METRO Responds to Chronicle Column
Monday, March 09, 2009 5:04 PM
A week ago, Houston Chronicle reporter Rosanna Ruiz wrote a column about her experiment riding the bus at her editor's suggestion. Click here to read it.
Here's a response by Raequel Roberts, METRO's associate vice president of marketing/media and corporate communication, which was published in the Chronicle on March 7. She is pictured here in a photo taken today by Ernest Chou, senior community relations rep at METRO.
"Houston METRO encourages everyone to ride METRO, including Houston Chronicle reporters who occasionally cover METRO.
"To neophytes, riding transit does require some homework and can take some time to master. We have a project underway to straighten out routes that have evolved over the years into zigzag patterns. Any visitor to New York City finds venturing into the subway system a bit daunting, but a day or two of experience leaves many singing the praises of the system. It's a maturation we often observe with first time riders to METRORail.
"We are glad the reporter noticed METRO's buses are clean. With more than 150,000 riders each day, that's a lot of traffic through one's front door.
"We were, however, perplexed by her statement that one must input intersections, not addresses, to use our Trip Planner. The trip planner works with addresses, as it does with landmarks. We recently added Google Transit to our site as an added form of assistance.
"On the matter of fares and our operators: Operators monitor fares to look for abuses of the system, but their primary responsibility is to drive buses safely and adhere to schedules. One of the goals of METRO's new METRO Q® Fare Card was to cut down on disputes between operators and customers. We want to keep operators just as safe as our passengers.
"Buses lurching and creaking? Well, they're buses, not limousines. It's too bad the reporter didn't board one of our new hybrid buses. These buses are so quiet, 
we've actually had passengers fall asleep and miss their stops. We're putting more and more of these on the streets each day.
"And, on the matter of travel time in a car vs. bus. In day-to-day street driving, no, a bus probably can't beat a car to your destination. People ride mass transit for many reasons. Some, because they have no car, some because they realize riding a bus is cheaper than driving a car, others because they believe it is the environmentally right thing to do. And then there are times when METRO is quicker, as anyone sitting on a freeway at rush hour can attest to, when our Park & Ride buses zoom past them on the HOV.
"METRO isn't perfect - we've fixed a clogged drain that caused leaking on the bus the reporter rode - but we provide a valuable, clean and safe service for one of the lowest fares in the nation."