article this morning about the renovations at five points. i have already started to notice the work. i like beverly scott, her priorities seem to be in the right place. maybe she’ll even get on board with my whole fix the led crusade.

seriously, the t.e.a.c.h kids continue to take over the #140. they were on in force again today, and honestly it was even worse. because they got on the bus late they were split between the front and the back and spent most of the time yelling at one another. of course i forgot my headphones too.

i am thinking of adopting the strategy of getting up at 5:00 am so that i can catch the 7 am #140 out of north springs.

meanwhile on the #9 this morning, leroy turned to jeff midway through the call to exrpess his incredulity that certain cell phones were playing music when people called.

clearly the adoption of ring tones in the african american community has a generational component to it.

maybe “abd” is a distant cousin of the once-noticed angry yaris man i dunno, but either way he sure was having a bad day.

as i stepped off of the curb to walk to the #9 as it rolled by my house, the bus driver honked at me. seriously, he HONKED at me.

when i got on the bus, he looked at me with the most stern look possible and said, “you walking to the bus with your head down and the bus is still rolling.”

huh?

to understand this, you have to know that cars park in front of the bus stop and there is no way the bus can pull to the curb. further the car parked right in front of the stop is usually a mini-van so unless i am on the street there is no way the bus driver will see me unless i step out into the bike lane. i do this every morning and it’s never been a problem, but angry bus driver sure did.

feeling suitable chastised i made my way to my seat only to notice that it was not just me that had drawn his ire. he chastised another passenger for pulling the cord to late by slamming on the brakes at the bus stop, honked at a taxi because he thought it had pulled out to far from a gas station, and violently swung the bus into another lane to avoid two cars stopped for an accident.

seriously, here is hoping that ‘abd’ is a substitute and not a permanent driver on the #9.

other that that the ride up was cool. i didn’t read at all, i was just too tired, distracted, whatever to do it. instead i listened to two full length albums and just watched.

it was very good to see that both ice cube and dreads one were back on the #140. i was starting to wonder about them. big white dude wasn’t but other than that the whole cast of regulars was assembled.

good to see.

in case you didn’t know, and honestly why would you care, marta coo frank beauford resigned today. it’s kinda prescient because yesterday morning on the bus i was thinking about what is the first thing i would focus on if i was in charge of things at marta.

here is what i came up with. i would fix the led displays on the trains and buses.

huh? you say. surely marta has bigger problems than that. maybe, but i am a big believer in theory of fixing broken windows and this just seems like such an obvious one. it’s amazing how often the leds on the trains have an eastbound destination when the train is going west, or are just flat not on. this happens on buses too. the driver forgets to switch the destination over when they turnaround. yesterday morning on the 140 the led had reset itself and was scrolling through messages like “25KB RAM,” ‘Sof Ver 11278″ and the like.

but my favorite are the ones that are just misspelled. the 140 for as long as i have been riding on it, refers to north point parkway as “north pointe parkway,” and independence high school as “independance high school.”

so if i got the job the first thing i would do is fix the signs. i would rigourously enforce it with the drivers that the signs be accurate and i would fix the misspellings. small step but i think it would go a long way to increasing confidence.

speaking of which last night i learned about what a small screw up in scheduling can bring. the #38 was late coming by church after my class to pick me up by about 6 minutes. this cascaded causing me to miss a south bound train by 30 seconds, than to miss the #9 by 5 minutes and then finally to miss the #107 and #37 out of inman park, which were my backups by about 2 minutes. i got home at 9:20, when i should have been home by 8:30. so 6 minutes cost me an hour.

then again i didn’t buy any gas, so you make the call.