I do see more bikes on the streets, but I’m not so sure drivers are being more mindful. My self and a number of friends of mine who are street smart vehicular cyclists have been hit in the past couple months. I regularly deal with cars revving engines at me, cutting me off, and on bike to work day I was honked at and flipped off for trying to make a left turn into my company lot after hand signaling and moving lanes. I do a lot of my biking in eco conscience Santa Monica too. Although most drivers are for the most part respectful, I think we have a long way to go before I use the words courteous to bike riders together in reference to Los Angeles motorists.

Consider my comments amended from “Overall WAD’s comment demonstrates just how out of touch MTA is” to “Overall WAD’s comment demonstrates just how out of touch MTA ***and it’s supporters*** are.”

When I hear the term “common sense” I reach for my gun,

but typically I just press ctrl+W

I need to ask because no grown adult would throw a tantrum as preschool as your post in number 7.

First of all, I am not affiliated with Metro as an employee or in any other capacity. I am not expecting you or anyone to do anything. I have been riding the buses and trains for well over a quarter century, and I am sharing my knowledge about how the system works. In particular, a Metro division supervisor explained to an audience one day about customer service. It was his job to act on customer complaints and discipline problem drivers, but a lot of the information he got from the customer hotline was so vague that he could not act on the complaint. Plus, drivers have both union and civil service protections to appeal any disciplinary actions that may go on their record.

If the information is too vague, he wasn’t going to bust his ass doing detective work on something that was only going to go on a driver’s record.

And his job was not to protect the subordinates, even though he was a former bus driver himself. He had the power and the duty to enforce customer service problems. So he explained to the audience what they should do to file an effective complaint. And just to show how serious he was about acting on complaints, he gave the audience his business card to call him personally to file a complaint and not even go through 1-800-COMMUTE! This was unprecedented. This was almost like receiving inside information.

The four items Metro requires are: date and time, location, bus number and line number. These data are sufficient enough to find the driver. Metro can resolve the matter in a day.

Items 5, 6 and 7 are not required because these are much harder to obtain. Only bus riders see the driver’s badge number (the four- or five-digit number on the shirt sleeve). The direction the bus was traveling is somewhat redundant, and out-of-towners may not orient themselves to our street grid and wouldn’t know which direction a bus was traveling. As for number 7 — the division number that set you into apoplexy — this is a detail irrelevant to the riding public. Most riders don’t know what a division is, nor do they need to. However, I have found that once I started to include the division number, I’ve gotten complaint responses within a half-hour. And not the boilerplate “Your concerns matter a lot to us. We’ll look into the matter” e-mail, either. Metro will actually tell me how it dealt with the case.

What Metro will not say, and cannot say, is how the driver was disciplined. That’s a privacy disclosure law.

I have to go into so much pedantic detail, because I can bet you will still stamp your feet and bullwhip your blankie to just further maintain that Metro is a stupid bully and must make nice.

There was a time when I used to think like you, too. The only thing is, I grew up. I discovered that there was a big, complex world beyond the tip of my nose, and I reached the age of reason. I also had teachers, family and friends that did not allow me to roam through the world as a functional retard. And I was not even a member of the GI Generation — hell, I was born in the period after the Vietnam war ended but before affluence and constant electronic stimulation rendered the species with a sense of entitlement that’s twice personal capita income and an intellectual maturity age that’s half of an adult shoe size.

Case in point: You demand that Metro must go through a reorganization of enormous time and money, because customers have lost the ability to memorize simple data and recall it at a later time to file a basic complaint. So, while Metro must cope with a flood of new riders and not cancel service because of high fuel and labor costs, here comes yet another expense. Metro must now procure a database vendor, customize the software, test it and train hundreds of employees how to use it properly, and come up with a backup plan should the system fail. So, under the most optimal conditions, Metro could take two years and a couple of million dollars to come up with a technological solution. Assuming it works, it will end up doing nothing different than what employees are doing now. And the customers have the nerve to continue sniveling!

So, Alex, your little hissy-fit misidentified the problem and your remedy created more problems than it solved. Metro had no desired outcomes, it must now replace the money it wasted, and customers are still pissed.

Yet, for the cost of about, oh, $0, customers can complain just the way they do now and still get results, imperfect as they may be.

