Thank you, very much

Thank you for contacting Regional Transit. Bus operators are required to de-board all passengers, secure the vehicle, and shut the doors for any scheduled break. If you need additional information please feel free to contact me at the number listed below.

Sincerely,


Robert H. Beverly
Customer Advocacy
Sacramento Regional Transit District
916.557.4545
916.456.1752 fax
cad@sacrt.com

A driving wind chilled the 45 degree air temperature to 33 degrees. The rain felt like sleet as it stung exposed flesh.

The No. 82 bus was parked and dark with the doors closed. No driver in sight. Three of us -- me, a woman and a man -- had arrived on the outbound train at 7:20 p.m. We were all getting very wet and very cold very quickly. The No. 82 wasn't scheduled to leave until 7:28 p.m.

Thank you for contacting Regional Transit. Bus operators are required to de-board all passengers, secure the vehicle, and shut the doors for any scheduled break. If you need additional information please feel free to contact me at the number listed below.

Sincerely,


Robert H. Beverly
Customer Advocacy
Sacramento Regional Transit District
916.557.4545
916.456.1752 fax
cad@sacrt.com

The three of us milled around in the rain outside the dark bus. I was hoping a driver would magically appear. I don't know what the woman was thinking. She had the hood of her jacket pulled tight around her face. The other member of our party was drunk. My first indication of how drunk he was came when he hit me.

And then he kept hitting me around my shoulders and upper arms. I looked at him. He stood about six inches shorter than me, and was skinny for his size. Looking at him slap my jacket I wondered if he was knocking some of the water off. That would be helpful, I thought.

He didn't say anything as he hit me, each blow noticeably more forceful. I got the impression that this was a drunken version of greeting. I was struck with a mental image of two drunks knocking each other down saying hello. While I tried to ignore the guy he managed to get one arm around my neck in a drunken embrace.

"It's just too cold to stand out here," I told the guy.

I walked over to the nearest bus stop shelter, my albatross hanging from my neck and banging on my back. Once we were sheltered from the wind, the guy lost interest in me. He found a white plastic bag and searched through it.

Thank you for contacting Regional Transit. Bus operators are required to de-board all passengers, secure the vehicle, and shut the doors for any scheduled break. If you need additional information please feel free to contact me at the number listed below.

Sincerely,


Robert H. Beverly
Customer Advocacy
Sacramento Regional Transit District
916.557.4545
916.456.1752 fax
cad@sacrt.com

The woman waiting with us for the bus watched silently. When my albatross and I went over to the bus stop shelter, she followed. But the guy pounding on me clearly dismayed her. She went back into the rain, returned to the shelter and left again. Eventually she walked to another shelter and waited alone.

The guy lost interest with the bag and returned to me. He said something that didn't make any sense. He hit my shoulder a couple of times and said something else.

"It is just too cold," I told him as I watched the wind turn the rain into waves of knives.

Thank you for contacting Regional Transit. Bus operators are required to de-board all passengers, secure the vehicle, and shut the doors for any scheduled break. If you need additional information please feel free to contact me at the number listed below.

Sincerely,


Robert H. Beverly
Customer Advocacy
Sacramento Regional Transit District
916.557.4545
916.456.1752 fax
cad@sacrt.com

In the distance I saw a round shape emerge from the dark. It looked like a large beach ball. As it got closer, I could distinguish the oversized umbrella and equally round driver. She wasn't in a hurry. Her progress, viewed from my frozen perspective in the bus stop shelter, appeared glacial.

The drunk left me and walked to the bus. He met the driver as she arrived. They appeared to say something to each other. It was too far away for me to hear and frankly I didn't care. Then the guy disappeared. I guess it wasn't his bus.

I got to the bus at the same time as the woman who had been waiting. We didn't wait to be invited aboard by the driver. We didn't even wait for the driver to turn on the interior lights. We took seats and tried to warm ourselves.

Thank you, very much, Sacramento Regional Transit.

The opposite of happiness

"There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along," Richard Brautigan wrote in his short story, The Old Bus. "It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing."

But what is it when your bus is missing? What is the opposite of that "certain happiness," that "specialized" happiness. Worse, how do you describe seeing the back of the bus, knowing you won't make your appointment because you missed a connection?

