We previously noted that METRO’s vice-president of PR something-or-another (sorry, we aren’t going to look it up — blogger’s prerogative) Raequel Roberts sent a letter to the Chronicle expressing displeasure with the newspaper’s recent coverage of METRO.
Apparently, the letter was edited to save space (or perhaps as a courtesy, to save the eyes and brain cells of readers), so METRO’s expensive blogger posted the overly long, overly defensive letter in its full, umm, glory on the transit/land-development organization’s blog.
That prompted some interesting comments from one reader of the blog. Since few people read METRO’s very expensive taxpayer-funded blog (but many people read our small, privately funded blog), we thought we’d reproduce Don G‘s comments here:
Rosanna Ruiz was apparently correct in her statement about using the trip planner. It flunked my several attempts when I placed my house address and Ben Taub for a trip tomorrow. It correctly inserted my total address and after selecting the correct choice for Ben Taub, it inserted that data. I then clicked on the “Get Trip Plan” button and zip, natta, nothing happened. All it did was refresh the screen.
Prior attempts (before I read the story) required me to tell it the intersections where a bus might be.
What “SHOULD” happen is for it to tell you first, how far you have to walk and an estimated walk time, followed by the scheduled trips and the walk at the other end.
I seriously doubt Metro will every do that because it would show you how long it’s going to take from your door step to the destination door step.
and
I use the Net all the time to locate and get to places.
I just now decided to try the Goggle Transit deal and lo and behold, it provided me with directions, total distance and the total travel time!
Of course…that was NOT using ‘public transit’!
It showed me that to get from Beaujolais Lane (with exact address entered) to Maroneal :ane (with exact address entered) as a 15.7 mile trip taking 28 minutes.
Now, when I changed it to ‘public transit’ with the exact same parameters (and I used tomorrow morning at 8 AM BTW) it gave me this glorious statement:
“Sorry, we don’t have transit schedule data for a trip from 1359 Beaujolais Ln, Houston, Texas 77077 to 2508 Maroneal St, Houston, Texas 77030 at the time and date you specified.”
Now I want to ask, who should we believe? Metro spokeswoman Raequel Roberts who has a vested interest in selling Metro as a gospel? Or should we accept Rosanna Ruiz,who tried it and surely is a skilled user of the net?
Metro continually seems to sell puff stories rather than providing truth to the tax payers who make it what it is.
Remember, Raequel is the one who compared stray current to a nine volt battery1 Insanely depressing comment that time.
PS: I even tried Raequel’s address…to my same destination and it worked PERFECTLY for car but failed to recognize public transit. And, FYI, her address failed also using their own “trip planner”
I would like for Mary to tell Raequel to write a apology correction to the Houston Chronicle to be published as a Letter to the Editor as well as a letter of apology to the author.
We won’t be holding our breath for that to happen!
