JeTDoG

Yeah, I was hoping Jerry or JetDog would provide an answer, but they have both been silent on this issue. I wonder why. Without getting too deeply into it, since I'm neither an engineer nor a service planner, I can only say that the use of bus bridges vs. total service replacements is a matter of efficiency, expense, and resource availability. This was judged to be the best solution in this case. Insofar as what work ODOT is doing, that is a question best posed to them, as it's their project.

There's a whole lot of word salad going on there, and I'm not entirely sure he ever reached any kind of conclusion. He's also rather dismissive of the "lazy SUV driver's" only excuse for not wanting to park being the ensuing 1/4 mile walk. I've got news for him -- there are PLENTY of reasons why a person wouldn't want to park, and drive, downtown. Perfect case in point -- Saturday night, my wife and I were returning from a party down in Canton. Bad as the weather was, I suggested we avoid Dead Man's Curve and cut through downtown, picking up 90 on the north side. BIG mistake. The Cavs game had just let out, the Cleveland PD were doing their usual STELLAR job of traffic direction, and the other downtown activity contributed to our being snarled up down there for about 45 minutes. I only WISH that more of the Cavs attendees had used RTA. Another great example would be the brutal cold snap we had last week. In that weather, a 1/4 mile walk could be treacherous.

Email sent, the slot is available, so I've penciled you in. Contact me at [email protected] to finalize.

I believe I had mentioned this previously, but I'm putting it out there again because it's "really real", and I (we) need your help. We're in the process of completely redeveloping the rideRTA.com website, and part of that process is a round of usability testing to ensure the validity of our site design against a real world audience. I'm looking for 2-3 volunteers who would be available for about an hour each during the day on Tuesday, January 29, to participate in this testing, which will take place at the RTA Main Office, 1240 W 6th St. In these single-user sessions, you'll be given a scripted set of tasks to complete within the site, while one or more observers will take notes on the steps you take and record any feedback you might have. This type of usability testing will go a long way toward ensuring the continued success of our online presence. The sessions I have available are as follows: 10:00-10:45 1:45-2:30 2:30-3:15 4:15-5:00 Light refreshments will be provided, and I would ask that anyone volunteering arrive about 15 minutes early to attend to any administrative tasks. If you are interested, please send an e-mail to [email protected] noting your name, the session(s) you are available for, and a reliable means to contact you. No transit experience is necessary, as we want a wide range of perspectives -- you just need a desire to contribute. I greatly appreciate the support and, yes, even the criticism we've received on this forum. The open dialogue has yielded quite a bit of understanding on both sides.

This reminded me of something I saw in my fb feed: "Bulletproof glass manufacturer 3M Security Glass placed this advertisement at a bus stop. There's apparently $3 million in cash inside there, behind their bulletproof glass. If you can break it, it's yours." Just to debunk this, and get us back on topic: this was done about 7 years ago, there was actually only $500 in real money inside, and there was a security guard nearby, as well as restrictions on how the glass could be broken: http://gizmodo.com/170504/3m-security-glass-ad .

Personally, I've still seen heavy usage on the #0/39/39F all the way out to Shoregate. If anything, I'd say the extension of the #30 out that way has increased ridership.

Just to clarify, before things get too far "off track", the study area actually identifies the following three terminus points -- the County Line, Euclid Square Mall, and E 222 & Lakeshore Blvd, NOT E 185 & Lakeshore Blvd. Accessways proposed to take BRT north from Euclid Ave are either E 140 or E 222. See the attached map for a fuller description of the study area and potential routings.

Somehow, I don't quite think you meant MARTA -- although I have to admit that WOULD be impressive! :-D

Any idea if these slides ever made it online? I'd love to get a closer look at them, as these images are a bit small for the level of detail.

I was wondering if they were going to pick up our feed, as I'd already seen some others that they'd done. A neat visual exercise. Oh, KJP, I also "fixed" your link to point to the desktop version of YouTube.