I hope you’re happy.

This knowledge, by the way, is not from a PhD in public administration or a career in public transportation. It’s a concept that in lay terms is referred to as “common sense.” Once you get the basics of it down, you’ll probably find it useful and even quite fascinating.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must be going now. I’ve already taken up more than my share of this fine blog’s bandwidth to educate you on the theory and practice of complaint-filing. You don’t have to thank me. I’m just lending a little help to a fellow rider.

By the way, there are a couple of transit users on the interwebs who actively follow Metro news and commentary closely, and help make changes on their respective governance councils. Had it been one of them who had seen this message, they would not have been as kind as I was to you.

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

The down side of this equation, however, is that while I am seeing a lot more people riding bikes as transportation, almost none of the new riders seem to be following traffic laws, or common sense from a safety perspective. (Yes, I recognize the regular bike riders I have been seeing over past years versus new riders this year.) I regularly see people:

1) Riding on the sidewalks, and then blowing right into intersections when they reach them (cars aren’t looking for things going at bike speed on sidewalks, even if the rider has the light, or “walk” sign)

2) Riding on the wrong side of the road

3) Riding the wrong way on the sidewalk (and then blowing into intersections)

4) Turn left from the far right lane, across 4 lanes of traffic, where there isn’t really a gap (as if somehow they should be treated like a pedestrian with the “walk” sign)

5) Unpredictably changing from being in the crosswalk to being in the road and back again.

Somehow we need to educate these folks on proper riding or we are going to lose the good will we seem to be gaining, and will be less safe as drivers will feel that our actions are less predictable, and therefore won’t know what to expect from our riding.

Justin

8. All complaints must be filed in triplicate, on form 27B-6, with a stamped receipt.

Metro can get with the 21st century and get some kind of computer thingy – I think they’re called databases – which can associate the bus to a division number.

Overall WAD’s comment demonstrates just how out of touch MTA is. If you’ve got a huge fleet then you obviously need a large complaint department. If it’s not large enough than Metro needs to allocate more funds to expand the department. That – or get sued to pieces by people getting run over because the quality control is so bad. Don’t give me baloney about why you have difficulty handling my complaint – spend that energy handling the complaint.

For instance, if you call and say “I saw a driver do such-and-such on Wilshire Boulevard …”, the customer agent will press the caller for more details. There are more than 100 buses running on Wilshire. It takes a long time to track down which driver did what.

Also, hyperbole will get your complaint in the trash can. If you call and say your bus was an hour late — riders do this all the time because they think they’ll get results — Metro can easily verify if a bus is very late. The complaint-takers can quickly tell if a customer is BSing.

If you want to know how to file a good complaint against Metro, remember this information when calling or writing the agency. First, be factual, not histrionic. Metro looks at the facts of a complaint, not the emotional stress a customer suffers.

Then, to make sure the complaint is filed quickly, give as much information as you can. Include:
1. Date and time. (required)
2. Location of incident. (required)
3. Four-digit bus number. (required)
4. Line number. (required)
5. Badge number of driver.
6. Direction bus is traveling.
7. Division number.

Virtually no customer knows about number 7, but it is the most helpful for routing routing complaints. Division number is the yard from where the bus operates. The division number is typically found on the windshield in a circle, or placed near the four-digit bus number. It will say something like GC-1, WSC-7 or SFV-15.

there is a disparity between the responses, and metro has done very little to show that it cares about people sending complaints.

Keep in mind, though, that there is an accident protocol Metro follows. The driver is required to report an accident and must remain on the scene until a supervisor and/or police and fire arrive on scene. The driver must write a written report and try to get passenger testimonies as witnesses. The supervisor and police can also gather their own witness testimonies, in case riders give different accounts. The driver must then submit to a mandatory drug test.

Metro is self-insured, but its risk management must follow other government and industry insurance standards. So it performs a formal investigation and fault-finding.

Should the driver be at fault, it’s a point on their driving record. Only a couple of violations can result in automatic termination, and if drugs are found in the system, the license can be suspended.

so… that makes for a really rewarding, satisfying experience. as far as we know… it could be sent into some vortex. there’s no way cyclists have any idea what their comments can do.

metro should do something about that.