I.C.E. — In Case of Emergency
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
It’s been cold here in Wisconsin — real cold. When I woke up Monday morning it was 17° degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). All of the schools were closed and I went out to start up the family vehicles, mainly to make sure they would start. My wife’s car didn’t. I was to be on a plane for a trip for Mass Transit in a few hours, so this became a real issue. Thankfully with the help of a neighbor and his battery charger, we were able to get it running.
This little emergency got me to thinking — actually, it got me to wish for some public transit in my small Midwestern town, but that’s for another day — we look at agencies when they survive catastrophes, but hardly notice those everyday emergencies.
Denver’s RTD suffered one of these last Thursday when an insulator failed on the Southeast Corridor of its light rail line. The failure caused the wire powering the rail line to sag, affecting other insulators (about a half dozen total) and tripping a substation. Suddenly the system was without power in the morning on one of its busier lines.
Luckily, the location without power was near a major bus station and the agency was able to ferry people to other operating stations using platoons of buses until the line could be brought back into operation before the afternoon rush.
This is one of many examples of everyday emergencies agencies face and overcome with little fanfare from us or other media outlets. This is just them going about their day, doing business like clockwork.
Public transit agencies do their jobs so well on a daily basis that we not only don’t pay attention when they overcome outages and delays, we expect it of them. As long as the trains run on time is an old adage, but it’s true. People are only upset when their train or bus is late (or worse yet, early).
It’s time for us to start giving agencies credit for overcoming these everyday emergencies and not just expecting it as part of them “doing their jobs.” As a group, we laud people for going above and beyond the call of duty to help out others, but let’s not let that mean something other than preventing and solving emergencies daily while transporting millions of people a year without fail in this case.
Thanks for reading the MT Position!
February 8th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Absolutely Fred, I agree with your sentimet. Here at Everett Transit, in the Pacific Northwest, we recently experienced several days of unseasonably cold weather and damaging windstorms. Granted nothing like the Midwest but cold for us. We are a medium-sized municipally owned and operated system connecting with two larger, commuter oriented systems. When the weather gets bad our ridership often decreases but those who are waiting for the bus really need the bus. We park our artics (they tend to slid sideways down hills, chain up the 40-footers, send out inspectors in vans to the tough the serve spots and do whatever we can to keep the system going. The most amazing thing to me and a great sense of pride as well is that not a single driver failed to get to work due to their own travel challenges. Some didn’t have power at home but they made it to work anyway. In times of challenge and crisis we can praise our planning and forthought but we cannot forget that it is the dedicated employee that makes it all come together for the customer.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Another part of this is the critical role transit plays in emergency management……and it often goes unnoticed because transit authorities are so self-effacing as well as focused on serving their communities.
But the fact is transit in return for subsidies pays back. To illustrate, here are a couple of examples. Capital Area Transit in Harrisburg, PA loaned buses so firefighters could warm themselves in shifts while fighting a conflagration in an ice storm. In Arizona, Amtrak served up cemergency commuter service when floods made highway bridges impassable. I’m sure other systems have had similar experiences.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:12 am
On feb.14th we had a snow storm here in the Montreal Quebec area. My son took the commuter train from Hudson (near the end of the line) to downtown Montreal, with no problem. On the return trip however, they were stuck on the track for over an hour due to a stalled train ahead of them, which they ended up pushing into a siding, after getting the go ahead to do so. To make matters worse, the roads were relatively clear. This line started operation in the 1890’s, owned and run by CP rail. Now it is run by the AMT (Metropolitan Transportation Agency), which runs four other successful commuter train lines which service the Island of Montreal. The AMT lost a great occasion to highlight the advantage of the commuter rail service.