Transports of Delight
Feb. 20th, 2008 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluFunny, the way things work out.
Last week, on my first day back to work after the worst of the flu, the Volvo's water pump conked out. Naturally, this happened in a fairly spectacular way, on the way up I-5, when I was already running late. What I knew at the time was that all of a sudden all of my dashlights were flashing at me in slow-mo, with a certain ponderous majesty, and I was blowing great billowing gouts of steam out the back of the car. And, oh, yeah, my thermostat was heading into the low stratosphere. Hosanna. So I kept a weather eye on the thermostat and nursed the car to the next exit, which happened to be MLK. This would be dirt-lot, rusting hulk, concrete-rubble-dump wasteland part of MLK. Hosanna, hosanna. Once at street level, I passed up the Public Storage megaplex, in hopes that there would be something a bit less industrial beyond it. Silly me.
Seemingly hundreds of yards of uninterrupted, fenced off junkyards followed. Finally, there was another driveway break in the curb, so I took it, parked, and killed the engine. Little spirals of steam streamed up from under the hood. Hosanna in the highest.
I looked around. The big, puddle-pocked dirt and gravel parking lot was flanked by a pair of low-slung corrugated sheds. Neither had so much as a street number on it, let alone a business name. Gray, shuttered, and totally anonymous. There were some abandoned chunks of construction rubble strewn along the back of the lot, and beyond that, an impassible slope of blackberry tangle. In the foreground, a chain link fence surrounding the lot, a few bedraggled weeds, a scattering of parked cars, and, under the raised hood of a pickup truck, a pair of guys working on an engine. No phones, no landmarks, and not a single building or street sign with an address on it. Welcome to AAA hell. "Hello, I'm in a dirt parking lot somewhere along MLK. It's sorta near a big orange Public Storage. Can you come tow me?"
Luckily, there were those two guys working on the truck. I mosied over, smiled engagingly, and asked if either of them knew the address of where we were. They conferred quietly in Spanish I could just about follow. The nearer one translated. 9830 Martin Luther King Blvd. I thanked them profusely and went back to the car to make a bunch of phone calls. Thank the powers for a fully charged phone, and those two guys working on that truck.
The rest of the morning went surprisingly well, all things considered. The tow truck arrived in a very short while, was familiar with Larry's Volvo in Beacon Hill, and Larry's was able to look at the car same day. From Larry's I was able to catch a bus right to King Station, and there connect with an Express to the U District. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
But in all the back and forth over the next day or two as I waited to get my car back, I was forced by circumstances to finally try taking the Sounder train to work. What a revelation! I love the train. It's easy. It's quick. It's pleasant. The station is an 11 minute walk from my house. The fare is totally included on my U-Pass. And there are three different express buses that connect from King Street Station to just across the street from work. The only explanation I have for not trying it sooner is that back when I first researched it, the bus tunnel wasn't open and the connections weren't nearly as easy or obvious.
That, and the fact that the Metro web-based trip planner is very possibly the single most useless and disabling feature of the entire local transit system. The system itself is way better than you would think if you trusted the stupid website, or indeed any of their customer interfaces. (In fact, the way I found out about the right bus to take from King Street on that first day coming from Larry's, was because a bus driver volunteered the information -- a Sound Transit driver, I might add -- after I had tried the Metro customer information line and been kicked out of the system twice.)But even stupid Metro's stupid webtrix can't get me down now. I get to commute on the train!
Last week, on my first day back to work after the worst of the flu, the Volvo's water pump conked out. Naturally, this happened in a fairly spectacular way, on the way up I-5, when I was already running late. What I knew at the time was that all of a sudden all of my dashlights were flashing at me in slow-mo, with a certain ponderous majesty, and I was blowing great billowing gouts of steam out the back of the car. And, oh, yeah, my thermostat was heading into the low stratosphere. Hosanna. So I kept a weather eye on the thermostat and nursed the car to the next exit, which happened to be MLK. This would be dirt-lot, rusting hulk, concrete-rubble-dump wasteland part of MLK. Hosanna, hosanna. Once at street level, I passed up the Public Storage megaplex, in hopes that there would be something a bit less industrial beyond it. Silly me.