The oversight of the Riders' Alert not being posted has been corrected. The Riders' Alert, with a description and embedded map of where to board the buses, can be found at http://www.riderta.com/ridersalerts/list/?listingid=1830. This same map is also available on the Major Projects page describing the Airport Tunnel project, which can be found at http://www.riderta.com/majorprojects/airporttunnel/. I can also try to address some of your concerns about the timing of the replacement shuttles. Typically, RTA's service changes are put in place on an approximately quarterly basis. As part of that process, operators pick the blocks of work they want to perform for a given quarter -- basically, all runs of all trips on all routes are put into a bucket and sliced into available chunks for operators to pick from, and a given chunk may not consist of work on a single, continuous route. An operator might leave our Hayden garage, deadhead out to Shoregate, perform an inbound run as a #39F as his first trip, and then perform an outbound run on the #11 Quincy - Buckeye. He might then continue doing inbound and outbound trips on the #11 for the rest of the day, and then get a #39F outbound trip from downtown to Shoregate in the afternoon as his last piece of work before deadheading back to the Hayden garage and ending his day. Some operators have traditional weekends off, some have perhaps Tuesday & Saturday, some possibly Thursday & Sunday, some might have a "weekend" that consists of Monday & Friday. I give the long-winded example above as an introduction to what we're going through with replacement shuttles for the Airport Tunnel project. When we have service changes that occur between regularly scheduled "picks", those changes are put in place by means of a "patch". As the name implies, it's basically a best-fit approach using the available resources we have without rejiggering the entire system. If a service change is of a long enough duration that it will affect an upcoming pick, we'll often try to work it into the actual pick setup and allocation of blocks of work. There are very few projects that fit that description, but the Airport Tunnel is definitely one of them. If you look at the upcoming Red Line schedule, http://www.riderta.com/schedules/#rt66, you'll see that the replacement shuttles are scheduled in sync with the departing and arriving Red Line, while allowing sufficient time for all passengers to make a given connection. This, combined with the increased frequency being restored to the line now that the lightning damage has been repaired, should make for a more enjoyable ride. Of course, the biggest enjoyment will be had by everyone once this project is completed. The rehab being done on the tunnel is extensive, and necessary, and should have a very long lifespan. It is our intention that the S-curve rehab will take place within the time the Airport Tunnel is closed. That project will be of a much shorter duration, approximately 4-6 weeks. At this time, there are only bus bridges planned for both project areas.

On that note, the operator of the Blue Line train I was on last night did add a "situational awareness" message to his usual departure announcement as we left Tower City. Not sure how many people paid attention, but it's something.

There, fixed that for you. Victim's gender -- irrelevant. Victim blaming -- unnecessary. Victim's individual behavioral motivation -- not your concern.

Yes, the intent is to perform the S-curve reconstruction within the time period of the Airport Tunnel rehab. As mentioned earlier, the S-curve project is of a much shorter duration (weeks vs. months). Once both projects are done, quality of service on the Red Line should be vastly improved.

Thank you for addressing the points I was going to respond to, in practically the same language I would have used. One small additional point to bring up -- this map does feature a scale at the bottom that allows one to compute both distance and average walking time. Using that scale, it's clear that the Tower City station, even located as shown, is not more than 1/4 mile from the center of Public Square. If that's too far of a distance for a person to walk to board the Rapid, I don't know that there's much that can be done to address that, other than perhaps installing moving sidewalks (I kid, I kid). I don't know that we could ever achieve the nirvana of "one map to rule them all", but as information-rich as this map is, I think it does a pretty admirable job of achieving its first goal, which is communicating the availability of public transit (no fewer than 29 bus routes, plus the Rapid) throughout a small, dense downtown core.

Okay then, here's a more direct statement: I monitor the aforementioned e-mail address multiple times per day, and have seen nothing, ZERO, insofar as constructive commentary about what one might like to see on the pages mentioned. I value other people's opinions, but I can only act upon conversations I actually have. Even if the constructive comments were ONLY posted here, at least that would be something. Complaining is easy. I appreciate your search for more concrete examples, and look forward to seeing what you discover.

Hallelujah! They look great. I will pass your praise along to our Graphic Artist. He's worked long and hard on this, and it is important that your appreciation is communicated to him.

I wonder why it says "Station closing"? Sounds like it's already giving the wrong impression.... Those signs were placed by the contractor, and were incomplete. What's actually closing as of 11/5 is just the north side headhouse access (the side closest to the CWRU campus). The south side headhouse and the associated bus loop will continue to be accessible. New, more accurately descriptive signs are being prepared and should be posted shortly. Sorry about the confusion.

