filed under Transportation
Another one rides the bus
9:01AM ON
04/14/2008
BY
Dave Segal
RIPTA could certainly be far better — if it got sufficient funding for once — but catches way more crap than it deserves.
With the state budget in such dreadful shape, we’re looking for extra-budgetary ways of encouraging more people to ride RIPTA. This is in honor of the House Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources, and their passage of a bill I introduced that would let state employees take a RIPTA pass, instead of the parking space that they are guaranteed. We hope it would yield several hundred more regular riders, and it’d save the state a little money.
Def NSFW.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNlOL8tBVL8]
(Josh Miller and Art Handy have introduced the ‘U-Pass’ bill, that would require public universities to arrange programs that’d let their students to use their student IDs to ride for free — easily paid for by a reduction in new parking lots and garages which can cost upwards of $25,000 per space.)
April 14th, 2008 at 5:16PM
EERac Says:
Put GPS on the buses! It would cost less than $1 dollar a day per bus.
Some other grad students and I recently tried to get Brown to fund this project as part of their ccurb initiative (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/CCURB/), but they said our proposal was too “business-like”, and hence RIPTA should pay for the service.
With GPS on the buses, we could have a website (and a cellphone app) that tells you not only what bus to take and where to catch it, but when you should arrive at the bus stop. Taking a bus is a lot better when you know you won’t have to wait outside. What’s more, the website would more than pay for itself with location specific advertising.
In the meantime, I’m told that RIPTA is close to allowing us all to use google transit to plan our trave routes. In other words, when you get driving directions on google maps, you’ll be able to click a button that will tell you what buses to take instead.
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April 16th, 2008 at 2:04PM
matthew l Says:
as a former student at RIC who had to get to class forty-five minutes early to find a parking spot and then walk across campus to class*, i think this is the best idea ever.
(*well, in theory anyway. usually i was just late.)
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