Detroit Public Transportation: 2014 and beyond.

[professorscott]

Achem, "LEON DROLET CAN SUCK IT."

The article I read in one of the papers quotes one of these guys as being frustrated by SMART's quite-low "farebox recovery", the amount of operating expenses covered by fares, which is quite low. The problem is, it ignores the basic, structural problem with SMART which is that, up until very recently, it covered suburbs on all three sides of Detroit, including bringing people into and out of Detroit, yet getting very little fare revenue WITHIN Detroit [[none of it inbound). So SMART operates very, very long routes, and until FAST started, all the distance in Detroit, except downtown passengers headed out, was driven with zero fare collected.

FAST will have a significant impact on this, especially once there is a full fiscal year of it to report on.

By the way, while we're here talking about buses, I'm surprised at the paucity of comments about the Detroit bus route restructuring, which is pretty significant, and not just in the renumbering of a dozen routes [[which everyone will get adjusted to in the first week). Many routes have picked up frequency, some significantly [[though two lost frequency a bit) and there are now twelve [[I believe) 24 hour routes, the most in a very long time.