Fireworks are worth shutting down a major city.
Said no one ever, but for the dipshit who decided that’s what Cincinnati was going to do.
For the second year in a row, I have been confounded by a preposterous barrier: at 7pm today, all the bridges shut down. Every one of them. For everyone. For the second year in a row, this has disrupted well laid plans with my boyfriend in Kentucky. This year it was fireworks at a friend’s house. Last year it was an anniversary dinner already in the oven.
Now let’s be clear; disruptions are normal in some transportation systems and that’s why we have redundancies. Bus not working? Take a bike. No go there? Hail a cab. Still no? Walk!
What we’re dealing with here is a complete breakdown in the whole system for every mode. There is no tunnel under the river. Every crossing is shut. With the number of boats in the water, swimming isn’t even safe. I was lucky last year though: one of my redundancies worked. After trying to bike across literally every bridge, the fourth police officer I talked to told me TANK might be running. It was, and I caught the last one over with my bike, arriving very late to dinner, but still, arriving.
This time though, I didn’t make it. Seeing the bridges were closed, and remembering last year, I headed directly to the TANK stop on fourth. I got there and was relieved to see half a dozen people at the stop. Now normally, this is a good sign. It means that the bus is almost there, because people have had time to pile up.
But in this case, it was a sign of TANK’s complete failure to communicate the fact that they simply stopped operating the most critical link in their whole system.1
When SORTA shuts down a stop, or changes service on short notice, at least they post signs literally over top of the bus stop signs. “This stop is closed temporarily. Walk to …” Something like that. (Other agencies often go quite a bit beyond that.)
For TANK’s downtown stops tonight, there was absolutely nothing. And as I write this, I’m certain that there are people sitting on those dirty little benches in front of the Federal Reserve cursing a late bus that they don’t know will simply never come.
Now, without defending the logic of the shut-down decision, I presume that it goes something like this: People driving on bridges would get distracted and wreck their cars…yadda yadda yadda. Now let’s not even get into why humans on foot cant cross (I can feel my blood pressure really starting to rise at this point). Let’s assume that that’s the logic and point out that the only people who can and do drive TANK buses are professional drivers who presumably can’t be so easily distracted, and certainly not on an otherwise empty road. Why the flying fuck can’t TANK keep running normally through the fireworks??? I understand that some stupid car-blind engineer might think to shut down the bridges, but what really gets me is that no one at TANK had the balls or the ability or perhaps the desire to stand up for themselves and insist that they continue to operate a critical service through this silly spectacle.
That failure being swallowed of necessity, it’s even more galling that they didn’t think to post even one notice at their single most active stop2 where, as I say, people are almost certainly still waiting at this very moment for a bus that won’t ever come.
I’m properly pissed. I’m pissed at the City. I’m pissed at TANK for not standing up for themselves, and I’m pissed at TANK doubly for not telling it’s passengers that they won’t be coming. To my mind, this is as big a (short-term) failure as a transit system is capable of making.
TANK, you should be ashamed. Learn from it, but feel shame no less for that pragmatic consolation. TANK failed it’s riders tonight.