The AATA has spent more money than it has brought in during the past three
years.  We have used our "rainy day" fund to keep service and fares at the
same levels (fares have not been raised for over 10 years).  

Most of the increased costs are the funny things that no one but a transit
board member would really care about (like health care insurance costs that
we are required by our union contract to provide and sky-rocketing fuel costs
last year).  

But the Board has finally faced reality.  These deficits are not going away,
and we cannot run a five-year deficit. [This year, the fourth, is more than
halfway over]  We have cut staff budgets, and are eliminating certain services
that carry less 10% of our passengers in Ann Arbor.

In June some trimming of services and service hours will occur.  In August,
we are proposing a fare increase and service reductions.  This item is to let
our transit-interested Grexers explain what they think about all this.

158 responses total.

In June, we are introducing electronic transfers.  They will continue to be
issued at no extra charge, and will be valid for 90 minutes from the time they
are printed [our fareboxes can print them out as you board, but we haven't
done that in the past].  However, you can no longer use them for a RETURN trip
on the same route.  

Also in June, we are making some service changes.  Some trips will be
discontinued due to low ridership, and others will have their timing changed.
Here are the changes

2-Plymouth  Weekend change: Saturday 12:15 trip from downtown discontinued
8-Pauline   Weekend change: Timepoint changes along Stadium and Pauline
9-Jackson   Weekend change: Timepoint changes
12A-Miller Liberty  Weekend change: Timepoint changes
12B-Liberty Miller  Weekend change: Timepoint changes
16 Ann Arbor-Saline Weekend change: Saturday service to Saline discontinued,
16 Ann Arbor-Saline Weekend change: Sunday 8:15 trip discontinued
22 South Connector  Weekend change: 5:45 trip discontinued
22 North Connector  Weekend change: Time point change
210 Chelsea-Dexter  Weekend change: Saturday service discontinued

June Service Changes for Weekday Service
3 Huron River   6:15 trip from Blake ends at St. Joe.  Last bus to Ypsilanti
will leave WCC at 6:10. Options: use 7 to connect to 4 at Arborland. Last
bus from WCC at 9:58, with 10:10 and 11:10 trips to Ypsi from Arborland.

5 Packard      5:55 and 6:25 trips from Meijer discontinued. Use Route 22
for service until 9:42 pm

7 South Main-East  9:58 trip from WCC ends at Arborland.

14 Geddes-East Stadium   6:15 trip from Pioneer discontinued

16 Ann Arbor Saline    10:45 trip discontinued.  Last bus at 9:45

16 Ann Arbor Saline     11:14 pm trip from Meijer discontinued

22 North Connector      Timepoint change- :42 past the hour changes to :39

In August, we are currently considering raising the fare to $1.00.  we are
also going to discontinue some service at times when the ridership is
extremely low on a particular route.  We will also be considering
eliminating Night Ride, because demand (ridership) has not met our
projections.  There will be public meetings to get input on these ideas.  

Board members have a legal fiduciary duty to prudently spend the tax dollars
we collect.  Our costs are not diminishing, nor is our income rising to meet
the costs.  So we have to do _something_.  

Right now it costs $.75 each way for me to take the bus downtown, or $1.50
for the whole trip.  Parking costs about $1/hour, so if I'm going to be
downtown for 1-2 hours (the length of one class meeting), it pays to take
the bus.

If, however, the price goes up to $2/trip, it will be about even with
driving.  So I (and others) may be inclined to drive more and take the bus
less.

Just thought I'd point that out.  But otherwise, a 25-cent increase is very
reasonable.

Yes, we've factored in the dropoff in ridership in estimating the total
decreased costs/increased income equations.

I read that the actual cost per ride is about $8, not $1.  Most of the fare
is paid by government subsidies.
Colleen, has anyone discussed running smaller vehicles to save on fuel?
Today I heard that in 2003 a pilot program will begin in which a few vehicles
will be run on some hybrid system that includes natural gas.  I saw a new
natural gas pump at the garbage truck parking yard, on Summit near Main.
What is this for? There is already a program in Chicago for natural gas buses,
which are way less polluting.  I don't know if they are less noisy.

Have LOTS of simple, hard information to pass out to everyone in sight
very early in the game.  Make that lots and lots.  Include stuff on the
bus systems in other nice cities.  Cost increases vs. LOCAL inflation. 

Bribe the A^2 Snooze reporter into letting you ghost-write their articles
(unless you want to read about on-bus felonies rising 33% per year & AATA
hauling radioactive waste to make extra money).

Offer a CD stuffed with your raw data (books, ridership, the works) to the 
public.

re #7 smaller vehicles don't, in general, save on fuel.  Our diesels do much
better than gasoline vehicles.  Also, in the overall cost, the driver is much
more expensive than the fuel.  Same driver = same cost, no matter what the
vehicle size.  And yes, our fare box revenue only covers about 13% of the
actual cost of running buses.  

