not exactly rail, but...

[bloodandpopcorn]

a couple days ago, I decided to just print out the Acrobat map of DART bus services and see where all I could go. I found the buses very nice and rather quick, and while I was on them rather impressed (i usually only take the bus that come sby my street for about a mile to the nearest lgihtrail station, so i wasn't familiar with using only buses for transportation). However, bus scheduals are horid. I found myself usually waiting 15-30 minutes when i wanted to transfer. That's mostly due to hte fact that most buses come once, maybe twice, an hour. Does anyone else find that rather impractical? I mean yes, there is good reason for it (Dallas, while rather accepting of rail, is still rather anti-bus, it seems to me, so except in the 'poorer' parts of town, ridership is rahter low I would guess), but right now, it's really not fesable for most uses. If I want to go some where that's not on a rail line, taking a bus just takes far too much time as it currently stands. So the question is, what can we do to make bus service in Dallas better? Likely, ridership or tax money going to DART needs to rise, but tax dollars aren't likely to start flowing in anytime soon, and ridership won't grow as things are now. Any ideas? Maybe Dallas could outlaw cars during certain hours of the day?

[JaeTex]

for the semester or so I tried to be good about taking the bus from West Village to SMU (nearly door to door service) my biggest frustration (other than getting past the West Village construction) was not the wait itself but not knowing whether I just missed a bus that was 3 minutes early or would be waiting for a bus that was 10 minutes late. If I just missed a bus that was early and then the next one ran late...well it was frustrating.

Therefore, my idea is that each bus stop shuld have some little display that says how far away the next bus is from getting to that stop. I know it would be possible, put a little transmitter in each bus and a receiver at the stop and let a computer guess how long it will take given what it knows about traffic. Of course the cost would be prohibitively expensive, but I'd like it.

[bloodandpopcorn]

That's a really good idea! Maybe they could just do it at "major" stops, at least at first, so it would be less cost-prohibitive, but that's a great idea. would definitly take alot of confusion out of it.