By: Diane Benjamin
I’ve written a few stories about the subsidies handed to Connect Transit every year. In other words, your tax money. According to this article, between $8 and $10 MILLION per year: http://blnnews.com/2015/10/27/hows-connect-transit-ridership/
Bus riders love to yell at me when I do these stories. Somewhere a bus route or two must be heavily used, but I don’t see packed buses anywhere I drive.
Saturday morning I was at Meijer. A huge empty bus drove past both entrances to the store. It went too fast to get a picture, I frequently can’t get to a camera quick enough for a pic.
How about some help? Let’s start an album of empty buses. Okay, one of packed buses too.
Here’s a start. Both are routes at or close to downtown Bloomington.
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In all fairness, the time of day, the day of the week and location should be noted as done in the article above.
Both were mid morning on different weekdays. Remember downtown is supposed to be a hub.
Agreed about the hub. Couldn’t get my camera out fast enough this afternoon at 2:30pm when a bus going south on Four Seasons at Oakland had 2 people. I never see anyone at bus stops either.
Also note the weather conditions. I bet ridership goes up when the weather is worse. Of course this being Illinois, our weather is only bad a couple days each year.
Okay can you imagine Fudrucker Airline buying the largest Boeing jet for service without checking on the number of passengers they expect? I say these transit services have it backwards. They get these big expensive fuel consuming, dirty diesel no less, buses without any indication of usage. Instead what they should be doing is monitoring and deciding on bus sizes by the number of riders. It is just like government having this backwards. It isn’t just here but in other cities as well. I cannot imagine the amount of wasted fuel this country consumes with this business model. Not to mention the pollution by diesel engines not equipped with emissions DEF/DPF systems. Once again a poorly managed government service that sticks it to us all to pay for their waste.
I’ve seen these busses sitting parked at white oak park before with the driver standing outside smoking a cigarette.
we thank you as we are bothered by this also.just the other evening approx. 8 p.m. as we traveled east on route 9—3 empty busses were at the mall enter change one going into colonial plaza (?) one coming out the mall exit and one going down the service road going west by the old shell gas station!!!
Now that we have bike lanes, why do we still have buses? It don’t make no sense! Get on your bikes and ride people!!!
How about the fact that some of the drivers do NOT stop at bus signs even if there are people waiting at the sign. My sister takes the bus every day to and from work & has had to take a cab because the drive ignores her! How about the great PUBLIC bus system who will NOT go into the largest trailer court in the city,Hilltop tr ct? They make the riders go down to the Dairy Queen to pick up and drop off. So much for public transportation.
Take some pictures around Uptown and ISU. The buses are packed every morning.
I never go there. Take some and send them. I’m not saying some routes don’t have lots of riders. The point is we all see huge empty buses elsewhere in town.