The AATA was turned down for the pilot project on natural gas vehicles.  

re #8, come to our public meetings.  We've started with the simple
information on the buses already.  We're trying to balance service cuts
(about $715,000 worth)  with fare increases in an even-handed way.

My biggest problem with the current bus situation is the hub-centric approach.
Back when I worked across town I'd have to blow a half-hour (assuming no
problems during the morning rush) on two different busses.

Um, The bus fares *HAVE* increased in the past 10 years.  Especially in
Ypsi.

I remember when my father was a driver for AATA.  One of the things that
they proudly pointed out to the new drivers at the time was that they had
never laid off anybody before.  A few months later, the entire crew of them
were laid of.  

My other big gripe is the fact that I cannot get a bus to where I live after
7 pm on weekdays, and not at all on the weekends.  I would think that they
would get a bit of traffic out where I am just due to the fact that it's not
a very monied area.  I do see people waiting for busses during the day.  I
just think that it sucks that the the outer areas just don't get service
like they ought to.

On the other hand, I'm thrilled that we have at least some form of public
transportation hanging around.  I think that we'd be very lost without it.

The AATA has not raised fares for Ann Arbor.  When other jurisdictions buy
service from us, they are free to charge whatever they want as bus fares. 
The fares went up because Ypsi decided to have bus riders pay for a bigger
share of the costs, not because the AATA increased the amounts we charged
Ypsilanti.  In fact, in parts of (I think) Superior Township, the fares
stayed the same.  

As I've said before, if you want evening and weekend service, the jurisdiction
you live in can easily supply it.  We do not restrict what services we offer
areas outside of Ann Arbor.  They can have anything that's available within
the city limits.  None of them want the level of service that Ann Arbor is
willing to pay for.  

I don't understand why smaller diesel vehicles cannot be used.  Other than
the Ypsi-Ann Arbor routes, I have never seen more than 10 people on a bus,
even during rush hour, and it is usually 3-5.  Smaller diesel vehicles would
produce less pollution and less noise.

Very sorry to hear about Ann Arbor not having natural gas buses - so which
vehicles are using the gas pumps?

There are a lot of Ford pickuptrucks that are now being made with natural
gas, as well as several school buses.  I was pretty excited to see thouse :)

Sindi: They do have some smaller busses.  I've ridden on them. I've also
been on them when they were way too small, and I've been on routes wher the
big busses are full.

Colleen: I guess I thought that AATA was just responsable for everything,
not just certain routes.

One thing most people don't realize is that buses do not go around in
circles on the same route all the time.  The "empty" #13 may become the
"crowded" #5 the next time it leaves downtown.  Scheduling vehicles and
drivers to minimize "out of service" time is an art.  If you get on the
inbound #12A (I think) you leave downtown on the #4.  We try to minimize
the number of "on-the-bus, off-the-bus" exercises by through-routing.
You can get from northeast Ann Arbor to southeast Ypsilanti on one
bus, if you can figure out the through routes.

It is also wasteful of capital, and personnel to have a small bus to
run the route for part of the day, and to substitute a larger one
during rush hour.  It is less costly to buy and use one big bus, than
to buy a small bus and a big bus for the same route.  

The "use a smaller bus" crowd usually forgets that the big buses
would have to sit, parked, during the middle of the day.  The routes
that serve low-use neighborhoods, and the route that runs on the east
side of Ann Arbor, routinely use the smaller buses.  The rest use big
buses to minimize the transfers and capital costs.
 

Out of curiousity, does AATA do pretty well with the Art Fair trollies, or
do they end up loosing money on them?

Most of the time when I have reason to go to downtown Ann Arbor, I take
the bus because I detest dealing with downtown parking.  I would take
the bust lots of other places if I didn't have to get on one bus, ride
into downtown Ann Arbor, get on another bus, and then go to my
destination.

I work near S. State and Morgan roads.  I live near Packard and
Eisenhower.  Looking at the route map, it appears that I would be able
to take a bus from where I live to State & Ellsworth without having to
go downtown first, but that also leaves me with about a two-and-a-half
mile walk or bike ride from State & Ellsworth to my job.  This wouldn't
be quite such a big deal if that walk or bike ride weren't down State
past the airport.  Of course, this also assumes that the bus driver
sticks to the route; I have been on buses where the driver skips the
part of the route where my destination is and gets quite irritated when
I point this out.  What would it take to get a bus stop added somewhere
in the vicinity of Morgan and State?

*starts tape playing* Get that township to offer that service.

