I continue to get e-mails from readers who are not happy with Metro’s new series of announcements. For the most part, the problem seems to be that the “stand back” message is repeated far too often. This is because it is attached to other messages such as “doors opening” so it gets heard a lot. Regular commuters feel like they know the routine and that the messages become little more than an irritation. I talked to the folks at Metro about this and was assured that passengers were surveyed (I printed some of the results last week) and felt good about them at the time. My concern was that these surveys were done in some conference room somewhere where the announcements were played back on a cassette machine that didn’t replicate the real-world experience. The answer was that one of Metro’s employees actually went onto trains and talked to passengers as the announcements were being made. Yes, the announcements are clearer and easier to understand and that’s a good thing. However, the problem is the repetition. I would suggest that another survey be done now that regular riders have had a chance to hear the announcements day in and day out. I’ll bet the responses will be a little different if our readers are any indication. It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to simply reduce the number of times that “stand back” is used. My experience so far has been that people don’t exactly jump into the center of the aisles when those announcements are being made anyway.
Tactics of troopers
The other day I was driving southbound on I-95 North of Baltimore during the afternoon rush hour when traffic suddenly slowed down. Just ahead I saw the reason and it wasn’t an accident blocking lanes and it wasn’t some overturned truck full of circus elephants. It was three state troopers standing in the median talking to a young man whose car was apparently on the left shoulder of the northbound lanes. Each of these officers had arrived in his own police car and each of these cars sat on the shoulder with all the lights flashing. No lanes were blocked but the show was attracting a lot of attention from traffic heading northbound, which at that hour was the main direction of the afternoon rush. I could see that northbound traffic was really backed-up and so I looked at my odometer and began to track the impact. Couldn’t those officers have questioned this person inside one of the cars? Did all three of those cars need to be there to question this one person? Did they all need to leave their lights on full flash or could they have, while still being safe, reduced them to just the minimal light display? No lanes were blocked and yet traffic was chock-a-block for five miles, wasting gas and time. I know I don’t know all the details of what was going on here but it seems like the cost for this action didn’t justify the impact on these hundreds or thousands of people who were just trying to get home.
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