Tomorrow's my 50th birthday, and today I just made an accepted offer on a house in Portland. A bit to digest, so we'll be dark here for a couple of days! Coming soon: posts on Tel Aviv and on British de-regulation …
“awesome driver!”: the power of positive feedback
Now and then Twitter pops up something like this, from someone called @wmataplusside.
@wmataplusside: @wmata awesome driver! Very clear & announced everything! orange line car 5053. Tell him to keep up the good work 🙂
In a local ecosystem dominated by colorful critical voices (including @FixWMATA, @dcmetrosucks, @unsuckdcmetro, and my personal favorite moniker, @MedievalMetro), @wmataplusside's niche is to offer all good news:
@wmataplusside Cell service at Anacostia, Navy Yard, and Waterfront is real! Its really there! #wmata
WMATA, the regional transit agency of the Washington DC region, has a problem that afflicts almost all transit agencies: Negative feedback is constant, positive feedback is rare. Transit is an incredibly visible service; when something goes wrong — whether in management or operations — there's no concealing it. Media feed on negativity, so that's what spreads, and what returns amplified to the agency staff.
Experienced transit staff learn to "control" for the negativity. I often tell client agencies that if the feedback on a service proposal is only 75% negative, as opposed to, say, 95%, then that's actually pretty positive. Negatively-impacted customers respond in much greater numbers, and usually much more belligerently, than positively-impacted customers, so it's unfair to count comments as though they were votes. The same is generally true of operations; commendations of good work from customers are rare, because few bother to comment in that situation. while lacerating feedback from angry customers is routine.
This is why folks like @wmataplusside are doing someting important. When not offering his/her own positive feedback, @wmataplusside is harvesting good news from all over the local Twitterverse, and retweeting it, amplified. If you want one feed of all the good news about WMATA (and I'm sure the agency does), this is it:
@dcmetrosucks: I have to say that #wmata has stepped it up this past month and a half…haven't had any significant delays on the OR during peak hours.
@jamdizzle So pressed with @wmata! Didn't really believe they'd put the money the bus ate on my SmarTrip and certainly not within a few hours!
@jeditrainee: Love the new bus bays at Seven Corners. Going through there used to be a nightmare. #wmata
@HS1979: On a shuttle. Watched WMATA employee explain to driver how 2 help one confused young passenger. "Take care of her, ok?" IMMD
@mindymoretti: $13 cab ride vs. $1.50 bus ride. Snarly cab driver vs. uber friendly bus driver. Well played @wmata well played.
@csimpson82: My orange line train driver would have an AMAZING career in radio! Excellent job today with the stations!
@zebrafinch: Cheers, kudos to DC Metro staff Ms. Taylor (Woodley/Zoo) & Gregory (White Flint) for ALWAYS BEING HELPFUL & on task! TY! @wmata #WMATA
@zebrafinch: New and cheery lighting at formerly dark Metro station. Good! #WMATA http://twitpic.com/9e1yv5
@chrispulaski: With all my negative #wmata tweets, I have to say that more often than not, the metro workers I encounter are wonderful people.
They don't have to be specific complimnents. Expressions of sheer passion are also passed on:
@Adam_Ulbricht: Have I confessed my love for the #DCMetro lately? Ya, it's amazing
@Wmataplusside also supports by being useful, extending the agency's eyes:
@wmataplusside: @wmata there are hornets building a nest inside of bus bay H at Naylor Road
The user @wmataplusside took a while to track down, but here's his or her self-description.
Unrelated with WMATA, just a Marylander who grew up with the Green Line. Not really much about me. A suburbanite, born in Virginia, raised in Maryland. Ride Monday through Friday and weekends when I need to go into the city. Been riding all my life, and it's really not as sorry a state of affairs as others make it out to be.
It moves people back and forth without serious incidents being commonplace. Sure, incidents may occur from time to time, but it's not nearly as bad as the Beltway. If riding Metro sounded like listening to a bad traffic report, I could understand relentlessly hating on it.
Started the feed because I couldn't understand why so many were dedicated to being negative about it, and none positive. Goal was an outlet for compliments and comments as a means of hopefully encouraging more positive behavior by wmata employees. Answer rider questions and tweet about my experiences on rails and bus, pass along information about delays when I'm in them. Just want to provide a contrast to all of the pessimism, and another side to the #wmata conversation.
