RTA is updating bus schedules again (effective 13 May), and by and large there's not a lot of news. A lot of small tweaks (routes 1, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 33, 42), a couple of problems (routes 21 and 54), and one service improvement (route 16). I won't comment on the tweaks, so let's talk about the problems.
Route 21 will no longer serve the Pedley Metrolink station, presumably because it's in an awful spot to get to if you're trying to continue on Limonite. This is all well and good, and it makes sense from an operational standpoint, but I hate to see RTA blasting holes in intermodal connectivity. It still passes close to the station, but it's roughly a quarter-mile walk along the car-sewer that is Limonite-- which could make or break a tight train connection, or constrain possibilities for the mobility-challenged. I'm wondering whether the operational benefits are worth it.
Route 54 is a new trolley service downtown, set up for the duration of the widening of CA-91. (During the construction, county workers will be unable to use much of their current parking lot abutting the freeway.) It runs from an under-used Metrolink parking lot at 10th/Commerce to the county admin building on 12th/Lemon, almost as if there were a concerted effort to keep it from serving anything useful downtown. It'll also do the same thing that the old #52 did, serving morning, lunchtime and evening peaks only, making it useful for one and only one thing: getting county workers to and from their cars. This is a shame, because RTA could have used the temporary funding to actually show how a downtown circulator route could effectively serve downtown.
I'll write about the improvements to 16 in another post, because I think they constitute their very own "teachable moment."
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