For PACE I would have been answering phones and stuff.
For Metra, I ride on the train and have a fancy notebook that I write numbers in with a pencil. It's very low tech. Some people ride the Metra solely to get drunk (they drink on the train and they pub crawl using it) and are general assholes and a few of them have actively tried to mess up the count, which can result in a passenger counter being fired. It's really... special. Other than that, it's an awesome job.
Some people who are homeless-- or can't afford heat or AC, depending on the time of year-- do ride the CTA around (CTA is mostly within the city, while Metra is long distance suburb commuting and has, like, soft seats and actual tickets and conductors and most lines have toilets on the trains, fancy pants) especially over night. I used to work with a woman who decided she had Had Enough and fled an abusive partner, but was very new to the city and had no idea where any shelters were, so she rode the train all night until it was time to come to work. The crazydanger quotient is pretty low overall, though. The service cuts generally involve buses in low income communities, meaning that people either can't get to work or else a bus that once came every 20 minutes now comes every 45-60 minutes fouling up the commute. School kids who live within a certain range of their school also walk or take public transit to school, instead of school buses. So it's possible to wait for a bus and see 3 or 4 in a row go past completely jam packed.
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Date: 2010-09-15 04:35 pm (UTC)For Metra, I ride on the train and have a fancy notebook that I write numbers in with a pencil. It's very low tech. Some people ride the Metra solely to get drunk (they drink on the train and they pub crawl using it) and are general assholes and a few of them have actively tried to mess up the count, which can result in a passenger counter being fired. It's really... special. Other than that, it's an awesome job.
Some people who are homeless-- or can't afford heat or AC, depending on the time of year-- do ride the CTA around (CTA is mostly within the city, while Metra is long distance suburb commuting and has, like, soft seats and actual tickets and conductors and most lines have toilets on the trains, fancy pants) especially over night. I used to work with a woman who decided she had Had Enough and fled an abusive partner, but was very new to the city and had no idea where any shelters were, so she rode the train all night until it was time to come to work. The crazydanger quotient is pretty low overall, though. The service cuts generally involve buses in low income communities, meaning that people either can't get to work or else a bus that once came every 20 minutes now comes every 45-60 minutes fouling up the commute. School kids who live within a certain range of their school also walk or take public transit to school, instead of school buses. So it's possible to wait for a bus and see 3 or 4 in a row go past completely jam packed.