Or as he put it in a tweet:
@wmataplusside: I may look like the eternal optimist, but I'm more normal than it seems. And after reading twitter daily, more lucky than most.
If nobody is aggregating positive feedback for your city's transit system, maybe you should start! Positive feedback can guide an agency at least as well as the negative can. Probably better.
does suburban local service get cars off the road? (updated)
See new updates at the end, based on comments to May 4.
Ricky Leong in the Calgary Sun on why Calgary should spend more money serving far-flung suburbs: Continue Reading →
quote of the week: the reappearing desert
How little has changed since the 1830s! From Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in 1835:
Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. The woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. It is not uncommon in crossing the new States of the West to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track.
Extended passage here, all equally relevant to urban planning. Hat tip: Ta-nehisi Coates, the Atlantic.
Photo: Tyson Jerry, NevadaCounty.com
should voter-approved transit taxes be spent in transit?
You'd think that once you ask your local voters to approve a tax specifically for transit, you owe it to the voters to spend the money on transit. Apparently that's not how it works in Houston, as Houston Tomorrow president David Crossley explains.
Metro receives local money from a 1-cent sales tax that was approved by voters when the agency was created in 1978. In 1987 then-Mayor Bob Lanier [of the City of Houston] began taking 25% of that money away from Metro annually to use as he saw fit. That included funding design work for the so-called “Grand Parkway,” which is now under intense construction in order to pull population away from the City of Houston and all the other towns and cities in the region.
I have some sympathy for these funding diversions. Sometimes voters haven't approved levies for what is really needed at the moment, and the only way to keep things going is through. Sometimes, too, these diversions really are "loans" that get paid back.
But when a diversion is used to fund a competing capital project, the obvious question is: "Why not ask the voters if they want to fund that project?" That, question, too, may have a valid answer, and I hope Houston readers will explain it in the comments.
UPDATE: A Houston reader offers a competing narrative.
I'll be doing a public lecture and discussion in Houston on May 14. See info under my photo –>
what’s wrong with the “transit score”?
This old post is superseded by this one.
heatmaps of service intensity
Does it make sense to represent service intensity as as heatmap? Is the result at least cool to look at? Xavier Jacques Côté, a programmer the Québec open-data advocacy group Capitale Ouverte, gave it a try with his hometown, Québec City.
More on the origins of this map, and other cool things Xavier did, in French here.
Hat Tip: David Duval, Ville de Québec.
hello from flagstaff, and a factoid
I'm at the Arizona Transit Association conference, which is also the annual conference of the Arizona DOT. Interesting factoid from an excellent presentation by CTAA's Scott Bogren: In the US, when a local initiative or referendum to raise some tax to fund transit is put to the voters, they pass 75% of the time.
Scott is on Twitter as @CTMag1 … Follow for more of the same!
seattle media cover last night’s event
My fun faux-debate with Darrin Nordahl last night, sponsored by Town Hall and Transportation Choices, has been covered by both the Seattle Times and the online journal Publicola. Both summarize the question as something like: "Should transit be useful or fun?" Put that way, it's easy to say yes to both, but there really are some choices to be made, because often we're asked to sacrifice the useful for the fun. As I said in the debate, I support all of Darrin's recommendations for a more joyous transit experience, except where the abundance and usefulness of service must be sacrificed to achieve them.
darrin nordahl’s new book
Darrin Nordahl has a new book out, e-book format only, called Making Transit Fun! You can download Chapter 1 here: Download PDF.
I will be appearing with Darrin Thursday Wednesday night in Seattle, to promote both of our books. Details in the far-right column under my photo.
For my review of Darrin's previous book, My Kind of Transit, see here. Note that Darrin is such a classy guy that he links to my review on his website, even though my review raised major objections to that book.
Darrin is a great writer, a keen observer, and a committed urbanist. While we have utterly different perspectives (compared by Treehugger's Lloyd Alter here and by Slate's Tom Vanderbilt here) we agree about almost everything that really matters. I look forward to reading and reviewing his new book, and meeting him again in Seattle on Wednesday.