By Antonio D. French
Filed Monday, March 6 at 7:46 AM
In an article in today's Post-Dispatch, Metro officials say they are ready for the challenge of a possible rider increase due to construction on Highway 40 and gas price increases.
"We see the highway construction as a marketing and education challenge, as well as an opportunity to introduce Metro services to a new market of people who may not be familiar with the system to get east to downtown," said Adella Jones, Metro's vice president for government and community affairs.
But we don't see how Metro could possible be ready for more riders when they don't know how to treat the few they have now.
But we don't just bitch and moan here at PUB DEF. We try to offer solutions too. So we propose three things that could be done in 30 days to help Metro improve its service:
1. BUS STOPS SHOULD ACTUALLY TELL WHEN THE BUS IS COMING -- This is a no-brainer. If you actually did wake up one sunny day and say to yourself, "I think I'll leave the car in the garage and travel on foot today," you'd quickly say, "screw it!" after walking to your nearest bus stop and realizing you have no idea when this thing is coming.
That Metro has no kind of schedule or map (or any other useful information) on its bus stops says to the average non-daily user, "Fuck you, take it or leave it." Posting the schedule for bus riders, like they do MetroLink riders, is really the least Metro can do.
2. SCHEDULES FOR BIKE RIDERS -- As spring and summer approach, Metro should publish (and post on all City bus stops) information saying when buses with bike racks will be coming by. That will make it 10 times easier for people serious about public transportation and personal fitness (either out of choice or necessity) to travel this city without a car.
3. WEBSITE SHOULD BE ABOUT GETTING OUT USEFUL INFORMATION, NOT P.R. -- Look, people go to Metro's website for only a few reasons: to get schedule and route information (which isn't posted at bus stops), info on where to buy passes, or Metro's contact info. To find that information, a hurried traveler must now dig through a bunch of crap about riverboats, the Arch, and "How Much Money You Can Save" public relations bull.
That stuff is all swell. But stick it on Page 2. The front page should just have three big icons: "Maps & Schedules," "Buy Passes," and "Contact Metro."
And one more thing about the website; if they're going to make a PDF of a bus schedule available for download, it might make sense to have it printer-friendly.
How about you? You got any ideas for Metro?
9 Comments:
In my opinion, the most important thing Metro could do to make their service better for riders is to have more frequent service. I would like to see every bus run at least every fifteen minutes, if not every ten, from at least 6:30 AM to 9PM.
Lots of people like to talk about how they think public transit in Chicago is so much better than St. Louis. Many of the people who make those claims have never ridden the Chicago Transit Authority, much less had to actually depend on it to get around.
I relied on the CTA for several years, and to me the key difference between Chicago and St. Louis public transit is not coverage of the area, but rather how infrequently the busses run here. I do realize that there are a few, like the Grand bus, that run every ten or fifteen minutes, but overall bus frequency here just does not cut it. To me, having busses that run every half hour during the day on weekdays sucks.
There are two busses that run near my house, the #74 Florissant and the #30 Soulard. Each operate on the every half hour schedule during the week. They each come by at almost the same time (on the half hour), so if I just miss one bus, it's a half hour wait until I can catch another.
If you're going to work and you just miss a bus, 30 minutes is a loooong time to be late to work, especially if you have to punch in at a time clock like I do. In bad weather, half an hour is an especially long time to wait. Over the winter, several of my bus-ridin' coworkers came in to work red-faced and coughing after having missed a bus, since they had to stand out in the cold for so long waiting for the next one. During the hot and humid St. Louis summer, half an hour's wait can mean the difference between arriving to work clean and arriving to work in sweat-drenched disarray.
Shoter wait times also make it easier for transit riders to take jobs that require them to make transfers between routes. I've not been able to pursue several job opportunities for which I was qualified because taking an every-half-hour-bus to Metrolink to another every-half-hour bus stands a great chance of making me late on a fairly regular basis, not to mention those wait times really stretch out what should be a short commute.