Today, I needed to be at my dentist's office at 8:30 a.m. for a cleaning. My dentist thinks my teeth are in such dire need of attention that I'm required to get them cleaned four times a year. Of course my insurance company disagrees, but that's another story.

I made the cleaning appointment for 8:30 a.m. six months ago because I had found a combination of my No. 82 bus and the No. 30 bus, along with a half-mile walk, got me to the dentist's office at exactly 8:30. Transitarian denistry at its finest.

By 7:24, I was waiting at my bus stop. The stop is less than 2.5 miles from the start of the route. In the year that I've been riding the No. 82 bus route, I've found that the buses are more often early than late. But twice in that year I have waited for a No. 82 bus that never arrived. Sure, that is just two buses out of hundreds, but that doesn't seem quiet as reassuring as it should when you have to be someplace at a specific time.

The No. 82 is scheduled to be at its first timing point, the next stop from where I was waiting, at 7:27. Today, the bus wouldn't reach that point until 7:34.

Having fretted about the possibility of the bus not arriving at all, I was cheerfully willing to forgive and forget when the bus was just seven minutes late. But that was a mistake.

In order to get to the dentist on time, I have to catch a No. 30 bus at Sacramento State scheduled to depart at 8:07 a.m. The No. 82 is scheduled to arrive at 8 a.m. I knew from past experience that the schedule was tight -- just seven minutes leeway -- but on my previous trips to the dentist I had made the connection without problems.

When the bus was already seven minutes late less than three miles into its route, I should have started thinking about possible alternatives to the No. 30 connection.

Instead, I read my book.

When the bus was eight minutes behind schedule at its next timing point, I should have put the book away and looked to see if I could catch light rail at 65th Street and get off at 29th Street in time to make my appointment.

Instead, I read my book.

When the bus finally arrived at Sacramento State at 8:11 a.m., I got off, not realizing that the No. 30 had already departed. Had I stayed on the No. 82 until the 65th Street light rail station, I could have boarded the 8:18 inbound train and arrived at 29th Street station at 8:25, with plenty of time to walk to 30th and P streets.

Instead, I watched the back of the No. 30 in the distance, waiting at Carlsbad and J streets for the left turn light to turn green.

How do you describe seeing the back of the bus, knowing you won't make your appointment because you missed a connection?

Bus driver appreciation day

I don't know where I got the idea. Maybe it was part of the childhood folklore that insisted that you couldn't hit a moving target when playing Army. But somewhere I decided that if you walk in the rain you don't get as wet as you do when you just stand in one spot.

My new job responsibilities necessitate a slightly different schedule. It is easy enough to know when the bus will arrive; it's something of a challenge to figure out when you must start getting ready to finish on time. With half-hour interval service you don't want to miss the bus.

So today I was early. Five minutes to be exact. Looking at my watch in the rain, the hood of my jacket pulled tight to shield my naked cheeks (why did I cut off my beard?), I pondered my options. Stand in the rain? Walk to the next stop? Stand in the rain and get soaked? Walk a half-mile to the next stop and get less soaked?

I walked. I jammed my hands in my pants pockets and kept my head down as I splashed down the sidewalk.

About three-quarters of the way to the stop I heard the distinctive whine of the bus engine. I turned and looked up, and there it was coming up the street. There was no way I could make it to the stop before the bus.

I keep my bus pass in my pants pocket. I pulled out my pass only to discover I had pulled out my employee pass. I put that back and pulled out my Starbucks card.

Now I was getting a little frantic as the bus bore down on me.

Finally, I got it right and pulled out my bus pass and waived it in the air for the driver to see.

The driver, a woman, made an unscheduled stop and let me on.

As I boarded I thanked the driver. It was 9:41 and the bus was right on schedule for its 9:42 timing stop around the corner.

I think I'll just stand in the rain next time. The marginal benefits that might be imagined from moving in the rain, don't come close to outweighing the chance of being stranded between two stops.

When I got off the bus at 65th Street I made a point of going to the front of the bus and thanking the driver again.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Change of jobs; change of looks. Why not? Actually the change of jobs is mostly on the organization chart, but it does end my fledgling writing career.