I would like to know why you take a #4 from Arborland to Ypsi at 10:10 and
11:10 but the last #4 to Ann Arbor from Arborland is at 9:46.  If I take the
#7 from WCC at 9:58 I can't get a bus to get me the rest of the way home. 
If push comes to shove, right now I could take that last #7 all the way to
Blake and walk home from there (further than I like to at the time of night,
but doable), now I won't even be able to do that.  There goes my being able
to take evening courses.

It's not really AATA's fault. Get the city to give them more money. 

I've thought about taking the bus when I go downtown instead of driving,
but if they routinely skip stops I better not risk it.  I had that
problem in Houghton, too.  I occasionally watched the bus sail right by
without stopping to pick me up because it was running late.

FWIW, I have never had an AATA bus not stop to pick me up or not stop 
when I requested a stop. When I was in Detroit, the bus would sometimes 
get too full and couldnt pick people up anymore. I still think it is 
amazing that I always get a seat on the AATA bus

Re #13:  Smaller buses would:

a.)     Require a new fleet of buses to be purchased.
b.)     Not save a significant amount of money, because fuel is
        a small expense compared to the driver, maintenance, etc.
c.)     Would leave the system with insufficient capacity for events
        which do use buses to capacity (Art Fair/football shuttles?).

All of this is obvious from cmcgee's statements or first principles.

No matter what size vehicles they use, the AATA is still a waste of 
money, in my humble opinion. It loses millions providing a rather poor 
level of service. And now the service is going to get even worse!

Watch out, if the situation out here in California is any indication, next
thing you know the Lionel Lobby will be hitting you up for a tax-funded
multi-billion dollar <insert cool-sounding adjective here> rail system,
that they promise (no, really!) will break even with fare income within
five years.

Time to get some kind of cable car system going.

It's worth mentioning, that, as a rider, from what I remember, the 
smaller busses (Ford F-350's, I think), are actually louder on the 
inside than the larger busses.  Maybe I'm misremembering things.

Re: 26 - if they can't make any honest money running diesel busses on routes
that can be changed at a moment's notice as demand patterns shift, what makes
you think they'd be able to make any honest money with a cable car, a.k.a
<light> rail?

re 14:  Art Fare, Football, and other out-of-town crowd-moving trips are
priced at market rates: ie what we think we can charge without costing
more than parking.  

re 19: I'm not certain, but I believe that what you are seing is based on
demand.  There are far more people going from Ann Arbor back to Ypsilanti
at that time (9-11 pm) than there are people coming in to the center of
Ann Arbor.  That last bus from arborland connects with the last surge of
outbound routes from downtown. 

re 25: That's already being planned.  The new communter rail route
between Lansing and Detroit comes through Ann Arbor.  There will probably
be a millage election in the next year or so to fund it.  

A rail link to Lansing would actually be pretty nice if it ran often
enough to be convenient.  I have friends who live in California and they
use BART all the time.

The difference, of course, is that BART serves an area with a high 
population density. This is not the case in SE Michigan, and my guess 
is that the probability that this commuter rail project will be a 
success is quite small. Let's hope the majority of the voters realize 
this before they vote to bankroll it (i.e. waste their money).

A train from Ann Arbor to Lansing would be wonderful!  How long since that
route was last in operation?  There is a public swimming beach in Hazlett
within a few miles, on safe sidewalks, of E. Lansing and it might be a quicker
way to get to the beach than biking 12 miles (1.75 hours on dirt roads) to
Independence Lake.  Will the train also stop in E. Lansing and/or Hazlett?
Jim tells me Bush is trying to eliminate all Amtrak service except the E.
Coast corridor - would the Detroit Chicago train also be a victim?

Where else might the Detroit-Lansing train stop besides Ann Arbor?  Is this
info online somewhere?

Put me down for also doubting that there will be enough ridership to make it
worthwhile, though if it goes to the airport there might be.

The Ann Arbor News regularly has coverage of the various hopes
for a Detroit-Lansing commuter rail.  As an Ann Arbor-> East Lansing
commuter, I don't see this working too well.  The news I vaguely
recall about proposed fares was $10 per person per trip.
Steve Andre and I are carpooling most days now; I don't 
think our car expenses run $40 per day.  It would also add most of 
an hour to get from the East Lansing train stop to our MSU 
offices -- that becomes much worse if the stop is only in East Lansing.

Yeah, at that price it's pretty much a non-starter, considering I can drive
to Lansing on less than four bucks' worth of fuel.

Man, that's a lot.

The train will be an express train with only 3 or 4 stops between Lansing
and Detroit.  

It is not intended to be rapid transit like BART.  Just your basic coupla
trains each direction in the morning, couple more at quitting time and one
or two in the middle of the day.  It is commuter service, built around the
Monday through Friday, 8-5 work day.  

This response has been erased.

Re #37:  I don't see the point, because I can't imagine there are many
         people who want to commute between Detroit and Lansing, but I
         assume they've done studies...

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