unfortunately I had a 10am meeting that I had to make. ended up paying for a $40 Uber ride to office from Anderson. There was no way I was waiting in that line to just wait again at Chinook. I agree, completely ridiculous response from Calgary Transit.
How they don't have an immediate contingency built in for break downs and severe service interruptions during rush hour when your trying to move thousands of people is beyond me
Sounds like a transformer on a pole between Heritage and Southland Stations.
Robbob - the garage is right at Anderson, but it being morning rush hour, there are few serviceable buses (there's usually at least some in the garage undergoing maintenance) and only a few drivers kicking around at those times. If it were the tail end of rush hour when many buses would otherwise be going out of service and could just be re-dispatched out, it would be a different story.
It is true that in these situations, communication is key. It is a bit tricky because the service outage is almost always a fluid and dynamic situation - no one knows just how quickly the fire (or collision, or medical emergency or train breakdown, etc.) will be cleared, and some time has to pass before you know the scale of the problem and if it's going to be 20 minutes or 2 hours. That being said, I totally agree that a message with an almost-worst-case timeline of "within an hour" like Southside suggested would be good.
Girlysports - the best situation really is to get people to the first in-service station and then shuttle buses. The long waits and masses of people certainly isn't ideal but it's a much higher-order of transit being crippled and being forced to use a much lower capacity band-aid. It is what it is. There's stations in between Somerset and Anderson that some people will need to use and there aren't just buses waiting at every station for an LRT operator to hop into, abandoning their train on the tracks, and drive at the drop of a hat.
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The answer in all of these situations is to immediately start walking to the nearest bus stop that jumps between stations or just walk the gap yourself.
It's not a communication problem it's a volume problem. You likely need a bus for each train car. The round trip between stations by bus is about 30 min. So that is 6 full trains or 18 buses that need to be scrambled during rush hour. And because it takes you 15 minutes to get the first bus there you now have a backlog of 9 buses.
You just can't catch up. Bail early before other people realize it's hopeless and do the same thing.
However, when there is a problem such as this mornings issue, the response is typically terrible.
They just start dumping customers at the train station saying buses will take you the rest of the way, or to the next point. As I said earlier, they seem to have that default plan, they just can't act on it, bring it to fruition. The trains keep bringing people in while there are no buses. Since they don't have people on the ground dealing with the situation, people don't know where to go and Anderson station this morning looked like scenes out of TWD. People just shuffling along, like zombies, following, not really going anywhere in particular. An hour passes and you have hundreds, perhaps in excess of 1,000 people all standing there waiting for those buses that were promised. The plan is fine, the execution SUCKS!
My brother is a transit officer for Calgary Transit and tells me all the time about these issues.
One of them being the chain of command and how everybody scared of their own dam shadow to make decisions when everybody clearly knows the answer.
By the time the request goes to the manager of managers and that person's manager approves the request, than that's what happens. Cluster F**
The same scenario happens during emergency situation's when life and death are at stake. Look at the Calgary Floods of 2013 and the Fort Mac wild fires last year.
In Calgary's case they had all the emergency response people waiting on approval from the Mayor, who happened to be out of town to approve an evacuation. Since Nenshi was out of town, than it went to the acting Mayor or Deputy Mayor who was designated. Thankfully nobody died as a direct result of the floods but we can all agree it was too close for comfort for a lot of people. Flood waters ravaging downtown city streets by the time the evacuation order was given.
In Fort Mac's case, the fire was literally at people's front door-step and people are then looking at evacuating with minutes to spare.
I am not an expert here but sometimes when obvious decisions need to be made it needs to be done quickly.
