The Planet reports that Hillsborough County Commissioner Brian Blair’s Bus Study has been completed. Apparently, the study shows that HARTline unfairly helps city residents more than the county’s. What a shocking surprise!
Also, like the Sticks, the Planet can’t help themselves from linking to that dreaded photo.
Editengine
3 years ago
You know it is easy to attack the blair commission, especially with the photo thing, but really have you read the report? I read the wp piece and I have a couple of problems with it.
The WP says
“it plays on urban vs. suburban rivalries, reaches half-baked conclusions, twists the data and feeds the political split between the city of Tampa and eastern/southern Hillsborough County forces.” It then goes on to quote the data directly from the report without indicating where it is twisted or explaining why the conclusions are half baked.
Lets look some of the conclusions…
1. Invite private companies to to set up their own mass transit lines wherever they see a market.
Who does this hurt? I don’t complain that the public airport has private airlines landing there either.
2. Don’t require lines to be either “local” or “express”. They can be a combination of both, picking up several stops in USF for example and then dropping them off downtown.
and then
3.”The transit system must be made more convenient for choice riders, higher income riders and other targeted groups as an essential part of planning transit services. HARTline should offer new services and amenities, such as “on demand†transit that is expanded beyond traditional paratransit trips, which appeal to riders that have a choice in transportation. HARTline should be encouraged to offer discount programs to groups of riders, such as a military discount sold through base outlets. HARTline should be encouraged to invest in “free days†on a regular basis to encourage choice riders to give the bus system a try.”
sounds good too.
And lets remember that Brian Blair, although a fun fun target, did not staff the committee all by himself. Kathy Castor has her own person on there as well. Essentially the report says start spending money on putting buses where people want them, and if the county can’t afford to see if private companies can take up the slack or can explore new routes to see if they are profitable. It says the goal of the transit system should be to tie the whole county together better with “feeder” routes from all over the county tying into “core” routes that hartline maintains. some of the financial stuff is wacky, county money only spent on county routes for example is going to be tough to accomplish since routes tend to go into and out of city limits in many areas. however it doesn’t appear this will affect the federal grant money that the system receives and that money can be spent anywhere. the core conclusion, that the point of the bus system is to move the most people of all incomes that it can, is sound. increasing service between the county and the city is a step towards bringing both closer, not driving a wedge between them.
bamaroller
3 years ago
Of course HARTline serves more city residents than county residents because that’s where the riders are!!! If they live out in the county, chances are good that they have their own vehicle. Plus there’s that matter of population density.
Can’t wait for Blair’s next startling revelation: The sky above Tampa is more or less blue than that of the rest of the county. Let’s get an ad hoc committee together on that one.
YOU WILL FEAR THE MULLET! (Buzz, buzz.)
Big Pauly
3 years ago
Having a study about HARTline is all well and good, but as far as making transit between Tampa and St. Pete or Pinellas seamless, we are light years behind, and we don’t have time for Mr. Blair to go “two out of three falls” on this issue…
gayPinellasPodcast
3 years ago
HARTline doesn’t even serve city residents well… they have like 1/2 the routes the pinellas counterpart has. There should be ONE bus service for the tampa bay area.
David Jenkins
3 years ago
There should be ONE bus service for the tampa bay area.
If I’m not mistaken, BART in San Francisco/Oakland is both sides of that bay also. Not sure how that all worked out, but you think we could learn more from example.
It’s like Brenden McLaughlin just mentioned in an editorial in The Link, we could learn a bit about the importance/value of streetcars from them as well.
Too bad our BOCC is too busy empire building and leading moral crusades instead of dealing with such trivial brick and mortar problems we all seem to be interested in.
David Jenkins
3 years ago
This has gotten me thinking … I’ve also had friends visit from the Pacific Northwest who were just aghast at how neglected our Downtown is, how non-functional our mass transit is, and how bad the sprawl is. If we think all these things aren’t part of one big problem, we’re crazy.
My friend exhorted a question basically asking if our city was still stuck in the 70s, and asking if they really paid any attention to what other areas have done to discourage sprawl, centralize the city and have proper infrastructure in place to make sure it all works.
A few years ago many would have blamed it on the mayor and a few city council members who were more interested in appeasing developers and building malls.
What’s our excuse now?
Watts Martin
3 years ago
If I’m not mistaken, BART in San Francisco/Oakland is both sides of that bay also. Not sure how that all worked out, but you think we could learn more from example.
I could tell you that — I lived in Tampa for years, and moved to San Jose (the south side of the San Francisco Bay Area) at the end of 2002.
BART isn’t fairly comparable to HART, as it’s a commuter rail service — no buses, only electric trains that run not only between San Francisco and Oakland but past each city (south along part of the peninsula beneath SF, and both east and south on the other side of the bay from Oakland). In SF, the equivalent of BART is SF Muni, which runs the buses and streetcar lines, including the famous cable cars.
The problem Tampa Bay faces, though, when you compare it to here, or your friends from Seattle visit Tampa and are horrified, is a matter of sprawl versus population. Hillsborough County has 1.1M people in 1051 square miles, Pinellas just under 1M in 280 square miles; San Francisco County has 750K people in 47 square miles! My suspicion is that if the money was there — and that’s always the big if — it’d be easier to get something “real” in Pinellas. (Perhaps it’s already better, as an earlier commenter noted.)
As for inter-county cooperation, yes, that’s an absolute requirement. There’s a lot of squabbling out here — the SF Bay Area is served by a half-dozen different transit authorities, and BART doesn’t reach into San Jose because of politics, although that may soon be resolved. But they generally manage to get it together enough to get things done in spite of themselves.
I think ultimately the problem is that Hillsborough and Pinellas county don’t see themselves as part of one big metro area. The SF Bay area is nine counties; not only should Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties be thinking of themselves as a metro area, so should Pasco, Manatee and Sarasota, and probably — say it ain’t so! — Polk, Orange and Osceola. It took me less time to drive from Tampa to Orlando than it does to drive from San Jose to Sonoma, guys. (Bullet train, schmullet train, just get a commuter train running along the already-existing tracks that roughly follow US 17/92!)