For all those anxiously wondering what exactly service will be like after SORTA’s service changes take effect this month, the answer arrived last night in the form of both PDF schedules and a new GTFS feed. Woot!!
SERVICE CHANGES: COMING AUGUST 18th 2013. Don’t get caught waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Check your schedules.
—
In related news, I’ll should some more quantitative analysis of the new service plan here soon once I get around to it, including an updated frequency map to be available on the website. I was just waiting for the GTFS data for that one. And hopefully…some new analysis of ridership on a restructured system. Will more cross-town routes be reflected in relatively decreased boardings in downtown? I’m counting on SORTA to release that data from their automatic passenger counting system as soon as there’s enough time for the results to be statistically significant, perhaps around early to mid-September.
Looks like they still make the 24 stop in downtown instead of ending in Uptown, very disappointing, as if they got rid of that loop they could run it more frequently and at the same time people could take the M+ or the 43 to go the rest of the way with very little time to transfer.
Do you know why they changed this from the plan that was originally put out there?
That is odd…I hadn’t noticed it until you pointed it out. I wonder what else has changed from the last maps that were put out. They had realigned other routes because they removed that portion of the 24. Are they still realigned?
Kind of hoping that schedule is an error. I’ll check the GTFS to see if the 24 Downtown leg is there as well.
Going to have to check later when I have a bit more time.
I hope every city adopts services like the M+ to some degree – I was just in LA and was blown away by how efficient the buses were. They have a system of rapid and local buses, the locals are pretty much there for ADA compliance on the routes with rapid service. The only thing they have over Cincy’s M+ with their setup (besides way more routes) is signal priority. The rapid bus I was on was PACKED too, though, I was riding down Wilshire Blvd which pretty much is a corridor that is begging for subway services (which they are getting too) due to population and job density.
Almost everyone(including myself) is(was) surprised to learn how good LA’s transit has become. It’s no Manhattan of course, but the LA system does seem worthy of the country’s second largest city :-)
In a lot of ways LA’s transit is (Shockingly) better than Chicago’s, (by the time I’m an old man and they have more fast rail transit it will be better as a whole!) because in Chicago if you are going between the spokes of the train system you are screwed by a maddeningly slow bus that will pick up and let off 1 person at a time every single block.
In short there needs to be more fast buses, look at what Megabus did to US intercity bus transit for instance :-). I’m pretty sure the M+ will be a success – now if they can only have more weekend buses.
I agree, though I still think there’s potentially more good to be done in the short-medium term by eliminating stops from all or most services rather than dividing some corridors into a fast express and a slow local service.
[…] is a visualization of weekly frequency for each of SORTA’s routes, derived from the just-released GTFS data. The area of each square is directly proportional to the number of trips a route will make each […]