In honor of the change, I whacked off my beard. Boy was that a shock. I haven't seen my upper lip since 1971, when I entered Navy boot camp. It was simply shocking to realize how much I look like my father. How'd that happen?

Since I have a kid who wants to be an artist I commissioned a new caricature of myself to use on this blog. Here's what he came up with.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I cant trace time

Meanwhile in the blogosphere, there's an interesting post about Sacramento Regional Transit's contract negotiating strategy. Read it here.

Charlie Wilson's War on the bus

Finished George Crile's masterful "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History." As regular readers of this blog will realize, spooks and wars are two topics that fascinate me. And Crile's book has both as it tells the story of the United States' covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In the last 12 months I've read "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," Valerie Plame Wilson's attempt at a memoir along with "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War" by Bob Drogin. I read "OSS: The secret history of America's first central intelligence agency" by R. Harris Smith; "No Other Choice," the autobiography of George Blake, who spied for the KGB against the West; and "Breaking the Ring: The bizarre case of the Walker family spy ring" by John Barron. Even in my rare fictional outing, I read John Le Carre's "The Mission Song."

I bring all of this up as a way to underline my opinion of Crile's book: It is simply superb. It is by far the best book I read in 11 months of riding the bus to work.

If it were not all true, it would be unbelievable.

Rep. Charlie Wilson, a liberal Texas Democrat with a self-destructive streak that mixes booze and beauty queens, becomes the patron of the Afghan warriors, on a mission to find a way to shoot down the Soviet Hind helicopter gunships. Gust Avrakotos, a street-tough CIA agent, refuses to kiss up to the dandies who control the CIA bureaucracy and manages to land a job supervising what would become the biggest covert war ever waged while his bosses were focusing on the ill-fated war in Nicaragua. Mike Vickers, a young former Army Green Beret just starting out in the agency, is given a chance to design and execute a military strategy and ends up turning ragtag Afghans into techno-guerrillas who take the war to the Soviets.

And then there are the women: the leggy Charlie's Angels who work in Wilson's Capitol office; Joanne Herring, the right-wing Texas socialite and honorary Pakistani consul; Carol Shannon, Charlie's belly dancer who entertains the Egyptian defense minister; Playboy centerfold Liz Wickersham, who has an important role in a Las Vegas hot tub; a Nordic blonde named Cynthia Gale Watson, whom Charlie introduced to everyone as "Snowflake"; and Annelise "Sweetums" Ilschenko, a former Miss World contestant and Charlie's fiancee until Snowflake answered the phone in Charlie's hotel room one day.

"What brought us together," Gust Avrakotos famously says, "was chasing pussy and killing Communists."

It's no wonder Hollywood wanted to make a movie out of this material. I haven't seen the Tom Hanks version of Charlie Wilson's War, but I can't imagine how it could possibly come close to capturing more than the surface of Crile's book.

Afghanistan was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, and the CIA's covert war was America's attempt at payback.

The Soviets were supposed to be providing support to the independent Afghan government. It was, in fact, their puppet government. The Red Army was supposedly just serving as advisers and suppliers of the Afghan army, which had been close to 100,000 strong at the beginning of the war. Now, after the tremendous infusion of Soviet arms and money, it was down to 30,000, and units were defecting en masse to the mujahideen. Once the Soviets had determined that the Afghans wouldn't fight, they'd found themselves with no choice but to take over the fighting. It had been the same for the United States. And just as in Vietnam, the Soviet infantry hadn't been organized to cope with a dedicated, cunning, and increasingly well-armed guerrilla force. To compensate, the Soviets, like the Americans before them, had grown increasingly dependent on air power.

Of course, today, in hindsight, the enthusiasm -- and the tons of ammunition and weapons -- we showered on the mujahideen seem more than ill-advised.

Afghanistan was the largest and most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA. But the scope and nature of this campaign has still not registered in the consciousness of most Americans. Nor is it understood that such secret undertakings inevitably have unforeseen and unintended consequences, which in this case remained largely ignored. None of the sponsors of the campaign, least of all Charlie Wilson, has ever felt responsible for the path the CIA-sponsored jihad has taken; perhaps that's because their intentions were so pure and because the specific objectives they sought were initially so overwhelmingly successful.

