Wednesday, May 09, 2007

A Day in Salt Lake County.

Well I talked about my days in Utah, Weber, and Davis counties and now to discuss my travels within Salt Lake county which actually comprises a couple of days plus my regular travels.

One of the trips I took was on the 48 line. This line was created from the cuts last year in the West Valley. The line travels from the Ballpark TRAX station to 6200 South and 4800 West with some trips serving the industrial complex to the west of Bangerter Highway.

Despite the fact this route is less than a year old ridership was good even in the off-peak hours and generally it takes about 3 years to build the ridership up an a new route to adequate levels. However, this route will cease to exist with the bus reorganization despite it providing good cross valley bus service.

One of the biggest things I am noticed was how bad the low floor buses are falling apart. The interiors rattle so bad even the one year old Opus buses, there are rattles throughout and give a generally poor ride. Now if UTA management and the Board of Directors cared about the riders they would be paying attention to these facts and working to solve the problems and communicate the problems with the manufacturers.

One thing I have mentioned in the past, why does UTA have the 11 & 7 run on top of each other? How much better would ridership be if they provided coordinated service along 1300 East? The same can be said of the 32 and 21 which run 2 minutes apart inbound and on the same schedule outbound.

Overall, almost every bus was on time and the drivers where friendly. The system did its job.

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