So Your Bus Is MIA?

The 14 has long been hailed as one the hardest to find Metro buses. Photo via Flickr, courtesy of So Cal Metro

Aside from the enormous pain in the ass a missing bus can be—the overcrowding which compounds the already annoying delays further on the route—it’s also a drain on the soul. And seeing as Holy week is just around the corner for some, I figured I’d look at all things public transit in the same light priests see sinners. Forgivable, yes, but not without some serious penance. Unfortunately, Metro, at times, acts like a godless heathen with its lack of foresight and decision making skills so I don’t feel any Hail Marys or Our Fathers are going to whip her into shape.

Instead, I’m going do something even more pointless—I’m going to email costumer relations every time something isn’t to my liking. If a bus driver passes without stopping, if a subway’s doors stop working and I’m forced to take the train all the way to Union Station and then another one back to where I had planned on going, if the intercoms aren’t working, if the elevators are broken, if the ticket machine is broken, if the ticket line is absurdly undermanned and I have to buy a day pass for an entire week, if their fancy new monitors don’t warn me not to chew gum, and of course, if a bus doesn’t show up.

This last instance is the most annoying one of all because even though being stuck on the subway all the way to Union Station, like I was this weekend, was annoying, it’s so rare (my first time in fact) that it was more comical than anything else. Where as buses just not showing up occurs very often. Even when I get skipped at my bus stop, something mind-blowingly frustrating, it still happens quite rarely and it’s usually (and I stress usually, not always) because the bus is full and there isn’t much that can be done. In fact, earlier busses never showing up in the first place is, as mentioned above, a cause of the over crowding and therefore said bus skipping you later on down the line.

We’ve all been waiting for phantom busses during our times as MetroRiders, and even though we checked Metro.net’s new trip planner, even though we checked our paper tables, even though we’ve waited at that stop many times before and know an approximate time it should come, the damn bus doesn’t show. Now there are cases that are worse than others of course. Wilshire is insane and there’s no reason to look at a schedule at all for there’s just as good a chance of five busses showing up at the same time as there is of no bus showing up for 30 minutes. But it’s the other lines that most annoy me when they never show up.

I’m currently a downtown resident so most of the stops I get on heading west are in the early phase of their trek, especially the rapids which are always the 1st or 2nd stops, so there’s no reason a 704 or 728 or 714 or… should be MIA for upwards of 45 minutes, a time in which 3 busses should’ve stopped. At best, one might have just missed a bus, the second never came, and the third was quite late. And the locals, well we all know the absurdity of the 12 minute map whose qualifications seem to only be “if the bus has ever been just 12 minutes apart… ever”.

I do have a point. I’m not just complaining. I am, but I’m also asking everyone to actually do something about it when you’re ticked off at Metro, rather than just brush it off to ineptitude like I’ve always done. I’m suggesting we actually email in out complaints. I’ve never done so myself because I’ve always seen it as a complete waste of time. Not because I’m a Metro fan boy, I have defended them and of course prefer them to the private auto, but because I’ve just always pictured the email going to an address that no one at Metro knows the password to anymore and since no one at Metro really cares about what the riders/customers think, they’ve never wasted the three minutes to change the password or email address.

But lets all for one day, one week, one month, be naive and believe the chairman, the mayor, the president—Snoble and Villa and Bush—read them. Hell, everybody’s new best friend, Obama is even checking our complaints on a daily basis. So that instead of just saying to yourself, “summmamabitch,” and looking to the other fatigued riders for camaraderie around you, email it in and lets see if we can flood the ignored inbox with enough emails they’ll finally have to take notice of what we riders experience.

Or they’ll just close the browser.