earthling wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2020 3:07 pm
^No there are still many regular sized if not most. And I'd rather have smaller/regular sized buses running more often than double length running less often. KC obviously doesn't have the ridership levels to justify it of course. What matters to most regular riders is frequency of service, not the mode of transit.
I agree on the frequency thing. I travel and do a lot of photography for transit systems and I just don't see a lot of short buses in larger metros. Even places like Omaha mostly run regular sized buses. You can sit at a suburban transit center in Columbus Ohio where buses come every few minutes and they are all full sized. So it seems like KC is kind of going against the grain a little from my experience. Again, not that it matters unless the buses are full, but it tells me that ridership on most of KC's bus routes outside the max lines are very low ridership.
I grew up on Blue Ridge Blvd and used the 28 and 28X for years along with many others. Full size buses would come every 15-30 minutes all day long. I never even needed a schedule. Now when I'm in that area, you occasionally even see a bus and half the time they are short ones. Even 47 is short now I think. And I used to have the entire ATA pretty much memorized and have noticed the same in other parts of the city. So when I'm in town, the system feels like a fraction of what it used to be only now there is a downtown streetcar the max routes. Although I still consider the MAX routes to be just normal bus city bus routes in most cities. The stops are nicer than most, but other than that, there is nothing about those routes that is a major difference from any other bus route. When I worked at crown center or downtown, I could walk down to the street and a bus that would go north or south would come every minute or so. Didn't matter which bus route it was as most went toward the plaza or downtown, just anything to get north or south. Now, even with MAX, it seems like overall frequency of having a bus come is much less. But the max buses are a little nicer than most KCATA buses.
One more thing and again, I'm really not slamming KC here. I'm just a transit nerd in general. That 3-Trails Transit Center? It looks like a shelter over a restroom you might find in a local park. I would hardly call that a transit center. And the one going in downtown is the same on a relative scale. Really really tiny for the downtown of a major city. It just seems like outside of the streetcar and maybe the max bus stops, the KC bus system is severely downsized and even future plans don't seem to match what should exist in a city the size of KC.
I know the KCATA is doing the best they can with their funding I'm sure. KC has little regional or state funding for transit. So it's not like the KCATA is not trying. The entire system just seems extremely underfunded and it's still very fragmented across the metro. The max lines are good bus routes, but the rest of the city and metro is just not a very robust system at all.
Just my thoughts, sorry.