Seemingly hundreds of yards of uninterrupted, fenced off junkyards followed. Finally, there was another driveway break in the curb, so I took it, parked, and killed the engine. Little spirals of steam streamed up from under the hood. Hosanna in the highest.
I looked around. The big, puddle-pocked dirt and gravel parking lot was flanked by a pair of low-slung corrugated sheds. Neither had so much as a street number on it, let alone a business name. Gray, shuttered, and totally anonymous. There were some abandoned chunks of construction rubble strewn along the back of the lot, and beyond that, an impassible slope of blackberry tangle. In the foreground, a chain link fence surrounding the lot, a few bedraggled weeds, a scattering of parked cars, and, under the raised hood of a pickup truck, a pair of guys working on an engine. No phones, no landmarks, and not a single building or street sign with an address on it. Welcome to AAA hell. "Hello, I'm in a dirt parking lot somewhere along MLK. It's sorta near a big orange Public Storage. Can you come tow me?"
Luckily, there were those two guys working on the truck. I mosied over, smiled engagingly, and asked if either of them knew the address of where we were. They conferred quietly in Spanish I could just about follow. The nearer one translated. 9830 Martin Luther King Blvd. I thanked them profusely and went back to the car to make a bunch of phone calls. Thank the powers for a fully charged phone, and those two guys working on that truck.
The rest of the morning went surprisingly well, all things considered. The tow truck arrived in a very short while, was familiar with Larry's Volvo in Beacon Hill, and Larry's was able to look at the car same day. From Larry's I was able to catch a bus right to King Station, and there connect with an Express to the U District. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
But in all the back and forth over the next day or two as I waited to get my car back, I was forced by circumstances to finally try taking the Sounder train to work. What a revelation! I love the train. It's easy. It's quick. It's pleasant. The station is an 11 minute walk from my house. The fare is totally included on my U-Pass. And there are three different express buses that connect from King Street Station to just across the street from work. The only explanation I have for not trying it sooner is that back when I first researched it, the bus tunnel wasn't open and the connections weren't nearly as easy or obvious.
That, and the fact that the Metro web-based trip planner is very possibly the single most useless and disabling feature of the entire local transit system. The system itself is way better than you would think if you trusted the stupid website, or indeed any of their customer interfaces. (In fact, the way I found out about the right bus to take from King Street on that first day coming from Larry's, was because a bus driver volunteered the information -- a Sound Transit driver, I might add -- after I had tried the Metro customer information line and been kicked out of the system twice.)But even stupid Metro's stupid webtrix can't get me down now. I get to commute on the train!
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:14 pm (UTC)http://barcamp.org/TransitCampBayAreaAbout
no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 02:12 am (UTC)We don't have the Sounder cars anymore, they went back to you. We have our own double-deckers and they're in the standard silver, blue, and red. The Sounders were much prettier.
Trip planner?
Date: 2008-02-21 03:49 pm (UTC)Commuting by train, wOOt.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 02:27 am (UTC)Agreed about the trip planner. Some saintly person wrote an alternate front end for it that makes it far more usable, though. http://spotbus.com/
Also, FYI, Sound Transit bus routes are operated by Metro so the drivers are often well-versed in Metro route lore.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-26 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-27 12:31 am (UTC)Another solution was a site called http://busmonster.com/, which showed stops and routes on Google maps. But the link to google maps has been broken for over a year now so the fact that it will show you push pins for stops near an address or a line for a complete route isn't nearly as useful as it used to be when it also showed the map. ("completely useless" is just an extreme form of "isn't nearly as useful as it used to be", right?)
Google Transit http://www.google.com/transit Does some of it though it doesn't have the polish of other Google apps.