March 1 thru 13 - 251 miles on 13 days
March 14 thru 31 - 0 miles on 0 days
A disturbing trend, but I expect to rebound in April.
In the meantime I've become a faithful patron of ValleyRide, which provides quality service. My aversion to Single-Occupant-Vehicle remains in force.
Tireless advocate for the most efficient form of
human transportation ever devised - bicycles!
3 comments:
Bikeboy, whenever I see buses they appear to be almost empty. How has the ridership been on the route that you take?
bob t, bus ridership is generally quite pathetic. It's better in the afternoon than it is in the morning.
Maybe "traditional" bus riders aren't moving about yet at 7:45am... but you'd think that would be a popular time slot. It's better at 4:45 or 5:15 (leaving downtown), but I have yet to ride on a bus that's more than half full.
My belief is that they could do much better if they'd reengineer the routes. Get some ACHD traffic engineers, who know traffic patterns, involved. Pretty much all of Boise's buses go out-and-back from downtown, in a "spoke and hub" pattern. I think they'd have more appeal - and more potential riders - if they "looped" and overlapped those loops in places. They could have a presence on more roads, and perhaps people could figure out better ways to get to their destinations, than riding downtown and then transfering for another long ride.
Bikeboy, from your description it appears that the majority of bus riders in Boise are not commuters otherwise the morning bus that you take would be packed. When I lived in Seattle and commuted by bus it was "standing room only" during rush hours.
I suspect that the problem here is routing and also frequency. I don't believe that ridership will increase under the current system, but then the system probably won't change without more riders. It's a vicious circle.
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