Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Transit Related Articles

Utah Transit Authority to release draft environmental study for light-rail extension

North Carolina's CATS posts passenger-count record in February

Interesting article from Charlotte showing how ridership has skyrocketed after their light rail line opened. Having lived in Charlotte for two years I can tell you that their bus system was next to useless (anyone who says UTA is bad should have been forced to ride CATS when I lived there).

Thank you to the Transit Sleuth out of Portland for referring the article above.

Sketch aims to encourage UTA probe

Then there is the Bus Riders Union and its allies. I guess when the facts are not backing you up, you do a dog and pony show in order to get heard even if you are wrong. Don't get me wrong, UTA is far from perfect, however these people don't want good transit service they want pathetic transit service.
Maybe its time to start figuring out where the funding is coming to these people. After all, when the Bus Riders Unions financial statements became well known they started loosing respect. Of course the Bus Riders Union here in Salt Lake has little respect but sometimes even a small group despite they don't represent the majority can do long term harm.

1 comment:

Clint Gardner said...

I would really like to see some substantive evidence for the problems with the new system that are continually harangued. The only really identifiable ones that I've seen are the reduced service in Sandy (which makes sense since, unfortunately, Sandy had low ridership counts.) I'm not really sure that the BRU is going to be very happy with the new more reliable counting system: it no doubt will show bus ridership as low and TRAX ridership as high.