Yesterday morning’s traffic reports told the tale of several deer that were struck on the Dulles Toll Road. We talked earlier about some of the things that were being done about this, and someone sent me aWeb address. File this under, “You can find anything and everything on the Internet”. There is a Web site called deercrash.com that is run by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know and more.
By the way, Metro is now providing a service that allows you to upload its maps to your iPod. I guess this is for people who have very good eyesight or who don’t want to wait until they get to the stations to read the maps. Visit www.wmata.com/ipodMap/default.cfm. Don asks: “What’s with this special reserved area in the Metro parking lots? There’s a special permit only area that takes up A LOT of the Vienna parking lots. What gives and how does one get one of these permits!?”
Those are the reserved spaces that can be had, when available, for $45 a month. That fee is on top of the daily fee that you would still have to pay for parking there. As you might imagine, the availability of reserved spaces is not good at the terminus stations, but it’s still worth a try if you can spend the extra money. Visit wmata.com/metrorail/monthly-reserved.cfm to get the application. Dean writes: “One additional problem politicians have in getting support from voters for a new line (above the high costs in financial and environmental concerns, which at the present time I think are politically insurmountable for the location offered) is the lack of concern for the current problems of Red Line users in Montgomery County. As you know, the Red Line has maintenance problems, timeliness and performance problems, parking and passenger pick up problems (at Shady Grove) and, most importantly (because of the aggravation of those of us who ride all the way to the end), the Grosvenor/Shady Grove scheduling (I do know about the 18-month trial for all Shady Grove trains from a prior column). I can only say that until the Red Line problems are cured, I see no reason to support a Purple Line or the politicians who support it.”
Terry writes:”Clearly, the people who run Metro have chosen to ignore the scores of customer complaints about ‘STEP BACK!’ It’s obvious that many of the people who run Metro never ride the trains during rush hour. If they did, they might observe how passengers routinely ignore the bossy scoldings of the ‘STEP BACK!’ lady. If they rode the trains on a regular basis, they might also notice how incredibly annoying the repeated scoldings are, stop after stop after stop. Therefore, we paying customers are stuck with another one of Metro’s bad ideas — until they cough up the next bad idea to stick their paying customers with. I’m thinking seriously about firing Metro and driving to work every day. ‘STEP BACK!’’’
Frankly I hope that the people who run Metro don’t ride the trains that often. I can’t imagine them not making changes after a couple rush hours of those repetitive messages.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to Steve@sprawlandcrawl.com
