TTA giving 20 pennies for your thoughts

As printed in the Chapel Hill Herald on Saturday, March 3rd:

Do you use public transportation very often? If not, what would you encourage you to use it more? Wireless Internet? More comfortable buses?

The Triangle Transit Authority is asking those questions in a creative web survey currently available on its site at ridetta.org. Folks are given twenty “pennies” to spend on a variety of possible upgrades to buses as the agency makes replacements in its fleet.

Some of the items are pretty cheap. One-penny upgrades include things like expanding the front-of-bus rack to accommodate three bikes rather than the current two or to install 10 bike lockers per year at various stops around the Triangle.

Others are so expensive they will use up almost your entire “budget.”

For instance, putting a rear window on the back of the bus would cost 16 pennies and implementing Sunday service would require all of your money.

I take the bus every day to work in Raleigh at the Sierra Club so I devoted my greatest expenditure of six pennies to fuel the buses using B20 biodiesel.

Seems like the right thing to do working in the environmental community. It’s not the cleanest fuel TTA could use but it would still be a definite step in the right direction.

I gave three pennies to have wireless internet on the buses. I actually enjoy its current lack of presence to some extent because the two hours I spend on the commute each day are about the only main chunk of the day where I’m not attached to my e-mail.

On the other hand, I’d like to see a lot more Chapel Hillians who commute to Durham or Raleigh use public transportation, and for the busiest workers out there that extra period of connectivity could give folks the impetus to dump their cars and take the bus. There are also certain days where it would be nice to finish something up on the ride home so it’s not waiting the next day.

Another four pennies went to providing headrests for the seat on the buses. It’s kind of amusing to see all the people in suits napping on the way to work in the morning, and although I try to read books I must admit that the allure of sleep is often too much to pass up.

This expenditure would go a long way toward increasing the comfort of riders.

Those three items were my highest priorities but I still had seven pennies left. This sum wasn’t large enough to buy any of the big ticket things but good enough to get a few other small enhancements.

Four of the pennies went to building five regular bus shelters. Nothing will get you back behind the driver’s seat faster than getting soaked while waiting for a ride. Five is not a lot considering the scope of the TTA system but it’s still a step in the right direction.

I decided to give the balance of my “funds” to installing 10 bike lockers per year at various stops. I’m not a cyclist myself, but I think a lot more folks who don’t want to actually take their bike on the bus would be happy to ride it to the stop and know it was somewhere safe when they got home in the evening.

Some of the big ticket items I eschewed spending my funds on included real-time bus arrival information at 10 stops (the buses are pretty prompt!) and creating a 100 space park-and-ride lot. Some of the smaller ones I can live without were luggage racks and individual high-quality lights at seats.

The “Transit Design Game,” as TTA calls it, is one of the most engaging ways of soliciting citizen input I’ve ever seen a local agency use.

The information the TTA gleans from this should give it a much better sense of how to improve the riding experience for current customers as well as what sorts of amenities are likely to draw more people in the future.

A lot of the time the path to better citizen participation is not just to schedule a bunch more meetings folks have to go to, but to create a way for them to give feedback that is simple and even fun.

With this project TTA has set a good model that other local governments should look to find ways to emulate when soliciting opinions from the public about various issues.

Whether you’re a public transportation user or not, go to ridetta.org and play the Transit Design Game, which will be available through this Friday. It’s a great opportunity to have some fun while also giving important information to the folks who buy our buses.

Time to get aboard TTA 'train'

As published in the Chapel Hill Herald on June 24th, 2006

For the most part I love living without a car in Chapel Hill. From my apartment near Foster's Market it's a 10-minute walk to Town Hall, a 15-minute walk to campus and about a 30-minute walk on the Bolin Creek Trail to University Mall. These are all distances short enough to travel on foot under any circumstances and it's good not to even have the motorized option to tempt me. Unfortunately, though, my life is not confined to Chapel Hill. My best friend lives in Raleigh, I love going to Durham Bulls games, and as a recent UNC grad I could end up working pretty much anywhere in the Triangle. TTA is great at getting me to the airport but beyond that it could do a much better job of serving Orange County.

Before talking about the changes that still need to be made though, credit should be given to TTA and the Orange County representatives on its board, Bill Strom and Alice Gordon, for some recent improvements. In the last year they have helped create two express routes of great benefit to residents of our county, one connecting Chapel Hill to Hillsborough and another connecting Chapel Hill to Raleigh.

The latter route has quickly become the most traveled in the TTA system. This shows that regional bus riders like the express route concept. This makes sense -- in my experience it cuts an hour off taking a standard TTA bus to Raleigh, which requires making a transfer at RTP.

The problem is that express service between Chapel Hill and Raleigh is pretty limited. Only three buses run each way during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The last bus for Raleigh leaves Chapel Hill at 8 a.m., pretty much leaving people who don't need to get to work until later in the day braving I-40 in their own cars. Similarly, in the afternoon the last bus leaving Chapel Hill to take Raleigh residents back home goes at 6:40, leaving folks who need to work late or want to dine or attend a lecture in town out of luck.

I think there's a pretty simple solution to this problem. Considering the high volume of ridership on express routes between Chapel Hill and Raleigh compared to normal routes, service between the two cities ought to be expanded to all day on the hour from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. This would encourage folks who just need to go to a midday meeting in Raleigh or who work outside the standard 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule to use public transportation.

TTA could also do a better job of serving people attending major events. I frequently took the 4:30 express bus to Raleigh to meet a friend to go to Carolina Hurricanes games, but after the game there was no choice but to make him drive me all the way back to Chapel Hill because buses have stopped running for the night by then.

Thousands of folks from Durham and Orange counties attended each Hurricanes game. Some sort of shuttle service between the western Triangle and the RBC Center, if marketed effectively, could provide a valuable service to Hurricanes fans while increasing TTA's ridership. I know a lot of students without cars who would have loved to go to hockey games but just had no way of getting there.

TTA also should think about starting a shuttle service between Chapel Hill and Durham. There aren't a lot of stops between the two cities on the current routes, but on average it takes just under an hour to get from campus to downtown Durham on TTA. However, if folks can drive their own cars the same distance in half the time, they have little incentive to use public transportation. Tons of people travel between Chapel Hill and Durham for work every day, and a user-friendly bus service could become a popular option for them.

As TTA attempts to garner federal support for its regional rail plan, it could use an outpouring of citizen support for the services it provides. Regional rail is a good idea, but as it stands, most of the advocacy behind it is coming from prominent government and civic leaders rather than normal people.

If I were Senator Burr or Senator Dole, I would be more inclined to give a helping hand if I saw a groundswell of support for the TTA from everyday citizens who benefit from its current activities and were confident their lives would be further enhanced by giving it the chance to implement regional rail. Creating more user-friendly services and expanding popular ones like the express routes could greatly increase current ridership and help build a loyal group of users whose support would be useful as TTA attempts to take its services to an entirely new level.