As you may remember, at the public hearing regarding the bus schedule modifications I had high praise for unflocking the #3 & #4 buses. This provides much better coverage while costing zero dollars in extra operating costs. This is something that transit advocates have been advocating for 2 decades now. Thank you for this small, but important change.
It is too bad that this isn't being done all over the city - Johnson-Gorham has the flocked 2 & 5, Monroe has the flocked 3 & 19, and other duplicated routes suffer the same inefficient fate.
To the main point of this email:
What I didn't realize until after the public hearing a couple of months ago is that part of the restructuring is killing the #10 line. It is my understanding that this is being considered at tomorrow's Transit and Parking Commission meeting (CITY TRANSIT AND PARKING COMMISSION, TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2003; 5:00 P.M. - Regular Meeting; Conference Room 260, Madison Municipal Building 215 Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard).
You weren't around back in the early 90's when people on both sides of the isthmus were clamoring for a cross-isthmus connector. We begged/pleaded/cajoled and even prostrated ourselves before the bus pooh-bah, Paul LaRousse, for this service. It even made it into the Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Plan of 1995. Well, we finally got it. (I hate to give Paul LaRousse credit for anything; but I think it was Paul's parting blessing for us to remember him by or something). The #10 has proven to be a highly successful service. My wife, a regular 10 & 11 rider, reports that it is often a standing room only service. I've seen it packed. We can't imagine why you would cut such a successful line. After all, we have been trying to build cross-isthmus connections of all sorts - schools, pedestrian/bike, social services, etc. - for many, many years.
It appears that the successful #10 is being replaced with the # 9 which serves only the student areas in the Bassett neighborhood. It is fine to serve the undergrad areas. But please understand that there are always a lot of people on the #10 bus even before it gets to the undergrad areas. Then it fills to overflowing once it gets to the undergrad areas. That means the # 10--AS IT IS CURRENTLY STRUCTURED-- is a great connector service for our many downtown & isthmus neighborhoods; the very neighborhoods that use transit heavily!
The thing that is most absurd about the #9 is that it goes back to the old LaRousse model of max spatial coverage/minimal temporal coverage. That #9 bus route winds around, doubling back block after block. If the route were stretched out in a straight line, we'd have the old #10, a very successful, well-used route. Why is it successful? Because it is very *direct*; because it connects a lot of neighborhoods; because it doesn't get hung up on those absurd connections-that-never-connect up on the square. Instead, the route planners have figured out how to actually make a great route BAD: long, tortuous and full of dizzying detours.
It is almost as if your planners are overly pandering to the student population, but didn't realize that the students, like the rest of us, want a direct connection to where they are going. And *they* *are* *students* for gosh sake! The packed #10 buses are proof that they don't mind walking the 1/2 block to the bus. It is, after all, a bus, not a taxi service. I realize that the students provide a good revenue stream for Metro. What you may not realize is that a lot of students actually do leave their own neighborhoods to work/live/play in other neighborhoods. They need the direct inter-neighborhood connectivity as much as everyone else in the city does.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely, Michael D. Barrett and Pamela S. Barrett 2137 Sommers Ave. Madison, WI 53704 (608)245-1059 _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
