Please tell me all about your bus system in your specific city. All of the details you can think of.
Do you use it?
Why or why not?
What are the downfalls of your bus system?
The good points?
Anything at all you can tell me.
(I’m looking to do battle with our bus system and would like to see how ours compares with other cities).
Thanks in advance!!!
Do you use it? Very rarely, and never to get to work.
Why or why not? It takes me about 7 minutes to drive to work, and 70 minutes to walk to work, and about 2 hours to get to work by bus. (I’m taking that last one from looking at timetables – I’ve never actually attempted it)
What are the downfalls of your bus system? Bus routes concentrate on roues into downtown, with a few based on OSU, which doesn’t help for many cross-suburban routes. In addition, on many routes, buses go just once an hour, or only at rush hour.
The good points? Bus fares are relatively low – so I do catch a bus occasionally to go downtown.
Do you use it? Yup, all the time.
Why or why not? Because I don’t have my license (yet, I have to start at the bottom with my learner’s and we’ve got a graduated system here, I’ve been studying the book and hope I pass the test tomorrow).
What are the downfalls of your bus system?
The good points? I find for the most part they are clean and on time (the on time is getting worse though, thanks to the new traffic and fewer bus drivers) and I can get to the essential places without a lot of transfers. They may not run really late, but unless I’m out partying I can always get a bus home (again, this varies, I’m lucky enough to currently live not far outside of downtown with 4 buses I can take to get there, the previous area of the city I lived in has one bus in that neighbourhood and I had problems getting around at times).
Anything at all you can tell me.
It has the good and the bad, but overall I find it serves my needs adequately and has for a number of years. It’s only recently that I’ve really felt the urge to get off my butt and get my license as my needs have changed and I am also more able to afford a car than I was even a couple years ago.
I should also say that the cost to ride isn’t too much, especially as I buy a bus pass every month (and the government has now implemented a tax credit).
Ours are free, subsidized by the largest employers to try to reduce the need for parking. They’re clean and nice and the drivers are friendly or at least efficent Yankees. They run to the key spots around our nearby towns on a relatively frequent schedule (every half-hour or so).
It only runs Monday through Friday but that’s useful for shuttling within town. I wouldn’t be able to take it from home. There is a bus from home but it’s $3 each way!
I used to use San Francisco’s Muni daily.
The good: It reaches to within a two-block walk of roughly 98% of all homes in the city.
The bad: Schedules are an amusing suggestion. It’s primarily built to take you to or from downtown, so some trips wind up taking a lot longer than you might hope as you have to take one spoke line towards downtown, then switch to an outbound in the other direction.
Where I live: I don’t take the bus at all as there’s no service within a mile of home.
I’m going to go with the Tallahassee bus system, since I used it while at college, and because I’m completely unfamiliar with the Broward County bus system. So, yes, I used it.
Not having a car makes public transportation necessary if you don’t live within walking distance of wherever you’re going.
The timetables and coverage of the bus system. It didn’t go out to many places, and was limited to 7am-6pm in the majority of the system. They did extend the hours to 10pm in the “downtown area,” but that’s useless for the majority of the people who lived in Tallahassee. If I missed the absolute last bus that’d take me within half a mile of my apartment at 6:10, I’d have to walk two miles or more from the bus stop that was closest for the night bus system.
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It existed and college students could use it for free. Non-college students had a discount, and the fare was pretty cheap to start with. I could also live further away from campus in cheaper housing because of the bus system. The negatives are that the buses are unpredictable, but usually late, and some of the drivers are reckless and won’t stop at the appointed stops.
My city of roughly 40,000 has an extensive bus system. If I were to take a bus somewhere, I’d have to walk nearly a mile to get to it.
First have to walk 1/4 mile to the bus stop. Then the only place the bus goes from here is to the shopping center. and not exactly there, just to the farthest corner of the parking lot. So there’s a lot of walking. And since I usually go there for groceries, you can’t buy much and then haul it to a bus. I usually get eight or ten bags full.
My daughter insists on taking the bus to see me. She doesn’t drive, and wants to prove that transit is viable right now. Instead she proves the opposite. Takes a trolley, a train, and a bus to see me, but still needs a ride from the station if she’s carrying anything. so it’s over two hours replacing a 20 minute car ride. And since she has the same long trip back she can only stay half as long as she’d like.
Do you use it? No
Why or why not? It doesn’t exist
What are the downfalls of your bus system? Not existing makes it hard to use
The good points? Well, by not existing it doesn’t raise the property tax to support it
Anything at all you can tell me - There are probably more towns and cities in the US that have no bus access at all then have some. There are only three towns/cities within 20 miles of here that have a bus service other than school buses.
Do you use it? No
Why or why not? It doesn’t exist
What are the downfalls of your bus system? Not existing makes it hard to use
The good points? Well, by not existing it doesn’t raise the property tax to support it
Anything at all you can tell me - There are probably more towns and cities in the US that have no bus access at all then have some. There are only three towns/cities within 20 miles of here that have a bus service other than school buses.
Nope.
I have my own vehicle; the routes are badly timed and not frequent; the routes don’t come out as far as where I live and/or where I work.
See above. The system also cannot keep up with the amount of people moving here (something like a net gain of 5000 people a month, IIRC). The buses are crowded almost all the time. Except on the routes that only run once an hour.
