New tricks not working

Obviously transit riders still aren't feeling all that great about safety conditions on MTA facilities:

Some bus riders in Baltimore brace themselves before stepping aboard. They say they never know what might happen.

Even after transit and city officials vowed to make public transportation safer after a brawl in December that left a 26-year-old woman with broken facial bones, the experience of riding buses is far from serene, some regulars said yesterday.

"Sometimes kids get on the bus and your heart is pounding," said a nursing assistant who, fearing for her safety, gave only her Nigerian first name, Ebun, as she waited for the No. 27 bus in Hampden -- the same route on which the Dec. 4 assaults occurred. "You better keep quiet or you're going to get slammed. You pray to get off safe."

Well let's face it though, would you feel that much safer because of the meek changes to MTA's security posture following December's outbreak of transit violence?

The fact of the matter remains this: the new tricks MTA implemented in order to get the public off of their back regarding their catastrophic failures in keeping riders safe are doing little if anything to improve the safety of the system. What this means is that consumer confidence in MTA facilities and services is continuing to decline. And if that confidence continues to decline further, ridership will decrease and the MTA systems will become even more of a logistical and financial boondoggle than they already are.

It is becoming more and more apparent every day, as I have been calling for for months, that not one more red penny should go to expand MTA operations and that MTA should be completely privatized. At the very least and only as a short-term solution, the entire senior leadership of the MTA should be terminated and replaced with people who might actually care about providing a reliable, efficient, and safe public transit system. Because clearly at this moment in time nobody with any decision-making authority over at the MTA actually cares one bit about the safety of their customers, and that is unacceptable as a taxpayer of this state...