Last week, we published a story from a group of student journalists at NC State about their peers’ frustrations with the campus bus system, the Wolfline, since the onset of the pandemic and with the glitchy TransLoc app the students have to use to track the buses that move them around the university’s sprawling campus.
Reader Cristian Ivan Zelaya-Reyes has some thoughts about the story:
Good story about the state of the Wolfline. I couldn’t help but notice the many parallels between the Wolfline and the GoRaleigh bus system however.
GoRaleigh (and the rest of GoTriangle and its departments) advertise TransLoc as the main way to track your bus. If you were to go on the app during the middle of a weekday, you’d quickly notice how many routes don’t have any up to date data at all, just displaying the scheduling GoRaleigh itself provides. For example, Route 20, the route between Raleigh and Garner, and the route I use most often, has not been up to date for months. I’ve sent emails about this, no change.
As for working conditions, it’s bad. Please watch the most recent Raleigh Transit Authority meeting done last week or so. Several GoRaleigh bus drivers spoke up, detailing their deteriorating working conditions, badly thought out equipment, and lack of raises and bonuses they were promised. The board seemed very receptive to the complaints brought forward, and promised change, but we’ll see how that pans out. While I cannot remember her exact words, one of the members said with the current state of the bus system and the city’s future plans, we’re building on top of trash.
Thanks for the story on the Wolfline, just wanted to point out its issues are city wide as well.
And on Twitter, commenter @CAPITALFSMGMT had the following to say:
Why is there a driver shortage? As a country we need to do away with this “plantation mentality”. That if your workforce is predominately black and your management is white, you can pay a lower salary and dictate anything. The ones that are currently working need to unionize.
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