Bus Stops - Amenities & Signage

[HuskyGrad]

I prefer to use http://www.omgtransit.com. It's much more responsive than NT.

[Tcmetro]

I have an iPhone app called "TCTransit" which is essentially the same as the "MyNexTrip" Android app or the MT NexTrip mobile site. The other ones are actually quite a bit worse, IMO (they are all trip planners, although some do show the locations of the buses on the maps). Google Maps and The Transit App are the two I most commonly use for trip planning.

As for the actual bus stop signs, it would be really nice to have something like any of the other cities that actually have better bus stop information. Which is, pretty much everywhere.

[David Greene]

You still need the big, confusing transit map to provide further information about transfers/connections.

The trip planner provides that. The map map is ok for answering the question, "Where can I get to from here?", but I'll bet most people already know where they want to go but need the answer to the question, "How do I get to X from here?", which is what the trip planner is for.

[twincitizen]

Eric Roper did some great reporting/blogging on this issue today: http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/234102111.html

He has been a consistent voice lately in advocating for better transit signage. Lots of defensive quotes from Met Transit spokesman John Siqveland in the article that are sure to irritate.

[Nick]

I felt like a superhero, once upon a time, when Siri worked with Google Maps and I could literally hold my phone up to my mouth and say "directions home by bus" and it would instantly return something along the lines of "the 6U departs from Lake & Hennepin in 11 minutes." Fast forward to late 2013 and I'm increasingly wary of smartphones as a thing we need to have glued inside our skulls all day long, but that's my sample size of one.

[woofner]

Lots of defensive quotes from Met Transit spokesman John Siqveland in the article that are sure to irritate.

I thought that was odd, too, considering there is certainly a cost associated with better signage, and this would be a very easy thing to blame on the legislative farebox ratio requirement. "We'd love to have better signage but we gotta make our 30%."

[mulad]

Yeah, I think the 30% rule is a major driving force for why we haven't seen nice incremental improvements to the system. However, I should say that I've never been able to find exactly where that rule is laid out -- does anyone know? I suppose I haven't ever put more than a few hours effort into looking, but it shouldn't be something that takes hours to dig up in the first place...

[mattaudio]

There has to be some way for them to project the marginal increase in revenue per rider, and the increase in ridership per dollar of investment in amenities. These things could actually drive increased ridership in the short term, the marginal revenue paying for the investment while maintaining >30% farebox recovery ratio, and providing additional cash flow after the amortization of these improvements which would allow for further capital improvements.

It's basically the opposite of what many agencies do, which is starve transit and then wonder why nobody uses it.