It's Harvey Pekar's world, we're all just living in it

We leave Tower City on the Shaker Rapid, and there's two guys sitting between us and the front of the train (where the driver sits). One of the guys is an RTA employee, a middle aged black guy, apparently with some degree of authority. He's carrying a radio, but doesn't really have anything to do with the operation of this particular train. The other guy is a passenger, a middle aged white guy, wearing a wool stocking cap and a ... well, I would call it a spring weight coat, but I know what Cleveland is like in the spring ... Regular blue collar looking guy, not an unusual type of person to see in Cleveland.

As soon as we leave Tower City, the passenger immediately starts an argument with the RTA guy over whether we had or had not left the station 7 minutes later than scheduled (the trains run every 15 minutes on Saturdays). The RTA guy claimed that the guy was looking at the wrong schedule and that the train was right on time. He seemed to take it personally; it's possible that it actually was his responsibility to make sure the train got off on time.

So, they went back and forth on this for a couple of minutes. Not really any shouting, and no threats of violence or anything, but definite arguing, and the RTA guy was never in the least apologetic or conciliatory. And then there was kind of a lull (maybe the passenger dude was just tired of arguing), and then got the RTA guy got his final lick in. He looked at the other guy and said, "Most of the time, when somebody complains about something, they actually have facts to back them up." No response to that. 

¶ 6/08/2008 09:49:00 PM 0 comments

 
Notes on riding the Cleveland Rapid

Update 12/07/2009: The fare collection system for the Rapid that I talked about in this post from a year ago has now been improved quite a bit, including allowing the use of credit cards. See this post for more recent discussion of the new system and my new transit commuting habit.

Last weekend (May 31), Mrs. Beckley and I decided to take the Rapid (the local name for our light rail/rapid transit system) from Ohio City to the Shaker Square farmer's market on a Saturday morning in order to possibly buy local strawberries at during their brief season. It turns out that the season hasn't actually started yet, so I guess we'll keep going until we achieve victory...

I've lived in the Cleveland area since 1998, but I believe this is only the second or third time I've been on the Rapid, and maybe the first time for something other than joyriding or a baseball game.

I thought I'd write some notes down on this experience which is quite everyday for many people but exotic for many many others. This is stuff I would have liked to have known before I went. Maybe this will make it easier for other people who aren't used to riding the Rapid to take the plunge.

We bought our farecards (tickets) at Dave's Supermarket in Ohio City, which happens to be convenient to where we live and the W. 25th/Ohio City Rapid station. You may be able to buy them at other Dave's locations (Shaker Square, for instance), but I don't know. There was no way to buy farecards in the station itself on Saturday morning, and, in fact, the station was completely unattended at that time.

The official fare for the Rapid is $1.75 one way. The farecards we bought at Dave's were good for 5 one way trips, with no price break. A nice thing about buying them at a store like Dave's is that you can actually get change. (I was worried that I was going to have to put $20 into a change machine in order to buy my $1.75 ticket, and then deal with $18.25 in quarters, but buying at Dave's avoided that problem.)

In order to get to Shaker Square from Ohio City, you take the red line Rapid (Airport/Windermere) from Shaker Square to Tower City downtown, and then switch to the blue or green lines to get out to Shaker. It turns out that there is no free transfer between the red and blue/green lines at Tower City, so you can (and we did) end up paying $1.75 for each leg, which seems like kind of a waste from W. 25th, considering it's only one stop away. A transit policeman we talked to at one point during the trip said that they used to have free transfers between the two Rapid lines, but they had "problems" with it and stopped doing it.

We found out later that you can get an all day Rapid pass for $4, so that would have been our best deal, allowing us to make our round trip for a total of $8 instead of the $14 it ended up costing the two of us. They have some other types of farecards available too.

So, we both had these farecards. The farecards were not scanned or checked or anything when we entered the W. 25th station, I assume because the station was unmanned. We got on the train for Tower City when it arrived, and put our farecards in a little machine by the driver in the front. In fact, we entered at the back and he made an announcement that all passengers just getting on should come up to the front and put their tickets in the machine, so we followed instructions.

I don't know if the ticket machines on the Rapid will take cash or not. I'm pretty sure that the equivalent machines on the buses do take cash, although I bet they don't give change.

At Tower City, we got off the red line train, and looked for a way to transfer to the blue/green lines, and didn't find one, so we actually exited through the turnstile and then put our farecards in the entry turnstile for the blue/green lines. When that train arrived, we didn't have to do anything with our farecards on the train. So, sometimes you present your farecard when you enter the station, sometimes when you get on the train. It may be that Tower City is the only station where you don't have to show your farecard when you get on the train, but I don't really know for sure.

Now, at this point, our trip got, ah, interesting. Our green/blue line train stopped at E. 93rd, and everyone was told to get off. It turns out there that was some problem with the overhead wires east of E. 93rd, and the Rapid was basically shut down. Eventually, a shuttle bus came and got us and took us to Shaker Square, stopping at the other Rapid stations on the way. When it was time to come back, the Shaker Rapid still wasn't running, so we got another shuttle bus that took us (at high speeds!) all the way back to Tower City, and we took the red line from there back to Ohio City.

Although we rode these two shuttle buses, they didn't make us show farecards/transfers or pay or whatever it is you're supposed to do on a normal bus, so I have no information about how riding the bus works. Maybe next time.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that the "yelling system" wasn't in use for this trip. Based on previous experiences riding the Rapid, Mrs. Beckley and I have long maintained (and it's only partially a joke) that the RTA employs a "yelling system": if you're not sure what to do in a given situation, you have to just do something and then if it's the wrong thing, someone will yell at you, and that's how you know. On this particular journey, though, the vast majority of the RTA employees we interacted with were very nice and doing the best they could (especially considering the shutdown of the Shaker Rapid). I do think that it's still not that easy to find out what the proper procedure is if you're not an everyday rider, but there was less yelling involved than I remember from the past.

Also, it appeared to be that you were supposed to pay and/or show your farecard or transfer on entering the transit vehicle in all cases. I swear that the last time I rode the Rapid, you paid getting on the train in one direction and getting off the train in the other direction, and that really threw me for a loop. Perhaps I'm misremembering how that worked, or maybe they've changed it in the past few years. If so, I commend them, it really seems unnecessarily confusing to have both systems in use simultaneously.

P.S. Update June 7, 2008: Strawberries are in! We got ours in Westlake (at Crocker Park), but I assume they were available at Shaker too. Yum! 

¶ 6/02/2008 09:12:00 PM 1 comments