This book tells the story of Wilson's ability to get hundreds of millions of dollars for the covert war against the Soviet Union, the battle within the CIA to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that felt WWI rifles were all that the Afghans needed against the Soviet Army and a staggering world arms supply chain that linked China, Isreal, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England and others to supply the jihad in Afghanistan, a war run mostly by the Pakistanis, who were busy at the same time creating the Islamic bomb.

This is an excellent book on so many levels. Just fantastic.

Bodies Revealed on the bus

Saturday, I took the bus from my house to the Bodies Revealed exhibit on Alta Arden in the old CompUSA building.

The wife, a vegetarian who feels looking at bodies flayed like so much beef is distasteful, wasn't interested in going. So I set out alone to meet a couple we know who have been to several exhibits like this -- connoisseurs of the art of body plastination, you might say.

Before I offer my impression of the exhibit I need to say something about getting to the exhibit by bus -- on a weekend with a specific arrival time a prerequisite. This is not for the faint of heart.

I first turned to Google Transit and discovered there were two options: One required four buses and took an hour and seven minutes. The other only required two buses, but it took an hour and 22 minutes. RT's online route finder had the two-bus option, but not the four-bus answer. Instead, it offered a third option, a three-bus trip that would take an hour and 28 minutes.

Google Maps suggests that driving the 5.8 miles from my house to the exhibit would have taken 14 minutes. But what is time to a transitarian?

I brought my book and took the shortest option -- and four different buses. I arrived on time.

Getting home was dependent on when I got out. Each hour, at 10 minutes before the hour, the stars aligned and a No. 23 bus could pick me up and drop me off for a No. 82 bus, and I could arrive home less than an hour later.

Unfortunately, I got out of the exhibit at 12:57, too late to catch the best route. Instead, I walked over to Arden Fair and waited for the scheduled 1:20 p.m. No. 23, which arrived at 1:34. I got off at El Camino and Watt and walked over to Watt and El Camino. The bus that goes by my house wouldn't arrive for another half hour. Instead, I took a bus that goes down Watt to the Watt/I-80 light rail station and got off at Edison and walked a mile and a half home. It wasn't raining and I had some music to listen to. I made it home by 2:38. That wasn't bad, but it was a sorry example of the extremely limited weekend service. Thankfully, I wasn't trying to do this on Sunday. It is just not possible then.

The exhibit itself was disappointing. Bodies Revealed is a knockoff on the original Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds. All of the full bodies on exhibit were males. While the bodies did offer an excellent opportunity to examine muscle structure, efforts to show internal organs in place were much less successful.

Looking at the Asian features of the bodies reminded me of pending legislation to outlaw these exhibits.

Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, has introduced Assembly Bill 1519, which would prohibit the commercial profit and public display of human bodies or remains without the documented informed consent of the deceased or next-of-kin. According to Ma, exhibitors who put on these shows often obtain bodies from China.

My friends offered that the Body Worlds exhibit does a much better job. Unfortunately, the exhibit in San Jose closed on Jan. 26 and the next California Body Worlds exhibit will be in Los Angeles in March.

Why I prefer transit

Friday was simply perfect again. And the relaxing, if damp, ride to work and back was in marked contrast to the day before.

Thursday, the wife needed to have her Honda Civic Hybrid shopped around to get estimates for the repair of some damage caused by a parking lot fender-bender. Since the wife works in Rancho and the shops we have used are in West Sac and midtown, I got the assignment.

After more than 11 months without driving to work, the trip in the rain during the morning commute did nothing to convince me to give up the convenience of taking the bus. Who designed that transition between Business 80 and Highway 50, where two lanes of Highway 50 are merging just as Business 80 traffic arrives and, just to toss in a fun adventure, Highway 50 traffic is trying to cut across the merging mess to get to the 16th Street exit? An eggbeater, indeed.

Sure it took half as long to drive downtown than it takes to get there with Sacramento Regional Transit, but that missing half-hour was my reading time, my relaxed preparation for the drudgery of my workday.

There is much that RT could improve -- more frequent service, better communication with customers, increased supervision on light rail -- but the overall experience makes riding the bus a reasonable choice for people like me who find their homes and workplaces convenient to existing bus and light rail lines.