Daily errands would be easier with more frequent service, too. For me, as a transit rider, I have to carefully plan out my days off if I want to get anything done outside of my own neighborhood. Getting a quick haircut shouldn't be a big ordeal, but when I have to wait half an hour to catch a bus, and then take an hour-long bus trip down to South City, getting a simple haircut suddenly becomes a three hour ordeal. If the busses ran every ten or fifteen minutes, it'd save me a lot of time and allow me to get more errands done in a day.
I also think that more frequent bus service would do a great deal to encourage new, casual, and spontaneous ridership, and to make it seem easier to ride the bus. If, as you mention, someone were to stroll up to the nearest bus stop just to try it, well, after fifteen or twenty minutes of waiting without a bus in sight, I imagine they'd give up.
In Chicago, most city busses ran pretty frequently during the week. Bus stops were also labeled with the name and number of every route that stopped there. Some had route maps. So, one could walk up to a bus stop, see where the various routes went, and hop on a bus within a relatively short time span. That was nice, and I think it removed some of the basic factors that make people nervous about trying to ride the bus for the first time. It encouraged quite a few spontaneous adventures on my part.
I also think that later service would be nice, so that people without cars can enjoy StL nightlife without having to rely on a friend for a ride. It seems pretty basic to me, too, that you'd want to have another option out there for people who go out on the town and drink--if better public transit service was available later, we might have a few more drunk drivers off the road. Also, later service would make life easier for folks working late, or even working the graveyard shift. I recently applied to work at a place that stays open until 1AM, and was quite nervous because the job sounded right up my alley, but I knew I couldn't take it if they wanted me to work late because the relevant bus routes do not run past 11 PM or so. Metrolink also does not run as late as it should.
I think more frequent bus service is the single most important change that Metro could make to improve life for current riders, and attract new ridership. If every bus in the city ran every fifteen minutes, that would make life infintely easier for current and potential riders alike.
12:00 PM, March 06, 2006
Whoa, Claire. Sounds like you had something you really needed to get off your chest.
I agree that it would be much more convenient for buses to be more frequent. I would love to see that. I'd also like to see buses be on time.
But more frequent means more buses and more drivers and more money. That's a whole 'nother thing.
What I'm talking about is quick and easy things that can be done right now, for minimal cost. After these common sense things are done, ridership might go up and demand will force more frequent stops.
12:44 PM, March 06, 2006
Antonio, your response to Claire is also the response to your original post. Your recommendation that Metro post the schedule for bus riders doesn't qualify as a "quick and easy thing that can be done right now, for minimal cost" because it severely underestimates the work involved. It means going to every bus stop (not just every line) and posting a schedule showing when the bus arrives at that bus stop. And every time the schedule changes, it means repeating the entire process. That's a lot of individual printing, a lot of labor to post them at each stop in each direction, and a lot of opportunity for workers to screw up and post the wrong piece of paper at the wrong stop. When I was a kid Bi-State did post the schedules, but it was too costly to keep up. Sitting at the keyboard and deciding that somebody else ought to go out and do that is a whole lot easier and cheaper than actually doing it.
Your response to Claire is correct. Doubling the bus runs doubles the expenses. It's a great idea for somebody with an endless supply of money, but what does that have to do with St. Louis?
The severe consequences of missing a bus that Claire mentions (being half an hour late for work) simply underscores the importance of making sure you don't miss the bus. Bus riders need to accept a little personal responsibility and invest an extra five minutes a day to give themselves a cushion to insure they won't miss the bus. That's a quick and easy thing that can be done right now, for minimal cost.
1:42 PM, March 06, 2006
Oracle, operating any business or service and thinking that informing your customers about your offerings is a secondary concern is just daffy.
You think when Harman Moseley builds a new movie theater, he says "Let 'em figure out our movie times by themselves"? No, he puts a big sign out front.
You seem to share in Metro's opinion that making it as easy as possible for people to know when the bus is coming is a luxury. I say it is not. It's common sense.
And for an organization that received more than $150 million in grants last year and another $50 million in revenue from passengers to say that it isn't worth the far less than 1% of that to revenue to make it as easy as possible for potential passengers to try their service... well, no wonder they're in such a bad financial situation.
If Slay wants to corporatize a quasi-governmental body, he should leave the schools alone and turn his henchmen loose on Metro.
