Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Meanwhile In Detroit - Got Change For The Bus?

How Bad is it in Detroit?

It's so bad, it costs them $1 million to count $14 million in fares a year - and they count the fares by hand, in a room with money cast about willy-nilly.

The Detroit News: Detroit to hire help to get disorganized bus fare counting on track

The city is hiring an armored car company to handle the daily collection of bus-fare revenue after officials discovered a disorganized cash-counting operation within the Department of Transportation, The Detroit News has learned.

. . .

The plan is to scrap the current cash system that involves employees counting bus-fare revenue each day at the DDOT central office on Warren Avenue.

“There literally is a room where employees sit around a table and just count money. It wasn’t well organized,” said Gary Brown, the city’s chief restructuring officer. “There was money on the floor, and in bags, and the money’s been there a couple weeks.”

Read that last paragraph again. A city with a longstanding history of corruption and incompetence that's been on the verge of bankruptcy and now finally is in bankruptcy has, as a matter of ongoing practice, having cash money just lying around for weeks in a disorganized mess.

Anyone want to take a bet that some of that money has been sticking to various fingers and going elsewhere then back into the transportation department's coffers?

Tell me again how its such a great idea to get into a regional transportation agreement with an agency like that?

2 comments:

Scott said...

Maybe they should get CoinStar in there?

Murphy's Law said...

This is why first-world bus systems use refillable electronic cards. I realize that Detroiters are too stupid/arrogant to master such a system, but it would eliminate the need to count cash and the ability of union-protected bus drivers to steal it.