Keith Harrow

It's concerning we haven't heard from him for 3 days...

I'm DYING lmao

I've been riding the bus for years & have found that they're generally on schedule in the early morning.  The stop is one block away & they come every 15 minutes or so.  They are sometimes late but almost never "early."  

 

The new system will cut buses on that (renumbered) route by 50%.  Another feature--they apparently won't be "scheduled."  On arriving at the stop, I can scan a doohickie & tell when the next one is due.  Which will be great for later in the day, when they definitely get off schedule.  Or evenings & weekends--when a schedulef bus will just not appear--or, my favorite, a bus with the destination sign "TO GARAGE" will zip by about the time the last bus was scheduled.  I've learned that, if I'll need to return home latish on a weekend night, it's best to have cab fare.  No matter what is "scheduled." 

 

But, as I said, my bus has been on schedule early in the morning.  Knowing the schedule lets me know when to set the alarm, how quickly to get dressed & when to leave the house.  The new setup sounds counter-productive for getting to work.  Other riders & most of the drivers agree.  Oh, well.  Buses will be free for that first week....

 

Light Rail is never "scheduled."  A train comes by every 5 or 6 minutes at "peak" times--until 7 PM Monday through Friday. With such frequency, it works fine.  (Well, there's the occasional "incident.")  The train's less frequent in the evening & on weekends.  (If only they would stop sending single car trains on weekends--they tend to be packed.) 

The buses will be scheduled.  They have draft schedules on the website.  

Hempstead Rd. is one of the most ugly, desolate stretches of road I have ever come across.  

A lot of ignorance here.  As per usual, most critics of Metro are still stuck in 2006 and have not moved on with the rest of world to the current year, 2014.  A lot of the issues that Metro has stem from Frank Wilson, the deposed former CEO that wasted millions, didn't build one inch of rail, and nearly lost all Federal funding after that Buy America fiasco.  When you make that many mistakes it takes a gargantuan effort to clean up, and unfortunately the clean up fell upon those who didn't make the mess in the first place.  However, the typically ignorant anti Metro crowd seems to think that the world operates like a 1980s film montage and through a few minutes of cheap, disposable pop music and some cutscenes we will have an up and running rail system.  Things don't work like that.  Building a rail system is expensive in both time and capital even if everything goes according to plan.  So after years of the Caligula like reign of Frank Wilson, rife with corruption, mismanagement and delays, you're not going to be able to wave a wand and get back on schedule and budget because you installed new leadership.  This isn't a transit simulation sandbox where you plot your line, click confirm and presto it's complete!  

Secondly, as always, no one actually cares about the nuts and bolts Metro bus system.  As the system lay breathing it's last during the Wilson years everyone was complaining about Light Rail.  Who cares?  They didn't even have enough buses to run on the routes and services that weren't cut to fund more of the Light Rail project.  No one cared though.  Metro just completed a massive overhaul proposal of a bus system with roots back to World War 2 that would drastically alter the travel patters in this city, for the better, and no one cares.  Except the extremely tiny but very vocal minority which this "new" Metro listens to to almost a fault.  Most Metro critics don't know nor understand the most basic aspects of the bus system and don't care to know.  They just want to see a shiny new train whiz by that they will only ride until too many of those bus "riff raff" start finding their way aboard.

Transit engineering is a complex and involved process on it's own.  When you politicize it, it is darned near impossible.  This new leadership at Metro has turned this agency around tremendously since Frank Wilson was tossed out by his ear five years ago.  Are they perfect, no.  Are they as terrible as the uninformed arm chair transit pundits will have you believe, not by a long shot.