3:06 PM, March 06, 2006
Good call, the entire metro bus system is retarted. Moving from St. Charles, I found this system to be completely archaic. There is no way of telling when the bus will show up.
When I visited London, you did not have to get online to find a bus. You could get a map, go to a stop, and the bus shows up in 5 minutes, simple as that.
They need to get transmitters on all buses, and link this up to a central system, which could broadcast its location, and possible ETA, which would be displayed on an LCD screen at the bus stop. This way, you have an idea of when the bus is going to arrive.
This technology is possible, we need it.
I agree with Mr. French, we need to show riders when our service is available.
Regarding the cost: everything is expensive, and St. Louis needs to spend money, and offer good services to citizens. This way existing citizens will be happy, and more county residents may seek to relocate to the city. This could also attract people from other cities who wish to take advantage of STL's cheap housing market.
5:58 PM, March 06, 2006
"You think when Harman Moseley builds a new movie theater, he says "Let 'em figure out our movie times by themselves"? No, he puts a big sign out front."
Don't get me wrong, Antonio, I think Metro is as ridiculous a bureaucracy as you do. It's just that you're wrong on this particular point (leaving many other areas where Metro really sucks).
Getting to your quote, if all Metro had to do was put a big sign out front, even they would have done it. More analogous, would Moseley post a brochure about his movie at several hundred separate locations in the metro area, and then do it all again every time the movie changed? I don't think so.
It's not like Metro makes no effort to inform its customers about its offerings. When I decided to take Metro down to Mardi Gras, I went to the Metro web site and looked up the timetables for the appropriate bus lines. Someone without internet access could have called Metro and gotten the same info. I guess homeless people and others with no access to either phone or internet (including borrowing somebody's phone) would be out of luck, but they have bigger problems than that.
And if Slay's henchmen would do the same for Metro as they did for our school system, we would learn how much worse Metro could be!
7:49 PM, March 06, 2006
Virtually all buses now have bike racks, so odds are more than likely that you wouldn't have to wait for another bus.
But the schedule idea is definitely needed. At least bus transfer centers (Ballas, Hampton-Gravois, Broadway-Taylor) and shelters at all MetroLink stations provide schedules, but ideally all stops should.
When Cross County opens, Metro will begin publishing a book of all schedules and route maps, initially free (nominal charge afterwards) for patrons. Metro is also experimenting with technology that would allow cell phone users to find out when the next bus would arrive.
6:25 AM, March 07, 2006
I do think that the bus stops should have posted at least a route map, if not schedules. I do realize that this would be very expensive, and I do not think Metro can pay for it. What this will take is a fundraising campaign that may have to be independent of Metro -- perhaps Citizens for Modern Transit would be interested. If the Danforth Foundation wants to do something really big, it could get involved in such an effort. (If it really wants to leave a legacy, it would raise money for more frequent service, or better yet, streetcar lines.)
In the meantime, it really is not that difficult to cut up a bus schedule brochure, take some wheatpaste or glue, and put the schedule up at a few stops in your own neighborhood. At least a few riders will have schedules in front of them that way.
One thing Metro needs to do better that would take no extra funding is to get schedule and route changes on their website, prominently displayed on their website. When the streets around the Century Building were closed for demolition, a few routes were re-routed but these changes were not once reported on the Metro website. How hard would that be?
On the bigger picture, I think that it's ridiculous that city leaders are spending time on a riverfront redevelopment project that is little more than an urban Disneyland when they should be taking leadership on issues like public transit.
9:13 AM, March 07, 2006
The Governor appoints Bi-State commissioners, not Metro commissioners. There is no Metro transit agency to be found in Missouri statute.
Bi-State had the money for the PR gimmick of replacing Bi-State with the dba Metro on all its signage (at stops, on buses, etc.) and the literature. They did not put Metro stickers on the signs to cover up Bi-State. They replaced the signs. At the time, they said it was not a significant cost.
The bus schedules would not change so often if Bi-State's goal were not to reduce bus service as much as possible because they really have their hearts set on mostly running a train system to accomodate park n rides.
It is nice about the bike racks. Too bad so many buses still cannot accomodate customers in wheelchairs.
8:07 AM, March 08, 2006
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