Cap Metro chief won’t stand for late trains

Who would have thought Randy Clarke’s first challenge would be to keep the trains running on time?

Clarke, Capital Metro’s president and CEO as of last Wednesday, had intended for his first few days in Austin to be mostly about meeting and greeting the public, political pooh-bahs and his employees. That first morning began, for instance, with some dark-thirty media interviews at the Republic Square bus stop on Guadalupe Street, where Clarke (who has made much of being a regular transit user in his previous work spots of Boston and Washington) was boarding a bus.

But Wednesday also meant a flurry of reporter inquiries (including from me) about why MetroRail trains since January have been chronically late, sometimes by as much as 45 minutes. After the commuter service’s regular customers had become publicly restive on social media about the tardiness, the agency had finally acknowledged the problem Monday in a breezy blog posting that in general terms blamed the problem on track and signal construction that, for worker safety, has forced trains to run slower.

The blog had a certain “well, that’s life” quality to it, portraying the delays as a necessary evil of improving the MetroRail line. It said that any real mitigation of the delays — probably a revised schedule to give the trains longer run times on the 32-mile route during the coming year or so of construction — would have to wait until after the 10 days of South by Southwest mania.