Quote:
Originally Posted by atbw
Yeah, I don't know what the issue is. I am generally OK with service on the peninsula, but there seems to be a lot more issues with routes outside of downtown. We don't even have a modern payment system! In a city of half a million, you can only buy bus tickets at a drug store. No transit terminal sells them.
As for the ferry, I think it is forward-thinking, but we really, really need BRT funded. Its the closest to a modern transit system we'll get for a while.
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The issue has two prongs. The first is Transit management which is, and has always been, inept. You mention the payment system, and the bus ticket idiocy, which they supposedly have been "working on" for years or perhaps decades with no real change. But it goes far beyond just that. They have never been able to get scheduling or routing correct. They have never been able to sync not just connecting bus routes but also the ferry/bus connections. They have done little to improve the ridership experience once you actually get on a bus. The list is endless.
The other prong is that Transit is in many ways run by the HTU, which is a militant union that has effectively tied the hands of Transit to react to even trivial things that in most environments would be easily handled. People have talked about a bus to certain beaches in the summer on days when the weather allows. That is impossible because the union requires several weeks advance notice to allow their members to pick their assignments, and so Transit cannot react quickly to things like this. If a driver is a jerk or has a bad day and does things that cause a bad user experience like driving recklessly or angrily, there are seldom any consequences because even if Transit tries to discipline the driver, the union typically is able to derail any punitive or corrective action.
The only way to "fix" Transit is to blow it up and put in place different types of organizations to provide the service, preferably as some kind of public/private consortium to eliminate the influence of both the HTU and the inept management currently in place.