Just got back from the Urban Transportation Commission where officials from Cap Metro spoke about the bus lines and service times they want to cut starting in June. According to them, most of the changes are from specific route times that had very low ridership. The biggest cut is that weekend Dillo service will be cut entirely.
The reduced service doesn’t seem that bad really but cuts in bus service during our current huge economic clusterfuck crisis doesn’t really seem like a good idea.
You can see the full list of cuts along with Cap Metro’s rationale here.
Capital Metro is having three public opportunities for input on these changes:
Public Meetings:
Thursday, March 12, 2009
(Capital Metro Downtown Customer Service Center -
323 Congress Ave.), 11:30am – 1:30pm
Thursday, March 12, 2009
(Capital Metro Downtown Customer Service Center -
323 Congress Ave.), 5:30 – 7pm
Public Hearing:
Friday, March 13, 2009
(Capital Metro Main Building – 2910 East 5th St.), 12:30pm
Related posts:
on Mar 11th, 2009 at 11:26 am
http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000573.html
CM is planning on cutting some express bus trips despite the fact that the commuter rail ‘alternative’ is going to be much slower for anybody in Austin, and slower-to-almost-competitive for the farthest out folks in Leander.
on Mar 11th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I understand your frustration on this point Mike, but why would CapMetro keep running a service that competes with the one then just spent tens of millions of dollars on?
My guess is that the commuter rail will end up being too popular, i.e. the cars will be full way before the end of the line, and they’ll have to restart this service to take up the slack until they get enough rail cars to meet demand. However, until that plays out it seems foolish to compete with yourself.
on Mar 11th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
The reason they should keep it running is because they promised at the beginning of this whole process that they wouldn’t cut express bus service to make commuter rail seem more popular.
If you think the service is going to be so popular by itself, you wouldn’t need to cut these express bus trips – would you?
Those who think it’s ridiculous to even consider that Capital Metro’s doing this for the reasons I stated should look harder at the graphs in my link above. Don’t you think a few people are going to notice after a few days that, yeah, the train gets you to the MLK station pretty quick, but then you have to spend 5 minutes transferring to a shuttle and 10 minutes getting back to UT (at best)?