In a press event just after midnight yesterday, Mayor Eric Carcitty announced that Metro is tripling bus service.
The announcement was made at the Silver Line freeway bus station at the intersection of the 110 and 105 Freeways. Reporter queries were mostly greeted with shouts of "what?" as freeway noise emulated the extraordinary technical glitches that plagued Metro's last board meeting.
Metro Operations Chief James Galacre, as far as we could hear, led off stating, "We got all this federal stimulus money - more than $3 billion. Believe me, we really really really tried to find non-operations things to spend it on." Galacre asserted that operating fast, convenient, reliable bus service was "going a bit too far" but there was just so much federal stimulus funding sloshing around at Metro, that the agency had to try something, and "we did need more bus service to transport all the police deployed on the system, plus for occasionally transporting police and detainees when there are big protests."
"Metro can only spend so much money on freeway-widening, park-and-ride, micro-transit, monorails, and police - and there's only so much shelf space for plans for Bus Rapid Transit, walking, and bicycling - at some point the conversation has to turn to funding bus service," noted Carcitty.
Galacre repeated past claims that this whole shebang will just confuse and frustrate Metro's remaining customers, "Improving bus service - especially at a time when we're doing this NextGen re-vamp to make bus service better - is going to surprise the heck out of riders."
A spokesperson from the Armada for Continuity Transmit, speaking on conditions of strict anonymity, replied simply: "We think it's some kind of trick - like Metro announcing a future fareless transit initiative the same day they cut bus service by 20 percent. We're expecting a real announcement could come some time later today, after the media have already gone back to sleep. The rumor is that Metro might actually triple the service, while saving money by closing down all its bus stops. Also, don't get your hopes up, because whenever the Metro board announces stuff like this, staff just waits a month and then announces why Metro can't actually run more service."
Speaking of Metro's fareless initiative, in an internal memo revealed by @MumBuLLL, Metro has further delayed its fareless system initiative and reduced the scope of the initiative's temporary trial pilot. Metro initially announced a broad fareless program would start in January 2021, but it now appears (pending several studies and board approvals) that the fareless pilot has been pushed back to 2029, in order to not interfere with planned sweeps coincidentally coinciding with the 2028 Olympics.
Note: This article is an April Fool's Day parody.
