Metro Worse than you thought Possible

Posted on December 10, 2015 by novahockey

Don’t ride Metro

Even those who didn’t see the questions beforehand considered the evaluations a breeze. “I’ll be honest with you—I studied harder for fast-food jobs and waiter jobs when I was in college than I did for their program,” says Kenneth Colvin, who was a US Army air-traffic controller before joining Scarbrough and Watkins’s training class. “Their testing program is a joke.”

Things got even stranger when the new hires started on-the-job training and found a workplace that, according to five recent ROCC trainees, was inhospitable to newcomers. The ROCC’s employees were mostly WMATA lifers who almost never left the Landover facility. (Even when the Silver Line opened, controllers watched a DVD about the extension instead of touring it.) Many veterans hardly spoke to the new hires, who felt as if they were being iced out. “They wanted us to fail,” Colvin says.

It’s hard to even recommend it for tourists anymore. I use it sparingly, but honestly, Uber is just so much more convenient. So i’m saying that i’d get in an loosely-regulated jitney driven by a stranger (UberX) before getting on a heaving regulated transit system is all you need to know. Of course, on Tuesday, my UberX driver had a Mercedes C-class Sedan.

Also: What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.

This wasn’t the only troubling thing the feds found in Metro’s plumbing. The FTA discovered that train drivers regularly relieved themselves on the tracks because supervisors, due to inadequate training, weren’t comfortable taking the wheel to give them bathroom breaks.

 

Filed under: government dissatisfaction, Travel | 16 Comments »

Morning Report: Competition for Zillow’s Z-estimate 12/10/15

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Brent Nyitray

Markets are rebounding this morning after several days of losses. Bonds and MBS are flat.

Initial Jobless Claims rose 13k to 282,000 last week. The story remains the same: companies are reluctant to let go of employees.

Import prices fell 0.4% in November and are down 9.4% year over year. Blame low commodity prices. Note that some strategists are starting to say the downside in oil is limited at these prices.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index rose to 40.1 from 39.6 the prior week.

Everyone knows to treat Zillow’s Z-estimates with a grain of salt. Pre-crisis, they generally overstated property values and post-crisis, they have generally been low. Their median error rate is something like 8% (which is calculated by measuring the difference between the modeled value of a house and what it actually sells for). Now Redfin is rolling out their own model, which they claim has an error rate closer to 2%.

Rental prices in Manhattan have risen so much that potential renters are balking at the asking prices. Rental vacancies are at the highest level since 2006. In November, the median monthly rent in Manhattan rose to $3661, up 4% YOY.

Filed under: Morning Report | 17 Comments »