The current system

At the current time in Springfield, we have a bus system that runs on what is called a "pulse," that is every bus in the system meeting at one central point, which in Springfield is downtown, and departing the central point in "pulses." While this may have worked in 1968, when the system was first drawn out, the pulse system doesn't work anymore. This is because of several reasons:

*In 1968, 90% of all shopping and employment was in the downtown area. Most people used the bus to get to work and shop because parking was limited at this time and people were still accustomed to using a trolley system which had the same idea.

*Now we are in 2007, living in a city which quite honestly has sprawled away from our downtown, and the pulse system as it stands makes some trips to the main shopping areas nearly 70 minutes long at times. For example, someone living on West Jefferson will need to take Route 4 eastbound to downtown, transfer to Route 7W and head back westbound to get to White Oaks Mall. This is a 45- to 50-minute trip, while driving is only 20 minutes.

*Some buses going inbound follow a different path for outbound. So if you live in the "outbound" portion of the route, going back in means you have to ride the bus to the end of the line, where it sometimes sits and waits five minutes, and then ride it back downtown, which is usually an additional 15 minutes just to get to the transfer center.

13 fixed-routes serve the city in addition to several specialty routes, including a bus which goes to the Harrison Park area of the western part of the city and a bus which is named the Historic Sites Route. Most of the buses leave the "transfer center" downtown on a 30-minute basis, while not all buses finish their entire route in 30 minutes, causing some confusion.

Other routes don't run for 30 minutes, but sometimes only every 60 minutes. This causes more confusion. In the same spirit of confusion, routes 4 and 13 don't even run in their entirety in the daytime, off-peak hours, causing the upmost confusion.

This confusion, I believe, is one of the main reasons that people in Springfield don't embrace public transit anymore.

Other attitudes about public transit in Springfield also exist. The prevailing attitude about transit is that only poor people use it and if you are fortunate enough to have a car you should use it. The only time that transit numbers seem to be boosted are during the Illinois State Fair when they have the 15-minute shuttle running until midnight and when winter weather gets to be too bad for many Springfieldians to drive to and from work. Otherwise people treat the bus system as something that they pay taxes toward, which many people don't even know they pay property taxes into the district, and they don't even use it!

The Springfield Mass Transit District, when it was first formed in the 1960s, was to alleviate the local transit company going bankrupt. It was formed to cover Capitol, Woodside, and Springfield townships (Springfield township, as many of you know, adjusts as the the city of Springfield expands). However, we have a foul-up: the transit district has not expanded in size with the rest of Springfield. As Springfield moved much of its commercial development out of the boundaries, the SMTD struggled to get service to the bare essentials for life for Springfield's poorest, which is partially why SMTD is seen as something only the poor use. Had the transit district grown with the rest of the city, buses would be reaching just about every subdivision of the westside on a regular basis. This exposure would have helped alleviate the "poor folk" attitude about mass transit in Springfield.

I will talk more soon about other reasons that transit has not been embraced in Springfield, and hopefully some of the solutions to that problem.