BusTalk

RailBus63 · Moderator Joined: 16 Apr 2007 Posts: 1063

I'll let you guys take a hack at this:

MSN - Buses and Beyond: 10 Cities with Great Transit

I'm all for mass media promotion of public transit, but it really does seem that the writers used transit authority press releases as their primary source of information.

Cyberider · Joined: 27 Apr 2007 Posts: 501 Location: Tempe, AZ

Phoenix? They've got to be kidding!

Mr. Linsky · Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 1:15 pm Post subject:

And, you can forget 'Traffic Signal Priority' for the 'Rapids' (if you want to call them that!), in Los Angeles.

That was a joke altogether!, and I was looking forward to following them through all the lights that they would change to green!

Mr. 'L'

HwyHaulier · Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 932 Location: Harford County, MD

Sigh! Excessive, unsupported "happy talk" violations abound? Consider the source! The various biases are way too obvious...

Oh, what? No hints at all how much all of this is costing whom? Just an oversight, I'll guess. Some of the eager ideas about proposed
new services would be downright droll, if we didn't think of the taxpayers who will be hurt in the process...

..............Vern..............

Dieseljim

It seems to me that some of these transit systems would be a lot better off if they operated much like businesses as they do public services so that they would not screw the taxpayers like so many seem to do today. By operating much like a business and yet serving the needs of the people a really good transit system could take on the appearance of an investor owned transit company of years gone by and yet still be a public service operation. By getting rid of such frivolous expenses as self aggrandization, wrapping an entire bus, and the like, transit systems would be better able to cover more of their costs from the farebox than many of them do now. In addition, get some one who is a TRUE PROFESSIONAL in transit and NOT some worthless political hack running the show and a transit system would be much better off than it is now. Pittsburgh"s PATransit seems to be a shining example of how NOT to run a transit system.

HwyHaulier · Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 932 Location: Harford County, MD

Dieseljim -

Sigh! I saw this one coming when it first started. Check out the present day financing schemes. It is hard to figure how
there is any incentive to excel...

Do that, and delivered results inevitable. I didn't say this. I'm the messenger. It is in huge numbers of management books
(Tom Peters a good writer, for instance)...

.................Vern................

timecruncher · Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 3:02 pm Post subject:

It came from MSNBC. For heaven's sake -- these people couldn't be objective about any kind of news article that oozes from their writers.

And APTA? Sheesh! Those people will brag on a bus getting repainted in Detroit using stimulus funds while the bus system is cutting 25% of its service. They would echo the president and say that painting one bus a week is "creating 6,000 jobs" for Americans!

timecruncher