Aug
13
Express buses don’t stop there. Ever.
By
The MTA should have put their old bus fleets back in service last week.
Yet another story on the MTA’s utter inability to coordinate communications during an emergency came my way this afternoon. This time, the Daily News reports on Express Bus drivers who didn’t stop at local stops during last Wednesday’s flood because no one at MTA headquarters told them to.
What you hear now is the sound of millions of people smacking their foreheads at once. Pete Donohue has the gory details:
Hundreds of empty MTA express buses didn’t stop to pick up subway riders stranded by Wednesday’s torrential rains because no one told bus drivers to alter their routes.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s NYC Transit division has about 600 express coaches, and the MTA Bus Company, another division, has several hundred more. Combined, they could have moved thousands who were stranded by crippled subways and unable to board jam-packed local buses. But the MTA, which was caught offguard by the storm’s severity, didn’t issue an emergency directive for express bus drivers to make additional stops, even though the deluge crippled the entire underground system, union and transit officials said yesterday.
Here we have yet another salvo in the call for the MTA to adopt a better communications system. For his part, MTA CEO Elliot “Lee” Sander thinks he could have asked express bus drivers to change their routes. “I believe that I have the authority under an emergency situation to ask all employees to do different things than they normally would do,” Sander said. “It’s in their contract.”
Coming not a moment too soon to the MTA: Common sense. I hope.
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“Nobody at MTA Headquarters told them to” -
Does that make ANY sense? What, someeone figures Mr. Kalikow or Mr. Sander is supposed to start dispatching individual buses when it rains? ?
The drivers could’ve called for instructions on their radios, or the Division should have notified Route Dispatchers.
MTAHQ should certainly figure out a way to install 21st Century communications in a 19th Century transit system, as soon as practically possible. Bus dispatching is the job of individual NYCT DoB Divisions.
Thanks for the correction, Peter. I appreciate the better info.
I think you’ve hit upon my point and made it better than I did. Someone at Division should have notified the route dispatches. But who would notify Division? Is that someone at MTAHQ or is that an independent decision that those at Division can make? To me, it stills seems to be all about communication.
This drove me crazy. I saw literally hundreds of empty express buses that had completed their runs driving empty through Midtown with “Not in Service” signs at a time when people were desperately trying to get into jammed local buses.