A
typical ride is like an everything bagel of sucks.
Never
mind the SmarTrip card readers which often reject your first, second, and third
swipes; Never mind the herky jerky braking of cars which toss you about during
all phases of slowing; Never mind the sheer volume of trash onboard a typical
car—KFC gristle, unread Express, and half-spent
Sunny D bottles, for example; Never mind the persistent breakdowns of railcars
and the resultant single-tracking that never makes any sense unless witnessing
seven trains headed in the opposite direction with none servicing your platform,
for an hour, makes any sense; Never
mind the overhead station announcements so loud and so garbled that nothing can
be gleaned from them and at the same time nothing else can transpire while they
occur; Never mind the same garbled, painful, staticky intercom announcements
onboard the cars themselves that offer nothing discernible, in the end, for the
rider; Never mind the persistent overcrowding on trains; Never mind the railcar
designs that don’t seem to anticipate even a few standing passengers; Never
mind the riders who must jam doors and disable doors and force the offloading
of the entire train despite another train (visibly) lurking in the tunnel, its
headlights glowing like two febrile eyes; Never mind the arrival boards that
routinely mistake the arrival times of trains—that, or suggest the arrival of a
(first ever!) two-car train; Never mind the wisdom of station managers who,
with one functional escalator, freeze it in the down position, forcing all
arriving passengers to trudge up the twenty-story hike to the street; No, never
mind all that; What I’d like to know is, what the heck is that nasty burning
smell, it smells like electrical wires afire and burnt monster truck tires and ‘incinerated
bathroom’, the Metro Rail system didn’t used to smell like that but now it does
smell like that all the time, especially with a train idling on the platform,
and we, the riders, have to breathe that smell on a regular basis, and I mean,
any thoughtful person will conclude that the smell is (1) very harmful and (2)
hurting me and other riders and (3) not being addressed AT ALL.
Complaint #1: Doctors & Pre-illness.
Complaint #2: Gravitational Pull.
Complaint #4: Beer Prices.
Complaint #5: Industrial Decay.
