November 2, 2006

I arrived at Jack London Square at 9:24 for the late 527 San Jose train that was supposed to come at (estimated on-line when I left my apartment at 9:04am) 9:29.   At 9:29 a train showed up, but was labeled Sacramento (error 1).

No arrival announcement was made on the reader board in the waiting area outside (error 2).

No arrival announcement was made orally by station attendants (error 3).

No arrival announcement was made orally by the 527 (error 4) conductors despite their train being labeled 518 to sacramento (which I didn't realize was wrong and was from hours before until I checked the schedule).

The reader board continued to say that 527 was "delayed" for twenty minutes after the train left and included no arrival time in the delay notices before and after the train's actual arrival (error 5)!

The train showed up and left without me because no indication had been made that it was my train!

I've been doing this same exact commute daily since September 1 with monthly passes.  The price just went up five percent for the pass and now I get even less value out of it to the tune of another five percent (one day in twenty work days is totally messed up).

I can't assume that southbound trains are the correct train for a few reasons.  Trains other than my own show up late and out of order that are originating at okj or are continuing to oac and stopping or turning around.  The okj trains are few.  When I miss an okj train I have to wait hours for the next one.  The next one wasn't until the afternoon.

I bike nine miles a day for this commute and am a strong advocate of public transit.  For two years I was State Secretary of the Oregon Pacific Green Party, was on the Coordinating Committee for another two years, and was a local chapter secretary for another two years.  I helped run candidates whose platforms were to subsidize public transit for positions ranging from governor to senate to transit district representatives.

I even work at a company that's responsible for many of the multi-modality routing systems available and navigation systems you'd find in everything from cell phones to websites.  They even subsidize my train ticket through reimbursing most of the cost.

My faith in public transit will never waver, however, it's not my faith you should be concerned about.  I can excuse the lateness due to freight traffic since I know freight has priority on the Union Pacific lines ever since we privatized and subsidized the private train industry to the point of granting them human rights in the Southern Pacific v. Santa Clara decision the 1880s.

But, if conductors, station agents, and other employees are simply unable to do a crucial part of their job all at once, public transit is not feasible.  

A system where people are irresponsible in assuming "somebody else" will communicate the proper train signage is not way to ensure train travel is usable.  All parts of the system should be working to high degrees of efficiency so that when the fallback communication methods are needed they fall into place and actually work.  If only half the time each component works, In riding the train over eighty times, assuming an equal distribution of error, a five factor redundancy system such that you have would require the probability of each component working to be around 58.37%.  Almost half the time, each part fails to participate. 58.37% is an F grade.  In reality train signage is almost never wrong.  The times it is wrong, I've seen once on bart, and a couple times on amtrak.  Thus the probability for the other contributing error events to happen is even higher, on the order of most of the time.

As I'm a participative individual, I expect a response on what corrective action has been taken to ensure that the probability that each element of the communication system works.  Personally, I think most of the problem can be attributed to the conductors simply not paying attention to their own train's signage and taking corrective action, however I'm at a loss to understand why all the other signage was void of information that could have given a hint that the train that was at the station was actually the 527 train.

If an expert and non-disabled user such as myself can't get on the correct train, what are we also to do about disabled people?

I look forward to your response and I am willing to help craft a solution that can improve service to the point that an error such as this is simply intractable.  There may have been a systemic problem that can be remedied that caused the cluster of errors to form, but I'd have to have detailed knowledge of how the communications infrastructure works to correct it.  I am curious to learn more so that I can assist the board and authority to come to a realistic solution to improve service.