2009 Stimulus goes to 1950’s Public transportation

In the modern age of fast, efficient transportation ranging from Bullet Trains to Introductory Light Rail, some forward thinker has decided to pimp-out the Triangle-Area Buses. According to Raleigh News and Observer, the $52.5 million for transit improvements” will used for: New bus operations, a maintenance center and a park-and-ride lot. Bus maintenance and painting, 27 para-transit vans, five 40-foot buses, 20 bus shelters, and GPS satellite technology that will give riders real-time information about bus arrival times, hardware and software for a fleet-inventory system, passenger amenities at bus stops (coffee dispenser and newspapers?), and paving.

On any rush hour morning or afternoon, Triangle-Area bus passengers are sparse. Meanwhile, most of the major thoroughfares are jammed to a crawl. The money received from the Federal Government is not being applied to resolving the cause of the current bus systems under-utilization, which is a two factor problem of speed and convenience.

It is still exponentially faster and more convenient to get around the Triangle by car.  The average commute time in the Triangle is about 25 min and from 15 to 30 miles. Depending on your route, your commute time by bus to go the same distance  could be anywhere from 45 min to 2 hours and require more than one transfer. On top of the poor ride-times, the bus schedule is limited to hours between 6 am and 8pm weekdays with no service at all on Sundays. If you happen not to be one of the numerous off-hour data-center employees in RTP and are able to commute within those hours, chances are that there is no bus stop near your home. The scattered enclaves that make up the suburban Triangle homespaces area are off the bus map. Mostly routing through commercial centers and the Research Park itself, the system maintains service to hardly any residential areas external to Downtown, where Park commuters are actually coming in from.

In the RTP area, as long as Lawmakers continue to not take transportation issues seriously and  fund incremental improvements to the unused bus systems, when well crafted plans for a light rail system are left in the wish-box, riders will continue to stay away.