A Bus Rider’s Frustration With Transit Planners

I guess I would be very curious to know how many local policymakers and planners actually use transit on a daily basis. At the moment, the status quo is to do stuff like spend $1.2 billion $1.5 billion on a rail line that minimally improves mobility while at the same time ignoring basic, cheap user experience improvements. We’re making some progress with the trendiest things--lots of new bike facilities, fancy streetcar proposals, and the like. And a receptive Hennepin County looks to be serious about making Washington Avenue more than a car sewer, which is great considering where their transportation department is located.

What percentage of our region’s transit movers and shakers have waited for the Route 5 bus at Nicollet and 7th Street in Downtown Minneapolis on a cold, windy January day and taken it anywhere? Or, one time, given their own bus driver directions? Or stood at the Uptown Transit Station with their little sister, visiting from the suburban East Coast, for a transfer to a Route 6 bus that is never, ever on time?  We should find out. The bus is the way that the vast majority of Twin Cities transit users experience the system, and while unabashedly unsexy, it’s important.