Is the phone ringing off the hook at Santa Maria Area Transit (SMAT) (928-5624)? It should be. The new bus routes and schedules, which were introduced on June 19, are hardly a bus rider’s dream come true.
I returned after being out of town for three weeks to find that my beloved Santa Maria Area Transit (SMAT) bus routes 1A and 1B had been reconfigured. These routes began at the Town Center West Mall on East Cook Street (a super, central location) and ended in either old Orcutt or not-old Orcutt.
My first venture out under the “new, improved” bus schedules ended with my walking home—one hour—from an appointment, because it was faster than dealing with a slew of unknowns and waiting for a bus, getting a transfer, and waiting for still another bus.
Since that inauspicious morning, I have called SMAT three times and have written City Hall twice. Like an outraged mother stressed beyond the pale, I wanted to scream, “What have you done?” and “Why have you done it?” But we all know we catch few flies with vinegar.
The inauguration of the revised bus routes was concomitant with the grand opening of Santa Maria’s new, million-dollar transit center, a handsome public property where, for reasons I would like to know, Bus No. 7 pulls into Bus Bay No. 15. The purpose of having a Transit Center that is more spacious than the street space by the mall is, as I understand it, to make finding a bus easier. At the mall, you never knew if 1A would be at the beginning or the end of a queue, or in the middle. So it seems logical to me, that in an improved system, a bus marked “7” would pull into a bay marked “7.”
I came home from Los Angeles to also find that, in my absence, three convenient bus stops near my house have been eliminated. It was not personal, I am sure, but it feels personal. I am a brisk and avid walker, but the distance to and from bus stops is discouraging. I now have to walk as many as 30 minutes to and from bus stops that had heretofore been seven, 15, and 20 minutes from my house.
A fourth stop convenient to my house had been eliminated six months prior to the Big Change.
Not only were convenient stops for me eliminated, but my most-used bus routes (1A and 1B), as I knew them, were so butchered that a formerly straightforward and ultra-convenient trek up a major thoroughfare in Santa Maria became an exercise in “Guess-where-the-bus-stop-is!” and “Where in the world am I going?”
Having to relearn bus routes, bus schedules, and bus stop locations and having to re-plot bus travel plans is time consuming and maddening. I am frustrated and flummoxed.
For navigating the old bus routes, SMAT issued a 4-inch-by-9-inch, 34-page booklet that was fairly easy to comprehend. They listed the bus stops along a route and the times the bus could be expected at those stops. You had to switch to another page for the Sunday routes and schedules and to still another page for the nighttime schedule. But it was user-friendly.
That booklet has been replaced with a 24-inch-by-32-inch foldout. Try reading that outside on a windy or rainy day! Try reading it at night, in the dark, under a streetlight.
One side of the foldout is devoted to a color-coded map of bus routes. The other side lists basic stops for the routes. All the bus stop locations are listed in separate columns, along with information about which buses you can transfer to and where transfer points are.
So, when trying to figure out how to get where you are going, you have to look at one column, then another, and then another in a different color and so on. Is this not enough to make a person say, “Oh, the hell with it!” and stay home? It was for me. I aborted several trips after weighing the alternatives. Sorry, Wal-Mart, Target, Vons, and points in between.
One of the bus stops listed on the foldout had an “NB” after it. I thought this meant “no bench,” but when I called SMAT, found it means “northbound.” Who knew?
Under the new system, if I take the bus from the new Transit Center (a five-to-seven-minute walk to the mall), to go home, I have to get off at Kohl’s department store (where there is no bus stop sign, no bench, and no shade) and backtrack—by going north for about a block and a half. I have to cross an always busy intersection at McCoy, cross another always busy intersection at Broadway, and walk about a block and a half to transfer to a bus (that may take 30 minutes to arrive) that will take me about one mile, where I will debark and take a 20-minute walk home. Under the old system, I could ride a bus with no transfers, no walks up Broadway, and no crossing busy intersections, to a bus stop that was a seven-minute walk from my house.
Imagine doing all this walking, waiting, and transferring if you were a pregnant woman with a child in a stroller. Or a person in a wheelchair. Or an elderly person with a walker or a cane. Such are the people who mostly ride the bus—they are the consumers of public transportation. Constituting more than half of the bus-riding population are the developmentally disabled; the physically disabled (about six wheelchair passengers have been regulars on Route 1); young women (many of whom do not speak English) with one, two, or three children and a stroller; and the elderly. There are also teenagers and the financially challenged.
Also, hordes of high school students, whose presence on the bus when school lets out, frequently cause passengers farther along on the bus route to be left behind, because there is no room on the bus. Another 30-40-60-minute wait.
Riding the bus in Santa Maria has never been exceptionally convenient, but under the old system, it was doable and relatively easy.
Now, people who board bus No. 7 at the Transit Center to go to Wal-Mart are in for a 45-minute ride for a trip that takes 10 minutes by car. The southbound bus takes a street parallel to the street Wal-Mart is on, bypassing the opportunity to debark passengers after 10 minutes; it travels farther south to Spencer’s Market, where it makes a circle and returns, passing the Wal-Mart stop on this leg of the journey. How does this route make sense?
I like public transportation. I was raised on the East Coast and have logged thousands of miles on buses (municipal and Greyhound), trains, and subways in large metropolitan areas. And I know any bus service is better than no bus service. But I am brokenhearted. I miss my old Routes 1A and B and my oh-so-easy-to-understand schedule. m
Helen Ann Thomas writes the Sun’s “Hobnobbing with Helen” column. Send comments to the opinion editor at econnolly@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2011.
