It takes a village to get a bus moving again
Posted on July 9th, 2009 – 11:48 AMBy Roadguy
Today’s post is brought to you by Roadguy’s boss. The text below is her status update yesterday on Facebook (where, by the way, you can become a fan of Roadguy and see who else already is). Here’s her update:
Today’s commute on the 24 bus had more stop-and-go than usual. The wheelchair lift got stuck on a telephone pole. No amount of lever-pushing would free it, so the driver called for help. But a passenger decided to put the mass in mass transit. He got out and pushed the lift clear of the pole, helped off the person who needed to use the lift and quietly took his seat as his fellow riders applauded.
More local transit stories are available every day at bustales.com and pickingupstrangers.com — and you can always share them with Roadguy, too, even if you’re not his boss.
2 Responses to "It takes a village to get a bus moving again"
Transit usability is a complex engineering process not practiced well
by Metro Transit.
Placement of transit
stops in areas that have too small a landing pad for people
to get on or off buses is a common usability problem with Metro Transit which is what is really going on with
your entertaining door lift story.
http://www.sofbot.com/article/transit_usability.html has a collection of 40+ articles addressing many transit usability problems like this at Metro Transit, including advertising impacts, fare schemes, scheduling, customer service, trains, bicycle transit and more.
I find “entertaining story” blogs like bustales and picking-up-strangers are mostly fluff and nonsense.
I look a look at the think site and came to one conclusion: Someone had too much whine with dinner. The author, a frequent transit user, didn’t know about the downtown fare? Wow. Nearly every time I ride the 6, 12 or 4 in or out of downtown Minneapolis at least one passenger pays the DT fare. There are also signs at the edges of both downtowns marking the fare zone boundaries. Just Wow.
