Metro a Mess, Traffic Too

Hey, the irony of this first story is very tidy. It's in the last line. This is from WTOP.

WASHINGTON - Metro's communication glitch that prevented riders from paying with credit and debit cards Wednesday morning is getting back on track.

The transit agency says services started getting back to normal around 8:30 a.m.

However, some riders tell WTOP they were still having trouble paying with plastic. Customers have been limited to charging a maximum of $20 at fare vending machines.

The NextBus system, SmartBenefits and the e-alert system are also not operational.

At 2:45 a.m., an internal power distribution unit failed at Metro headquarters, disrupting bus and rail operations.

The unit provides power to a key computer data center for the transit agency.

During the morning, Metrobuses were not accepting fares. Fares are now being accepted, Metro says.

Metro also could not communicate with its bus drivers in the field, and the public address system was not working.

The problem did not affect Metro's ability to monitor subway trains.

Metro says its trains, buses and paratransit service are operating as usual. Communication at Metro slowly returning to normal

Yes, this sounds pretty usual. Except they didn't mention the escalators that don't work.

So since the Metro is a mess, the thing to do is drive yourself, right?

Nope. Another story from WTOP:

WASHINGTON - Montgomery County is working frantically to "troubleshoot" a major computer failure that caused traffic headaches throughout the county Wednesday.

"There's simply no centralized computer control. The signals are working independently, instead of in any coordinated fashion. That will continue until we get the problem fixed," Emil Wolanin, chief traffic engineer for Montgomery County, tells WTOP.

Engineers hoped to have fixed the problem by the evening commute, but it doesn't appear likely.

The problem started overnight.

"We don't exactly know what the problem is right now, but we think there's a communications interface between the primary computer and the modems that talk to all the cameras," Wolanin says.

"We're focusing all of our resources on trying to troubleshoot that problem and fix it."

The lights do turn green, yellow and red, but engineers have no computerized way to make sure they are in sync.

During the rush hours, congested areas ended up more congested than normal.

On Wednesday morning, Montgomery County put its techs and engineers out in the field to manually adjust timing for the lights.

"We have to send our signal technicians and our engineers out to each of the local controllers at the intersection and modify timings if they don't seem to be sufficient to handle the flow of traffic."

The county has been monitoring traffic from the air and via traffic cameras throughout the day.

"So far, there is nothing that putting an officer in the street is necessarily going to change or make better. If we have to that, we will," he says.

The county has contractors on site working on the computer system.

"This is a rather old computer. It's probably 25 to 30 years old. It's a 1980s-vintage Data General main frame computer. Parts are not really available."

Wolanin says the computer crash comes as the county initiated a major modernization of the traffic computers.

"We are working to replace this old-aged system. We're just not there yet." Montgomery Co.'s traffic computer system fails

Today just seems to be the day for it...