Dan Dirks of DDOT ran the SMART buses on time

[trotwood]

Kudos to Mr.Dirks for getting out in the trenches so to speak and riding DDOT!!
Very impressive Mr.Dirks!!

[downtownguy]

To be fair, stasu said many people use mass transit, not the majority of people. The report cited 5.0% use public transportation. One in 20. I think that's many people.

Article from USA Today in today's Freep says 9.4% of Detroiters use public transit to commute to work. Also interesting to note is that Detroit ranks 8th in the percentage of households without a vehicle at 26.2%. Chicago ranks 7th.

I'll excerpt the part about Detroit here, but the rest of the article makes for interesting reading.

Detroit ranks high on list of U.S. cities where residents are driving less

8. Detroit


> Pct. of households without a vehicle: 26.2%


> Pct. commuting to work via public transportation: 9.4% [[69th most)


> Transit score: n/a


> Population: 706,201 [[18th largest)


Just 21.2% of Detroit households did not have a vehicle in 2007. By 2012, that figure jumped to more than 26%. Residents’ especially low incomes may be one reason for the high percentage of households without a car; the city’s median household income was just $23,600, or well less than half the U.S. median of over $51,000. Detroit had, by far, the lowest walk score of any city where so few households had a car. According to a 2011 analysis by the Brookings Institution, just 59.7% of working-age residents in the Detroit metro area were served by transit systems, lower than more than half of the metro areas reviewed. One public transportation system, the Detroit People Mover, is little-used and extremely expensive to maintain.

[Danny]

This year there suppose to be 225 D-DOT busses running in the City of Detroit. However D-DOT only has 160 working busses. Most of them are almost 10 years old. It least it's not worst than the D-DOT bus crisis of the late 1970s and 80s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdJmHBpglFA

[Wesley Mouch]

As an avid public transit user in the various cities I've lived [[Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland, Toronto and San Diego to name a few) and have visited during my travels, the fair boxes on DDOT are of cheap quality. It is apparent the moment you step into the bus. They are mostly made of plastic [[some metal), rather small and chinky looking. They did not work properly when they were first installed during the Coleman administration. They are not even in the same league as even the ones used by COTA in Columbus, OH. They lack any kind of anti-jamming technology and they usually won't take dollar bills unless they are brand new[[even those get shredded and jam the boxes) Much like the parking meter kiosks used downtown, they are inferior, cheap quality and don't work as intended. Maintenance is a big thing lacking in Detroit, but if it's inferior from the beginning and does nothing to speed up service to passengers, there's not much to be done other than investing in better technology [[and stop being cheap and cutting every corner possible to divert money to other non important things)

TTC in Toronto doesn't take dollar bills either. Since their country made the sensible move to dollar coins [[and toonies). Voila. Bus fare machines made easier.

The trend is towards card-based systems, with central machines vending the tickets. I know on this forum we'll hear why that can't happen in Detroit -- but systems like this can work in cities. You can also have stores selling one-time use cards and let the merchants get traffic from this activity too.