30 Days of Plight. Stephen Dare goes JTA every day.

[stephendare]

Its weird posting my own name in the third person.

Starting tomorrow, (actually I got started Thursday last week) I will be going 30 days without a car, relying totally on JTA transit in order to move around the city.  I will also be exploring the routes and seeing where they go and what they do.

Already the start has been rocky, and its clear that no one has ever had a discussion with many of the busdrivers as to what constitutes a customer friendly approach.

Anyways, get ready for a month of reports, whining, bitching complaining and insight on how to get around JTA.

First.   Must make sense of this cobweb of wildly named bus routes.

They have an almost 0 correlation to any part of town that they go through.

Will begin with explanation tomorrow.

[second_pancake]

Holy crap!  Good luck with that.  Are you bringing a video camera with you and doing a documentary a la Morgan Spurlock?

[Lunican]

I'm interested to know how the bus to the beach pulls over and collects additional fare from riders before crossing the Intracoastal. I heard this is how they operate but I have trouble picturing it.

[thebrokenforum]

What an awesome idea. Make sure you get some photos to go with this. The local "media" is so going to wish they would have thought of the idea. Good luck. :

[thelakelander]

Sounds like this is going to be an interesting experience.  Btw, the $40 a month does sound great.  I'm currently spending around $160 a week on gas for two vehicles.

[thelakelander]

or $20 less than you are spending on a week of gas.

Yeah.  That does not even include the money spent for routine auto maintainance and insurance.

[Jason]

May God be with you Stephen.  You'll be in my prayers.

[Jason]

Was it Shlitz or Schnapps?

[BridgeTroll]

This should be good... any chance of getting your experiences published in the TU or something?

[BridgeTroll]

Trolls know many things....

[winthropf]

This will be very interesting....Good Luck!

My wife had recently decided that riding the bus would be a good idea as there is a straight shot from our house (in St Nick) to her work (at UNF).
The initial trial was supposed to be a bus ride home from a conference downtown...  she showed up at the bus stop about 5 mins early.  45 minutes later still no bus, so she called someone to come pick her up.  When she called to complain to JTA, the lady at customer service told her...  "oh that bus was running late today".

The second test run was a morning bus ride to work...
So to start off, the "plan your trip" option on the website gives you directions to take the SS2, from Atlantic and San Souci what makes that interesting is that when you look up the SS2 it doesn't list this as a stop....  whatever, maybe I haven't figured out how to read their site or their maps yet (but I can easily use the public transit in cities like New York, Paris, London, San Francisco, Vancouver, & Seattle... and I don't need a secret decoder ring).
So, with the assurance of phone support that the plan your trip info was correct...  my wife goes to the stop in the morning... a couple of minutes early again....  and she sees her bus ride right by her (and yes, she is standing right under the sign).  This time phone support tells her...  she did everything she was supposed to, and the driver should have stopped.

Luckily she doesn't have to rely on this, she walked back home and drove to work....

I think she is crazy when she says she is going to try again....

[gatorback]

I'm interested to know how the bus to the beach pulls over and collects additional fare from riders before crossing the Intracoastal. I heard this is how they operate but I have trouble picturing it.

Its brutal and often involves threats of bodily assault, staredowns and lots of cop action. I will not be dealing with it, as I am using one of the 40 dollar month long passes, which gives you unlimited rides on all jta transit including the town to beach shakedown.

By the way.

The 40 MONTHLY PASS is an awesome deal for transportation.

17 per month in Austin. 

If you have an iPhone you can blog on the bus.  Also, Capmetro has WIFI on board some of the 983's already.

Wash your hands when you get off the bus or take that antibacteria hand sanitizer.

[gatorback]

Get an iPhone or some other web enabled device.  With the Internet available on a PDA, or cell phone getting the bus schedules is no big woop.  Plus, with all the content you have, the news, MJ, Yahoo, etc., etc, you'll wonder why you ever drove in the 1st place...once you get your routes down.

Truly, Hell has no fury like a commuter with a lost 2 day old montly unlimted bus pass.

[gatorback]

Still?  You've got to be kidding.  I compared the CapMetro site with JTA.net or whatever it is about 6 months ago and of course the sites were nothing alike.  One was well thought out and planned the other just thrown together not unlike their "regularly scheduled" bus service. 

Why don't you finish that trip up then go to another city and compare a real service for 30 days. Ha.

[BridgeTroll]

Day One so far.

Starting at Main Street, I took the Talleyrand bus straight into the central station. As I arrived there, the downtown trolley arrived almost simultaneously.  I hopped on the azalea line (which is really just a dumb way of saying "The Trolley that circles East of Main Street"  It took me straight to Hemming Park, where I disembarked, got coffee, dropped in all three points of the Bermuda Triangle of Downtown Gossip (The UPS Store, Starbucks and of course the Library Book Store)

Now comes the real trick.

Finding any useful bus stops once one is away from the central station.

First a few hard cold fact and observations:

No one who works or drives for JTA knows a damned thing about any other part of JTA.

Already this weekend I have had the distinctly unpleasant experience of announcing a perfectly reasonable destination like "Art Museum Drive" or "San Marco", only to be stared at as though I had murmered something dangerous that ended with "Allah Akhbar".

Simple asking a bus driver which bus one needs to take to get to a final destination is bound to be an experience where one sits while said busdrivers gaze moodily off into a distant land and the sound of square wheels clanking brokenly in a badly designed clockwork is distinctly heard.

Invariably a rushing river of non sequitors follows in which the destination is used variously as a noun, adjective and verb in assorted sentences before one of two things happens:

1.  One is directed to a supervisor at the station (or alternately pointed in the direction of the website or customer service number)

2.  One is left to stuff the compounded information in ones pipe and smoke it.  Further questions will result in further obfuscations and sometimes the open interference and hostility of competing passenger theories, with the possibility that an argument will break out and one is left feeling part of a family melodrama.

Calling the customer assistance line is the best idea.  Indeed it is probably the safest as well.

That number is 630-3100.

Which is great if you have a cell phone with unlimited minutes (i do.)

Second thing to be aware is the curious and damnable custom unique to jacksonville of NOT OFFERING TRANSFER SLIPS.

This is especially pernicious.  ALL routes end downtown and if one is going from say, regency to UNF, one must necessarily go downtown and switch busses.  For this little indignity one would be forced to pay an additional dollar.

Already in the course of the weekend, I have witnessed no fewer than 4 melodramas over this basic injustice.  Each time with a newly energised first time user of JTA.  In one case,  I began to suspect that we were about to witness a case of self strangulation as the bus driver (a Vogon if ever there was one) happily explained to the power tie sporting 20 something that he would have to pay another fare if he wanted to ride the second half of his fare.

I suspect that this surprise mini lynching is going to lead to a lot more people carpooling.

In any case, I am able to stand above the fray as a result of the aforementioned monthly pass.

With it, I would never need a transfer.  This does not however shield me from the anxiety caused by the absence of the small helpful sensible little tickets.

Allah ahkbar...