Here’s my column from the Sunday paper. If you’ve already read it elsewhere, please skip on down to the comments below. Thanks.

WHERE’S THE 9:26? PLUS, TRANSIT FOR DUMMIES

Most people don’t take the bus, and most days, I’m like most people. But my humble vehicle needed maintenance this past week, so I spent a couple of days in the world of mass transit — a world where time has a slightly different meaning, and where technology is increasingly your friend.

I dropped off my car on University Avenue, home of the legendary and frequent Route 16, so I figured I’d stand at the nearest corner until a bus came. I wound up getting to the stop at 9:26 a.m., which turned out to be one of the times that buses are scheduled to appear, with subsequent ones coming at 9:36 and 9:47.

I ended up boarding a bus at 9:40. Had the 9:26 already come and gone? Had I boarded a late-running 9:36, a really late-running 9:26, or an early 9:47?

Back at the office, I called Bruce Howard, Metro Transit’s director of marketing, who said that a bus is considered on time if it passes its time points no more than a minute earlier than scheduled or no more than five minutes afterward.

And because all buses now have global-positioning technology, he was able to check records and tell me that the 9:26 bus had probably passed my stop a bit more than a minute early, while the bus I boarded was a 9:36 that was 4 minutes behind schedule.

The uncertainty of when a bus is going to appear is an obvious turnoff, so since July Metro Transit has offered a service called NexTrip, which uses GPS technology to tell riders in real time when an individual bus will reach a certain location. It’s available on the Internet and by phone.

On my Route 16 trek, I was too cold to take my fingers out of my gloves and dial in, so I later tried the technology from home and the office with a fair amount of success.

NexTrip times also are displayed at the Uptown Transit Station and will be available along Marquette and 2nd Avenues in downtown Minneapolis when the rebuilding of those streets is complete.

Howard said Metro Transit’s goal is to be on time 90 percent of the time, and so far for the year, they’re at 89 percent.

Detours related to construction and the Republican National Convention haven’t helped, he said, but we’re way ahead of some metro areas — Seattle, for example, aims for an 80 percent on-time rate and is at about 75 percent.

My own on-time behavior is considerably worse, as evidenced by a couple of mad dashes to the bus last week. Speaking of learning the hard way, here are a few lessons from an infrequent transit-user:

Be very specific when using the online route finder. When I was trying to get to downtown Minneapolis, I entered “4th St. and Portland Ave. S.” into the destination field, and I got an error message telling me my trip to 4th and Portland in White Bear Township was not possible.

Make sure you have a firm grip on any coins, as it is very disruptive to drop a dime down the stairs of the bus while trying to pay.

Do not put your backpack on the floor on a snowy day, then place it in your lap, or you will arrive at work with a muddy brown splotch on your pants.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.