Yes, the transit strike is finally over here in the Twin Cities and we can all get back to normal. The 1.6% of the population that actually felt any noticeable impact from the bus drivers leaving their posts of duty can that is. The rest of us would likely have not even known that there was a strike were in not for the frantic efforts of the local media to top each other in delivering the schmaltziest, most guilt inducing stories of people coping with the bus strike. We've covered these shameless attempts to tug at our heartstrings previously in great detail, both here and on the Northern Alliance Radio show (where JB's memorial "urine caked drunks" line originated). And with the end of the strike, it seemed natural that we would also see the end of the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the media.
But, we didn't count on the Star Tribune's Nick Coleman. Where all others see a story completely played and milked of juicy material, Nick sees opportunity. Where others see the door closing, Nick jams his foot in and says, "Not so fast". Where others pack up and move on, Nick gets on the bus in a column titled Here's How It Really Was the Day the Buses Rolled:
The No. 69 bus was running for the first time in 47 days, and it was going to be clean and shiny and there would be free newspapers and a party atmosphere all the way from the Sun Ray Transit Center on St. Paul's East Side to downtown.
In your dreams. Here's how it really was, at 8:04 Monday morning on the day the buses returned.
The sidewalk in front of the bus shelter was splotched with vomit and sprinkled with cigarette butts. The creaky bus, driven by Shirley Walker, had 350,000 miles on the odometer. The floor was still strewn with street sand tracked in during a February snowstorm and, behind a seat, above the right rear wheel well, a weird white foam was oozing through a crack.
Welcome aboard reality.
Anyone who has ever ridden a city bus before can attest that vomit, trash, and weird white substances are par for the course. So the question is what did Coleman expect? Apparently the Metro Transit Commission's modest efforts (free newspapers, allowing riders to bring coffee with them) to lure riders back after the strike left Nick with the impression that riding the bus was going to be like Carnival in Rio.
By the way, when Coleman was busy chatting up the bus driver to learn her name and the mileage of the bus, why didn't he ask her if it would have been so hard to take a fargin' broom and sweep out her bus? Or is that not in the new contract?
Maybe there were free papers, free back rubs and hot drinks on other buses. Maybe there were express buses full of well-dressed people on the way to the office, people who left the Lexus in the garage Monday and who were laughing and standing in the aisles singing the "Hey Ya" song and catching up on how one another's portfolios have performed since Metro Transit drivers walked off the job March 4.
Feel the love people. Nothing like a little sneering class envy to bring us all together now is there? Maybe if Nick had decided to leave his beloved urban core and journey out to the far sprawling suburbs of say Wayzata or Chanhassen he would have indeed discovered busloads of well-attired business people heading downtown (and elsewhere). There's a transit station close to my workplace in Eden Prairie with a four level parking garage that's jammed full every day. They don't all own a Lexus, but they do okay. And they ride the bus.
Something that Nick should be happy about. Isn't it good that these suburbanites are partaking of the glories of mass transit? When the strike was going on they had alternatives. And they used them. They don't need the bus, but they choose it as a matter or convenience or economics. If Nick really wants the transit system to survive and thrive (and help the "less fortunate" that he supposedly cares so much about) he needs these kind of people opting in. But that doesn't fit his story template so he chooses to ignore it and focus on the "powerless":
But if you want to know how a metro area with pretensions to greatness could allow its rudimentary transit system to sit idle for six weeks before the big cheeses got interested enough to settle it, take a spin on the 69 bus.
The people on the No. 69 don't have clout or friends in power. They don't have a Lexus in the garage. They have the bus, and they are glad it's back. People like a 46-year-old woman named Soong Sook, who rode from the East Side to a charity store on West Seventh to pick up some clothes for her grandkids.
Who exactly does have clout or friends in power? I don't. I don't have a Lexus in my garage either. Can I be one of Nick's people?
One of the most irritating aspects of the media coverage of the bus strike was the tendency, which Coleman of course follows to a tee, to always blame the strike on the MTC commissioners and the governor, apparently the "big cheeses" here. Never blame the drivers who actually engaged in the strike which left the buses idle.
Three hours on the No. 69 -- from the East Side through downtown, then along West Seventh through the West End on out to Fort Snelling and the Veterans Affairs hospital and back again -- and I saw only one person going to an office job.
He only saw one person going to an "office job"? Was this based on his notion of "well-dressed"? Talk about hypocritical. Liberals like Coleman love to preach that we shouldn't judge based on appearance alone and yet that is exactly what he does here. Unless he actually interviewed everyone on the bus, there's no way he make this claim. And what the hell is an "office job" anyway?
Maybe there are more. Maybe they will come back when the parking deals they made during the strike run out. But many No. 69 regulars don't make parking deals. They just make do:
Only Coleman can turn the act of paying a monthly contract rate or "making parking deals" sound like entering into a real estate development agreement with the Donald. Hey Nick, I made an "electric deal" with X-cel energy this month. Wanna write about it?
Coleman goes on to chronicle the tales of no less than seven people riding the bus that day and why bus service is important to them. I'm not going to make fun of those who have to use public transit (I'll leave that to JB), but Coleman's efforts to elicit pity for them didn't exactly leave me fighting back the tears:
Augustine Cortez, 48, said that he was taking the bag of clothes on his lap to wash them at the coin laundry.
I have just enough Spanish and he just enough English for us to communicate, but Lunes is washday everywhere, I guess.
And the point of that is what exactly? This guy takes the bus to a laundry mat. I bet it happens on buses all over the Twin Cities every day. Is this a revelation to Nick?
• And a woman named Lisa Bailey, who has a learning disability and whose left arm was in a cast. She got on the bus with a bag of plastic juice bottles that she was going to drop off at a recycling center because her apartment building doesn't recycle plastic.
"Where's all the free newspapers at?" she asked as she made her way down the aisle, looking for evidence that a disastrous transit strike was finally over and that she was on board a party bus.
That thing I said about not making fun of people who ride the bus? It's getting really hard to stick to. Must resist...
Wasn't the simple fact that she was RIDING ON A BUS evidence enough that a "disastrous" transit strike was over? Oh wait, she did have a learning disability didn't she? No doubt she was hoping to find a free Star Tribune so she could catch up on all her favorite Metro section columnists.
I told her what I had heard: The free newspapers are supposed to be on the bus next week. But that might be too late.
The party's already over.
Earth to pretentious, out of touch, newspaper guy. Riding the bus was NEVER a party. And it NEVER will be. Understand?
All of these people who were riding the bus yesterday were probably riding the bus forty eight days ago before the strike and they'll likely be riding the bus two months from now. And the bus they ride will be dirty, smell of exhaust fumes, and creak along. So what? That's life Nick. It ain't always pretty but it's life.
Finally someone with an insider view of the Star Tribune e-mails to make an interesting comparison:
Coming back from vacation I find the buses are running but the illuminati here are oddly unhappy.
Settling into my desk and looking out the window at the tracks of the biggest electric train set I've ever seen, once again I feel the big wheels of journalism turning in smooth, silent rotation, utterly without friction because they're completely disengaged from reality.
With that I promise that this will be our last word on the bus strike and hopefully my last word on Nick Coleman for some time. My head just can't take it anymore.
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