[PRCo] Re: Boarding buses and trains

[ROGER Jenkins]

Having driven public transit buses in San Diego and Brockton Mass. , its
the schedule makers that write up an unrealistic schedule for a
particular route that will make or break being on time or late. One
particular route 15 schedule I drove on a Sunday PM , from downtown to
El Cajon , a distance of 15 miles , cut the running time between time
points so much [because they thought the riding was less on Sunday ]
that by the time you made a round trip you were 15 min late leaving the
downtown terminal . And on each succesive trip you got later and later
.!!  You had to go to the restroom at the end of each trip and they gave
you a 15 min , supper break ,which I took ! [otherwise you went hungry
.]  

   At the end of the night I was over 1hour and 20 min. late !
Everybody else was as late as I was . I wrote out what they called a
Micelaneous [SIC] Report to the schedule dept. explaining the situation
and it took them until the next schedule change two months later to
improve the running times !  In the meantime we all heard it from the
riders about the inconsistant schedule !!  

   As an example of the poor time element , from Hillcrest at 5th and
University to Park Blvd and University the weekday running time was 12
min. Sunday it was 7 min. [a distance of  9 blocks and six
unco-ordinated traffic lites ]  Impossible to make in a bus . The
running joke among the drivers was that the schedule makers ran the time
points in an Mazda RX7 SPORTS CAR to figure the running times.