“We’re not just a service
for the needy few,” says Greater Bridgeport Transit’s CEO Doug Holcomb, the
feisty young leader of one of the state’s largest and most successful bus systems.
In other words,
single-occupancy car drivers’ perceptions notwithstanding, it’s not just poor
folks and the car-less who must rely on the bus. According to Holcomb, 90% of GBT’s ridership
is either going to school or work. Like
rail commuters, some bus passengers own cars but prefer to take the bus for any
number of reasons.
GBT’s 40-foot buses average
30 passengers per bus per hour, an impressive average when you consider it
includes rush hour and lower-ridership off-hours. And it’s no wonder people take the bus when
78% of Bridgeport’s population is within a half-mile of a bus stop.
It’s the frequency of
service that also makes buses attractive.
Miss one bus and there’s another along in a few minutes. The GBT’s bilingual website makes it easy to
ride the bus with maps and tutorials
for first time passengers. And the bus
company even offers a real-time
online map that uses GPS to show you
where your bus is on its route. Not even
Metro-North can do that.
If you go to www.cttransit.com you can input your departure and end points for anywhere
in the state and your bus alternatives and travel times will pop up.
Fares are cheap: $1.75 for adults and just 85 cents for
seniors. Yet, fares cover just 35% of
the cost of the ride (the rest is subsidy). But by keeping fares affordable the bus is
attracting more riders and covering more of its costs.
Sure Uber and lower gasoline
prices are eating into ridership. GBTA
carries 18,000 daily riders compared to 20,000 just a few years ago. But the bus can take you places Metro-North
can’t, like the “Coastal Link” route which runs from Milford to Norwalk along
the Boston Post Road. At Milford you can
connect to New Haven and at Norwalk, to Stamford.
Even the buses themselves
are getting better as transit agencies upgrade their decade-old vehicles. New buses are hybrid electric, not the old
smoke-spewing diesels of years ago. And
Connecticut is now engaged in a $1.4 million study of all-electric buses,
seeing if they can handle the cold and operate on our hills. One model of electric bus can even re-charge
in 5-12 minutes when it reaches the end of its route while off-loading
passengers.
One of the biggest bus
successes in the state is CTfastrak,
the almost three year old BRT (bus rapid transit) system running from downtown
Hartford west to New Britain and more recently, as far east as UConn in Storrs. The buses operate on a 9 mile dedicated highway
and carry 400,000 riders each month on clean, sleek Wi-Fi equipped buses that
depart every seven minutes.
CTfastrak has proven popular
with college students, so it’s now considered “cool” to take the bus. Who knows?
With millennials being big fans of mass transit they could give our
state’s bus network a new uptick.
Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media
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