A year ago, a construction company closed a depot and cleared out about 500,000 tons of earthmovers. I drive by the lot sometimes, so one day I saw a huge collection of cranes and backhoes, and a week later it was this incredible brutalist wet dream. i actually tried to model it in the hammer map editor (god's intended platform for Large Concrete) but couldn't get the scale right
drove by it again a few months later and there were 500 busses in there, which is how i found out that seattle's school bus contract now belongs to a company called "zum"
the above are the only parts of this post that matter. you can click the read more if you also want some depressing, incorrect, unresearched and uncalled for assertions
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with a name like Zum, this is an App Company. you know exactly what i mean and there's no way this doesn't end in tears. they are going to fail to deliver the MVP of "being a school bus"
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to be clear, the state wasn't providing bus services before this, they just had a contract with another private company. that's probably how it is in most places, idk
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but, an App Company is definitionally worse than "company that sprung up 50 years ago solely to satisfy a government contract." sure, the old company was functionally "a branch of the local government, but with a private-party condom that prevents the state from having to fulfill a bunch of legal obligations or hold any liability," but this one will be worse
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i heard vaguely that the school buses around here had been fucked for years because they couldn't get and keep drivers. whatever conditions created that problem are probably still here. the purpose of this new company is to further insulate the state from having to know about those problems or do anything about them
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i am "looking forward" (in the grim sense, like how we all look forward to the coming Civil War II) to zum crashing about five buses before a Grand Investigation discovers that every one of their drivers is someone who was fired or not hired by the previous company due to readily-discoverable problems, and had been reported many times for clear on-the-job drunkenness etc. and all those reports were buried so zum could continue claiming that they'd "solved" the staffing problem
