Boviosity!

OK, I'm going to take the plunge and get back onto mass transit.

I think mass transit is a wonderful idea whose time is way overdue. But that doesn't mean that I am willing to take whatever junky mass transit authority is foisted off on me by local government.

Enter MARTA, Atlanta's mass transit.

There was a time when I didn't own a car and had to use MARTA to get from home to school to work. In other words, I was square in MARTA's target demographic. Like many, many people who have been forced to ride MARTA for any length of time, the second, the hot second I got a car, I no longer even considered MARTA. It's been blatantly obvious from every customer service interaction I've ever had with MARTA that they regard their passengers as a captive constituency.

The buses are relatively nice but they not only don't run frequently enough (which I could get around by appropriate scheduling); they don't stick to the published schedules! I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck waiting 30 or more minutes for a bus after making sure that I got to the bus stop well before the scheduled time.

OK, fine, I'm no longer a candidate for the bus service anyway. I live in Gwinnett County, which has a transit authority but no buses in my area yet. So I'll be driving to a train station and parking. But MARTA's trains aren't much better.

They're unpredictable. Some days you go to the station, wait a few minutes, get on a train, and go. But about 30% of the time, there are inexplicable delays. And god forbid there's a crisis on the tracks. Last time I was a MARTA regular, they had two incidents close together of jumpers over the tracks. Both times, MARTA was totally unequal to the task, which was to get its passengers around these blocks. Did they send buses to ferry people around the affected stations? Are you kidding? No, we sat and waited at the new end of the line. When that happened the last time, I simply went back to work and waited for news that the situation had cleared up. Did MARTA make any attempt to get local media to announce that riders could get through again? Are you kidding? The interesting thing about these incidents was that, despite what had to be numerous complaints after the first incident (I know I complained, in writing and on the phone), there was no change in the passenger experience between the first incident and the second.

But it doesn't take a crisis to slow the system down to a crawl. Some days there's never any reason given why I waited 20 minutes for a train.

Fortunately, though, the trains are somewhat comfortable and air conditioned. Most days.

We'll see how it goes. I'll report here.