If you ask any of the people on that bus, we're not "wasting" a dime, especially if transit is their only option. My personal observations have run contrary to yours, as I was on a #30 bus outbound 11:40pm this past Saturday night, and we were SRO+10 leaving Windermere Rapid Station, with a decent crowd still on the bus when I departed closer to Lakeshore & Neff. This was not an anomaly, as I've been on that bus at other late hours and observed similar loads. Keep in mind, also, that farebox recovery, even for "successful" routes, only averages about 21% nationwide across all routes, modes and systems, per the latest (2010) numbers from the NTD.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to address a few concerns and clear up some misconceptions regarding NextConnect: First off, it is a compiled, turn-key product, and RTA does not have access to the source code, so we are the mercy of our budget and the vendor's availability to effect changes to the back-end -- any change other than presentation-level changes (some of which can be made in-house) has some dollar figure associated with it. NextConnect is part of a larger suite of software packages that integrate across many of the operational aspects of RTA. These inter-related systems have dependencies that cannot be ignored, and we can't simply pull out one version, or product, and replace it with another, especially one from another vendor. This is a reality of any specialized vertical market, which transit at our scale most certainly is. Keith is correct in noting that the system is designed to post schedule times when real time information is not available. This can occur for any number of reasons, and is more likely to occur on rail, where physical factors as well as human factors come into play. Unfortunately, in its current incarnation, the system cannot differentiate when it is displaying schedule data due to real-time data being unavailable. My personal experience with bus tracking on NextConnect has been (to my own surprise) very good. YMMV. Describing the system as "a joke", "horrible", or stating that "No one is going to check... on a full web browser" is unconstructive. We currently receive about 200-300 visits to the site per day, and are on an upward trend, keeping in mind this system was only launched to the public in June of this year. Also, our visitors are from a diverse range of networks, including the public library, the VA, and various cable providers, so I'm hard-pressed to believe that all of these network providers are entirely supporting clients on mobile devices. Can we do better? Of course we can. Will we? I believe so. Are constructive comments welcomed and considered? Absolutely. Everything else is just navel-gazing. As a turn-key, closed-source product, the vendor is under no obligation to provide a public API to the data, and does not, in fact, currently provide one. We have determined a means in-house to access more base-level data, and are working on methods to better present that data. jam40jeff very astutely observed that an API layered on bad data is worse than no API at all. I'd also like to take this opportunity to let folks here know that changes are in the works for our main website, rideRTA.com. We have engaged a developer to work on a complete overhaul on the site, incorporating some more current technologies and presentation, and offering a layout based on the principles of "responsive design", which can dynamically adapt a site's layout to the widest range of devices it's viewed on. It is hoped that one of the spillover benefits of this process will be layouts and styles that can be applied across the range of RTA online properties. So, some of the presentation woes of NextConnect may be dealt with through that process. One aspect of the website redesign process is usability testing, and to that end, I'd like to invite members of the UrbanOhio community to participate in that process. We'll have two rounds of usability testing, with the first involving paper mock-ups or wireframes. If you are interested in participating, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with: Your name (real name, please) A phone number you can be contacted at (phone sometimes just works better than e-mail) A brief statement of your familiarity with transit, and transit websites (we want a broad range of participants) A general sense of your availability (daytime availability will be necessary, as all testing will take place in-house, but we'll try to be somewhat flexible) Thanks for being the generally supportive audience that you are. We're all in this together, working toward the same goal, and your input is appreciated.

They can't even get the Healthline to the bottom of Cedar Hill anymore but I would agree if it went all the way through the 7 and 32 routes you would have a lot more ridership You do realize the weekday #7 and #32 routes were extended to Euclid and E 89 to preserve the connection to the HealthLine, don't you? No, it's not a one-seat ride, but neither was the former situation of the HealthLine diverting down MLK. With the beginning of construction on the Cedar-University Rapid Station, HealthLine ridership from those feeders may see incremental growth from folks wishing to avoid the construction zone.

I've heard good things about the Highland Heights location. It will be good to see this site occupied again. And, it gives me another possible lunch destination.

Did these things ever happen? I did some checking on either side of the quote you posted, just to get some background and context, and this isn't/never was an RTA project. From the City Planning Commission minutes at the time: DF 2010-030: Downtown Cleveland, Recycling Bins, Wards 3 and 8. Project representatives: Greg Peckham, Cleveland Public Art; Justin Glanville, ParkWorks. So, you might want to direct the questions to those respective agencies. They recently merged operations to form the organization now known as LAND studio: http://www.land-studio.org/

So RTA is hoping that a bunch of downtown workers have their bus passes paid for by work and so will choose to continue taking the 47 instead of, god forbid, walking a block to catch a trolley. Good for RTA I guess. Well, have you seen the list of companies that participate in the Commuter Advantage program (a pre-tax payroll deduction program that does not constitute "having their bus passes paid for by work")? It reads like a who's who of downtown employers. http://www.riderta.com/commuteradvantage/participants.asp

Yup: http://www.riderta.com/pdf/Trolleys.pdf and http://www.riderta.com/pdf/NineTwelve.pdf