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Chris La Tray's avatar

I've never ridden a bus as an adult ... except maybe in Chicago a couple times, now that I think about it. I see people using the bus in Missoula but I've never used it, though I would happily do so if it came out to where I live and it doesn't. It is frustrating. I would love to be able to reduce how much I drive but given how massive vehicles (and the texting drivers behind the wheel) have made my narrow country road I have to take for at least a dozen miles at a time a death trap, I don't think I'll be that person for a while yet.

I was really struck thinking about so many of the things you discuss here, Nia, when I was in Tucson recently. Talk about a city that seems to be moving farther and farther away from any kind of walkability. Most of the main thoroughfares have been widened so many times and are so packed with speeding cars that crossing them at all for many people probably takes two lights and some dangerous waiting at the midpoint. It's disappointing how little progress has been made culturally related to this.

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Tait Sougstad's avatar

I have tried and failed many times to decipher the occult tables that are the City of Billings MET Transit schedule. I am not at all certain that if I find a bus stop near my house and get on the bus, I will ever get back to my house. They paid for a service that tracks the busses on a GPS so you can see where they are, but nothing showing where they are going, or, more crucially, how to connect various bus routes to get across town to a destination. I'm sure this has nothing to do with only 10% of the MET Transit's revenue comes from bus fares, that the few times I see a bus in the wild it is carrying no more than four passengers at a time, or that I have never heard of any of my friends or associates taking the bus. As one who grew up walking and biking all over my little home town, and didn't get a driver's license until I was 20 years old, because there was a decent transit system that could take me between my home and the state university where I spent my freshman year, I am disturbed by how difficult it is to navigate this town. But, at least we have those new, dump-methane powered busses. More grant money pouring in to buy more carts when we don't have any horses.

In many cities, the bus routes can be planned out through Google maps. I took a moment recently to see what it would take to get Billings "on the map", and found that, for Google, it appears to be merely an issue of putting the route data in a particular text format and submitting it to their transit program. They have a radio button to select what kind of user is submitting the data, and among the various professional transit officials, one selection humbly indicates "end user". I haven't had a chance to follow through, yet, but I am hopeful that this opens the door for normal transit activists to submit data that would simplify access to the system.

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