If you’re on the Strip, you can catch a bus. You’ll be packed in like a sardine, but you can.
I learned far too much about how the bus system here (and systems in general) work because I worked for the transit authority for five years. Two and a half of those I spent most of my days out on the routes, checking them for timing and ridership and routing. If you have specific questions, I’ll try to answer them.
Just remember that it’s tough to make comparisons city to city because of revenue and demographic differences.
I love the LA area bus and rail system. I take an express bus to work everyday and I only have to walk less than a block on either end of the route so it is very convenient. It also means I don’t have to drive through the monstrosity that is rush hour in LA, so I arrive to both work and home unstressed, relaxed and rested since I can nap if I want to.
I did once live in a town with a good bus system. Escondido Cal.
Not sure if it’s changed, as that was 20 years ago.
Their secret was they actually went where you wanted to go, not just vaguely near it. They let you out right in front of the cineplex, not at the far corner of the parking lot.
They dropped you at the door to the library, the grocery, the school, the restaurant row, the local business cluster.
And they had mid-size busses. No huge busses that only work a couple hours a day, for commute traffic and then run empty the rest of the day. The mid-size were perfect for the whole middle of the day. They were used by the school system and for seniors.
And because they had mid=size busses they didn’t feel the pressure to fill them by making pickup times far apart. 15 minutes was the longest wait any time of day or evening.
When the busses go where you want, when you want, people use them.
No feasible bus system right where I live. They have a dial-up-and-make-an-appointment-for-pick-up-bus, but I’m not even sure they’d come to the unincorporated end of town for an able-bodied person.
I used the bus system in Boulder a million years ago. It was a great system, and the stop was in front of my house.
**Do you use it? ** Yes, in the winter when it’s snowy, as I prefer not to drive in the snow.
Why or why not?
It’s far easier to have someone else drive than have the stress and worry that I’m going to injure someone else because I don’t know how to drive in the snow.
What are the downfalls of your bus system?
The good points?
Anything at all you can tell me.
Umm…I’ll think on this - I’ve got nothing else right now, but may have more later.
Oh! I remember. They got an increase in funding at one of the elections since I’ve been here (I’ve only been here two and a half years - I think it was the Nov '05 election), but they still say they have to keep cutting routes and service because they don’t have the funding.
I live about a mile outside Santa Monica proper, but for the infrequent times I do use the bus, it’s likely to be one of their Big Blue Buses. I can’t say anything bad about them. They’re usually not packed, the #2 stops about 100 paces from my front door and runs between Venice and UCLA, and it only costs $.75. What’s not to love, especially for times when I need to go to UCLA and don’t want to pay $8 to park, just on the principle of the thing. Another nice feature is that there is usually a lighted sign inside the bus that tells you the name of the next stop, so you don’t have to peer out the windows trying see address numbers or street names. This isn’t a problem for me on the 2 line, but I can see how helpful it would be for someone who doesn’t know the route.
**Do you use it? **
Nearly every workday (when I don’t ride my bike).
**Why or why not? **
I love being able to read during my commute, it’s incredibly convenient for me (even with a transfer, I doubt I’d be able to drive myself to work much faster), and I like the thought of not being responsible for another car on the road.
What are the downfalls of your bus system?
RTD in Denver went through a major service change last November, when it opened some light rail lines from the southeast part of the city into downtown. In hopes of encouraging riders to take light rail, RTD discontinued many routes and decreased service on others. It didn’t affect me a whole lot (because of where I live and where I work, it’s not efficient at all for me to take light rail), but it did make a big impact on other regular commuters.
The good points?
RTD has agreed to partially restore some of the routes it discontinued in November – they do listen to their riders (and fund providers). For the routes and times that I use, I feel very comfortable on the bus (other routes and times – not so much).
Anything at all you can tell me.
Devising a route system and schedule that serves the most people effectively is not a job that I’d want, but I think RTD has done a pretty good job of it. I try to keep that in mind whenever I’m inconvenienced by my bus ride.
A local ride fare is $1.50, by the way – dunno if you want to know that.
When I want to get into Ipswich without driving, there’s a regular bus during the day, and a few well into the evening (last return journey is nearly midnight). In town, the bus system is pretty good: a lot of the routes are figure-of-8s (dating back to when they were trams), and so a single vehicle is travelling not just back and forth to the town centre, but across the town and back again, providing for a large area.
Do you use it?
Yes.
Why or why not?
Because parking in the city centre is expensive, and the buses are regular and reasonably cheap. There’s also a very efficient park-and-ride system that allows visitors to the city to park in huge lots in the outskirts, and take a very cheap bus into the city centre.
What are the downfalls of your bus system?
Two problems: they’re subject to the vagaries of roadworks and the idiots who choose to drive during rush hour; and some routes are fulfilled as a contractual obligation to certain building projects, and are therefore covered to the bare minimum, with substandard vehicles and idiot drivers. Early in the morning or late at night they’re not as regular as they could be. And there’s no night service.
The good points?
Very regular indeed - at normal times, I rarely have to wait more than 3 minutes to get a bus from the end of my street to the city centre or train station. Pretty fast, given the drawbacks of buses in general. And though expensive by London standards, the price is still OK.
(Flutterby, you might want to check the definitions of bus/tram/train ;))