Nearly a year later, MARTA makes no apologies for shutting down its bus service for two days last January when a snow and ice storm paralyzed metro Atlanta. Yes, a lot of regular riders couldn’t get to work, and some people lost their wages. But officials said that canceling service was safer than trying to run transit and getting vehicles and riders stuck or injured due to frozen roadways.
“A bus is a pretty big thing to be sliding down the street,” Dwight A. Ferrell, MARTA’s deputy general manager and chief operating officer, told me recently.
On the flip side, MARTA trains ran nonstop during the storm, although lengthy delays occurred. For some who ventured to work, it was the only way to get around. (The agency runs trains all night in icy weather, even during off-hours, Ferrell said, to keep switches and its third rail power source from freezing over.)
MARTA officials still take exception to criticism that the cancellation of bus service last January was done haphazardly, on the spur of the moment. The storm hit Sunday night, Jan. 9, and Ferrell said MARTA was seriously monitoring weather forecasts the Wednesday before that.
“One of the things that sort of stung was the notion that we did this capriciously, without much forethought,” MARTA spokesman Lyle Harris said. “But the decision to not run transit service, for a transit agency, is one of the most difficult decisions that we could ever make.”
Ferrell recently talked about changes the agency has made to do a better job with the next winter storm.
“We are being more proactive to make sure that we have accommodations to put up our employees overnight,” he said. He estimated that MARTA had only 20 percent to 30 percent of its usual workforce available to operate rail service during January’s storm. MARTA has 4,600 employees total.
MARTA also has decentralized its supply of sand and de-icing materials; instead of being stored in one place, it’s now spread out around the system, “so we can deploy it faster,” Ferrell said.
For paratransit Mobility vehicles that take disabled people to vital services such as dialysis centers, the agency has acquired tire chains to help them navigate neighborhoods where they often pick up folks at their doors.
Certainly, none of this strikes one as radical innovation. You also wonder, why weren’t some of these moves made before this? It’s not as if we haven’t had stormy reminders over the years: The nasty weather in January 2000 during Super Bowl week in Atlanta, for example, made national headlines.
Still, if basic steps such as these — along with effective communication between local governments regarding snow removal — can help put bus service back on the road in a timely manner, so be it.
“It’s a no-win scenario,” Ferrell said. “If you do run the buses, you get criticized. If you don’t run the buses, you get criticized. Given the region’s ability to make roads passable, I think we did well given the circumstances.”
MARTA, in other words, is not in charge of clearing snow and ice from the streets. If the state and city can do a better job with that, maybe the buses won’t have to shut down.
Winter starts Thursday. Good luck, everybody.
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