Farting around with the guys

The guy who chases co-eds isn't going to like this news from the Associated Press:

MEXICO CITY - Groping and verbal harassment is an exasperating reality for women using public transportation in this sprawling capital, where 22 million passengers cram onto subways and buses each day. Some men treat women so badly that the subway system has long had ladies-only cars during rush hour, with police segregating the sexes on the platforms.

But that hasn't helped women forced to rely on packed buses, by far the city's most-used form of public transportation — until this week.

Acting on complaints from women's groups, the city rolled out "ladies only" buses, complete with pink signs in the windshields to wave off the men. ...

On Thursday, passengers on one of the female-only buses spent most of their trip down the capital's tree-lined Reforma Avenue chatting or putting on makeup, instead of fighting off unwanted male attention. ...

Women-only buses or subways have been rolling for years in India, Brazil, Japan and other countries. Mexico City finally took the action as part of a growing responsiveness to complaints about discrimination against women, Montiel said. ...

Some women, like Maria Elena Sanchez, have learned to take matters into their own hands. A 47-year-old office messenger who uses public transportation all day, said she carries a sewing pin for protection.

"I always carry the pin so I can defend myself from abusive men," she said — adding that she's had to use it twice this month alone.

Traveling only with women, she said, makes her feel more secure and allows her to relax a bit on the way to work.

"I don't think I will use the pin on these buses," she said, giggling.

Having watched the way the guy who chases co-eds annoys women, I can sympathize with the idea. But I'm wondering about the other buses.

"Chatting or putting on makeup, instead of fighting off unwanted male attention" is how the reporter describes the women-only bus scene. What does the guys-only bus look like?

Are the guys horsing around, snapping towels at each other? Are they singing their favorite soccer team's song? Is there a lot of farting and belching?

Can there be any civilization without women on the bus?

RT's communications deficit

Sacramento Regional Transit is in the midst of contract negotiations. But of course you don't know that. At least you don't know that if you monitor www.sacrt.com.

Back in December, the RTDriver guy posted that the district had failed to convince IBEW Local 1245 of the merits of its offer. On Dec. 10, the members voted against the offer 202 to 1.

Today, contract flu apparently decimated the ranks of RT mechanics, with nearly all of them calling in sick.

The details of the sick out are being distributed to reporters and news outlets. Here's what Matthew McGuire is reporting at From The Capitol:

Nearly all of Sacramento Regional Transit’s crew of 40 mechanics called in sick this morning in an apparent job action related to their ongoing contract talks with the provider of light rail and bus service in Sacramento, RT officials said.

RT spokesman Ed Scofield said supervisors handled fueling and other early morning chores, and all light-rail trains and all but two bus lines operated normally. Scofield said a bus assigned to Route 1 in the Sunrise Mall area missed two runs, meaning riders waited 30 minutes, rather than 15, for their bus to arrive.

A bus assigned to Route 51 along Broadway missed one run, resulting in a maximum wait of 30 minutes, RT said.

Scofield said more mechanics, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, could call in sick for later shifts today, but RT officials were preparing to have supervisors fill in.

Service is being disrupted. Riders are left wondering what's happened. And nothing is said on RT's Web site.

There's nothing under "Service Status Alert," despite the promise:

Frequently Updated

RT makes special efforts to provide timely information to our customers including updates through our call center and web site. Updated information will be posted to the web site (www.sacrt.com) and through our call center 321-BUSS (2877) on a regular basis.

There's nothing under press releases, even though a press release is obviously in circulation.

I have no idea whether RT has offered its workers a fair deal. I don't know if the unions are featherbedding and otherwise keeping RT from improving efficiency. What I do know is that RT has a real problem with its commitment to serve its riders if it can't do better at keeping riders informed.

UPDATE AT 5 P.M.: The Bee had the story on its Web site by 9:29 a.m. KCRA had the story up by 7:32 a.m., with updates at 12:17. The KCRA story, however, was hardly worth the effort, at least what was left after the "update." The MSNBC version of KCRA's story was posted at 12:34 and just as useless.

Still nothing at www.sacrt.com

A little more historical perspective

What became of Charlie of the MTA?

P.S. Thanks, Roger