Day Pass

In order to promote usage of transit by locals and tourists alike, many transit agencies will have a Day Pass, allowing unlimited usage of their services for that day. Instead of paying fare after fare every time you board a bus or train, you can just pay a flat fee for the Day Pass and not have to worry about anything. However, there are agencies that have not opted to put this sort of measure into use. Perhaps the greatest example of that here in the Pacific Northwest is the Puget Sound region (for this blog, defined as Snohomish County to Pierce County). Served by not one, not two, but five different transit agencies: Community Transit, Everett Transit, King County Metro, Pierce Transit, and Sound Transit. Of the five agencies, only Pierce Transit has a day pass. Even then, it doesn’t amount to much, as it’s only an available option on weekends and holidays with Saturday or Sunday service levels.

In the interest of being fair, I went through and did a survey of all the transit agencies in Washington State to see who has a Day Pass and who doesn’t. Some of the results were rather surprising, while others not so much.

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August 2011 Board Meeting

Last night, August 11, BFT held their monthly meeting of the board. Though it is a rather simple affair, the board meeting brings to light a lot of information that normally isn’t circulated nor heavily advertised, but still is important none the less. The other benefit of going to the board meeting is that by doing so, I can get a copy of the board packet, a stack of documents and memos and whatnots that get passed out to each attending board member, as well as any member of the public attending who requests one (though I’ve never seen anyone else do it at the meetings that I’ve attended.)

With that in mind, I’ll go ahead and share a few things from last night’s meeting, as well as some new bits of information.

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UPDATE: September 2011 Service Change

As I mentioned before in this post, service changes to Ben Franklin Transit are scheduled to go in effect for next month.

Since the last post, a few updates have come up:

• Though they are referred to as the “September Service Changes,” the new schedules/routes will actually be going into effect on the last Monday of the month, August 29th. (September 1st is on the Thursday of that week.)
• In a notice posted at Three Rivers Transit Center, the notation for changes to Route 67 reads as follows: “In addition to regular routing Route 67 will run to CBC on school days and on weekdays becomes Route 66 at Road 100.” Columbia Basin College, or CBC, runs on a Monday-Thursday class schedule (with some exceptions), so I contacted BFT for clarification. They said that the extension to the CBC bus stop on Saraceno Way will be in effect for Route 67 (as well as Route 225) Monday through Friday, but only for Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters. As mentioned before, Saturday schedules/routes will still stay in their current form.

Also, though not necessarily new information (I merely forgot to mention it in the original post), the last change to schedules is that Saturday service levels will be instituted for the following holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President’s Day, Veteran’s Day, and New Year’s Eve. Christmas Eve will also see Saturday service levels, but the last departures will be at 1:00PM/1:15. As of now, there’s no word on how service for Route 170 to Benton City/Prosser will be affected by this. No changes will be made to holidays that already have no transit service.

Ben Franklin Transit on Google Maps

It’s finally arrived!

Now anyone can use Google Maps to find the directions from any point in the Tri-Cities to any other point by using Ben Franklin Transit.

As far as I know, Ben Franklin Transit hired an outside firm to do this work for them, and so far through early testing, I’d say they did a pretty good job.

For a test, I decided to ask it to route me from the Wal-Mart in Richland to the Wal-Mart in Kennewick. On a Saturday.

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Efficiency

It’s a tricky thing in transit planning.

Do you cater to the few who absolutely demand transit and provide them with excellent and accessible frequent transit, or do you try to cater to the masses, regardless of whether or not they’ve asked for transit service?

Case in point, the current debate in King County (WA). In short, King County Metro faces severe cuts to service unless a $20 Congestion Reduction Charge is approved by the county commissioners as a stop-gap measure until the state can approve a new or better source of funding. (Take a peek at SeattleTransitBlog.com for more in-depth coverage about this.) A problem that King County Metro has is the size of the area it serves. Except for the uninhabited areas in the east part of the county, Metro has routes serving the entire county. The pro to this is it opens the opportunities for people everywhere in King County to go where they need without relying a car. The con is that it costs money. A lot of it. One of the biggest examples of this is Route 209, which runs from North Bend to Issaquah. It is a very infrequent route (on average it runs once every 1.5 hours),  and has a very low ridership. But, there are people using it. However, in an effort to conserve resources during these difficult financial times, many have proposed it would be better to cut this route and use the saved resources to serve people where there is much higher demand. And that is where the hard decisions begin. Do the low-ridership routes get cut in an effort to streamline the agency’s resources, or do all routes suffer the same cutbacks so that nobody will be completely cut off from their lives?