First Business Day of the Bus Changes

Well today was the first business day dealing with the new bus changes. I got nauseated listening to Justin Jones on KSL tell how great this new system is. Of course the guy can be smug after all even though he was in charge of it he will not be held accountable if/when it proves to not be a success. Now if Jones was willing to put his job on the line against the performance of the changes that would mean something. Of course then it would be tied to ridership which of course is a meaningless number.

Then there was John Inglish making his pitch. He said he took route 346 from his Draper Estate to the TRAX station. He said that there was many more riders than normal. Define many more! Of course he failed to mention that the 346 was one of the first experiments in "Fast Bus" and has already had service cut because it was a failure. Maybe he's afraid of losing his bus route.

Interesting is that I had to take a little journey today because my wife had an doctors appointment at Alta View Hospital. Now the easiest way for this to happen would be for me to take the 32 right near our apartment to where she works in an office at 3500 East/Bengal Blvd behind Smiths. But that's right no more 32, that's why my wife can't take the bus anymore, scratch that one.

So I decided to meet her at the hospital. Normally I would walk and take the 45 over to TRAX but decided to take the direct way this time to see how the bus routes were doing.


So I rode the 213 from 1300 East/Spring Lane to the 7800 South TRAX station. Of course the 213 was the 11. I got to the bus stop about a minute before the bus was due at 4500 South. I waited, and I waited, and I waited until finally the bus came running about 10 minutes late.

Strange thing is there was only 2 passengers on the bus which used to carry more than that. Could it be that the bus has loss ridership because it no longer goes downtown and has poor connections to get downtown? Hum??

Both passengers got off by 6400 South so I was along on the bus with a female driver with absolutely no personality. She either needs customer service training or needs to find a new job. Along the whole former 27 portion of the route there was not a single passenger. Once again, could this be because there is not direct link to downtown anymore? Every time I rode the 27 (and it used to be frequently) it at least had three or four passengers on this section so where were they? I addition we saw both the 207 and the 201 which were running empty.

I then took TRAX to the Historic Sandy TRAX station. From here I had about a half hour wait for the F94. The cutaway van showed up and it actually had a good load and two other people got off at the hospital with me and total ridership on my short section 7 passengers. Not bad for a route that had no off peak service for a year and has a joke of a headway (every 80-minutes). There was a driver and a helper on the F94 and they both were extremely friendly. The one lady helping the driver (who is out of the Flextrans fleet and didn't know how to do transfers) mentioned that they are talking about another Flex route for Draper. I will go into detail about the F94 and comparing it to the Denver Call N Ride later in the week.

Who and remember about all the people UTA had out to help you today? At 1:00pm when I started this trip I did not encounter one UTA person out to help. Not a single one at either TRAX station just the lady on the F94 who was actually there to help the driver. So I guess they only cared about the commuters and not the people during the day.

Well we will see what happens....