The four feet of snow that fell during Blizzardammerung and its kissing cousin Blizzardammerung II linger on the Maryland landscape like a festering malignancy. I look out at the frozen wastes from my sixth floor office, and I think I should elk and moose wandering the glacier that now lays across the hills and dales of the Old Line State.<\/p>\n
And, from my office, I see the Light Rail as it runs through the business park.<\/p>\n
The Light Rail, despite running entirely above ground, has been running pretty much consistently on time since last week.<\/p>\n
Baltimore’s subway, however, has been something else entirely.<\/p>\n
The Maryland Transit Administration<\/a> website reports on outages and delays on the various lines.<\/p>\n It also lies.<\/p>\n Yesterday, for instance, it reported that service had been restored on the entire length of the subway line and that there were no delays.<\/p>\n Only, service had not<\/i> been restored on the entire length of the line. The line was running a single track from Old Court to Owings Mills, which resulted in, yes, delays<\/i>.<\/p>\n But, let’s rewind back a day. Let’s go to Monday.<\/p>\n On Monday, service on the subway had been restored only to Old Court. From there, the website reported that a shuttle bus was running out to the end of the subway line at Owings Mills. And the woman at the booth in the Old Court station confirmed this when I asked her.<\/p>\n However, the reality was quite different.<\/p>\n I arrived at Old Court at 7:15. I rode the escalator up from the platform. I walked through the turnstiles. I walked down the long tunnel to the parking lot. It was cold, it was snowing, and there was sleet mixed in. I waited curbside for the shuttle bus; there were already about twenty people, presumably from the previous train, waiting for the shuttle.<\/p>\n Buses came. None were buses heading to Owings Mills. They were heading east and south, into Baltimore. None were heading west.<\/p>\n More trains arrived. More passengers departed their trains, made their way to the curb.<\/p>\n More snow fell. More sleet fell.<\/p>\n Seven-fifteen turned to seven-thirty. Turned to eight. Turned to eight thirty.<\/p>\n The crowd grew, and tempers flared. Some would occasionally rush a bus, trying to berate the driver into abandoning his route to take us to Owings Mills. One driver spent several minutes on the phone with a dispatcher, trying to figure out what what going on (as it was now 8:40), only to get angry and drive off when someone started pounding on her bus’ door.<\/p>\n Finally, at five past nine, a bus heading to<\/i> Owings Mill arrived. How the large crowd fit into the bus I don’t know. The bus must have been dimensionally transcendent.<\/p>\n An hour fifty minutes in the cold and the falling snow and sleet.<\/p>\n Yesterday’s story was not nearly as compelling. Arrive at Old Court, disembark, wait for a train said to be coming ten minutes behind that will carry us on all the way to Owings Mills. Instead, it was half an hour.<\/p>\n I know, MTA has a lot of track that they are still working on; much of the track above ground — in other words, between Owings Mills and West Cold Spring — is not that<\/i> clear. I saw teams digging out the track, in particular the power rail, with shovels on the commute in this morning. Perhaps a few days of forty-plus temperatures will melt some of the snow and improve the passability of the subway tracks. Perhaps.<\/p>\n But then I think about that hour and fifty minutes Monday night, waiting for a shuttle bus. :-\/<\/p>\n Maybe that<\/i>‘s why I’ve been sneezy since yesterday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The four feet of snow that fell during Blizzardammerung and its kissing cousin Blizzardammerung II linger on the Maryland landscape like a festering malignancy. I look out at the frozen wastes from my sixth floor office, and I think I should elk and moose wandering the glacier that now lays across the hills and dalesContinue reading “On Maryland Transit Suckitude”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[424,734,4093,605,577,363],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-baltimore","tag-blizzardammerung","tag-life","tag-light-rail","tag-subway","tag-weather","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}