New Bus Schedules Out....

Today UTA released the new bus schedules for the bus redesign. Remember its this glorious new system that will get people to downtown faster yet not get many riders to where they need to go. Ironically, today UTA said ridership has dropped significantly this year, are they going to try to make the post August 26 look better than they are? Of course revenue will tell the real story.

Here is one example of how this new system works. Lets look at the current 32 soon to be a the useless 307. Instead of providing all day service it will only provide peak service to downtown in the morning and back in the pm. No more riding the bus for my wife since her office is at the end of the 32 so she needs to go the other direction.

According to the new timetable the new 307 is 6 to 7 minutes faster than the current 32 so from Golden Hills and Wasatch to Downtown will take 38 minutes instead of 44 or 45. Think people are going to go running to the bus since its soooo much faster? Didn't think so. How do they save so much time? By eliminated a majority of the bus stops south of 6200 South and all other stops north of there that are not at major intersections. So in other words they won't have to stop to pick up passengers. Then of course the buses sit for most of day wasting valuable capital resources.

However UTA is still being stupid. The new 320 that replaces the 21 would once again be run on top of the 307. They will run from 6200 South all the way to downtown just a couple of minutes apart. The scheduler who planned this should be terminated for gross stupidity. Since the buses are running every twenty minutes they should be 10 minutes apart but that would take common sense and marketing experience.

Now its not so easy to compare the 21 and 320 since the current 21 does not go into the 9400 South Park in Ride lot before heading down Highland Drive (the route will naturally will be faster since it does not service the neighborhoods to pick up its customers..most of whom rode from the neighborhoods), so instead we have to use Fort Union Blvd to Downtown. Here the current 21 takes 29 minutes and the 320 will take 22 minutes so a difference of 7 minutes.

It will be interesting to see what revenue does over the next year.