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Yesterday was another fun afternoon out of the office. I had just picked up lunch at Nate's Deli (where the baba ghannouj is excellent, by the way) and, in the name of research, had just waved off the 20A bus that could have taken me straight home. I wanted to try out the RTA Community Circulator buses that have been running through Tremont since April of 1998.
The buses themselves are rather wide, low-riding vans; think of a Dodge Sportsman crossbred with a Pacer. They seat 16 and have what appears to be reasonably good weelchair access. The fare is fifty cents, which amounts to zero if you are transferring to or from another line. On the Tremont run (807) there seems to be five vehicles looping most of the day, as the round trip runs about 90 minutes with the buses 20 minutes apart. It's officially okay to wave a Circulator down if you're not waiting at a regular RTA stop, and they'll drop you off between stops too.
The smaller vehicles also maneuver better in heavy traffic and on those narrow Tremont streets than standard buses. This is a good thing, as the Circulators take tortuously indirect routes from Point A to Point B to serve the largest number of riders and landmark destinations possible. Forty minutes from Detroit to Denison is much too long for the rush-hour commute, but it's reasonable when you realize that the route wasn't designed for end-to-end travel.
The 1:20pm bus was bang-on-time. My old pal Richard was right in the front seat already when I boarded at 25th and Bridge. Richard, who has lived on West 10th in Tremont for at least 20 years, takes the buses and rapids pretty much everywhere. Over 40 now, he's never read well enough to get a driver's license and his SSI doesn't provide the cash flow to support the costs of a car anyway.
Before the Circulator, only the 81 and 84 lines went through Tremont at all. That was better than nothing, but those services mostly went just downtown. To go anywhere besides downtown, Tremont riders would almost always have to transfer. Already paved under and over by ODOT, Tremonters also suffered the indignity of some of the worst public transportation in the city. You can see so much of Cleveland from the north end of West 10th, but actually getting there has been problematic. People like Richard need more flexibility than that.
The best thing about the Tremont Community Circulator is that, unlike much of what we see from RTA and the state DOT, it's clearly there to benefit city people. Practically nobody is interested in a bus route that goes from Lakeview Terrace, through Tremont, around Clark, past Metro, and over to Denison... except people who live and work in the area. It's a welcome relief from highway projects that knock down the places we live and express buses that cut through but hardly stop here. (Euclid, Lakewood, and West Shore communities also have their own Circulators, as well as other parts of Cleveland.)
As an example, one of our fellow passengers on this bus, which was over half full for most of its southbound run, was a woman who obviously worked at Grace Hospital up on 14th and lived on Archwood. Her ride home from work was cut to perhaps 15 minutes by the Circulator, and why not? It's only a couple of miles, and would have taken at least twice as long on the conventional routes. It should be this easy to live in the city and work here too.
For Richard, the Circulator is a practical asset. He had just finished up a meeting with his "job coach" at a social service agency around Detroit Avenue, and was headed back to his apartment on West 10th. Without the Circulator this one-mile trip would require two buses, cost $1.25, and take maybe twice as long. The Tremont Circulator gives Richard better, quicker, cheaper access to resources that will help him become more self-sufficient.
The Circulator routes can help many Clevelanders by giving us transfer-free access to schools, workplaces, and hospitals. I still have a few concerns about how the routes are publicized, as they could be better used and thus run more often, leading to even more benefit.
At fifty cents a trip, the buses can only carry $8.00 worth of fares at a time. The turnover of passengers in a single run can compensate for this somewhat, but on the other hand the buses don't usually run full either. This is hardly enough to pay the driver, let alone maintenance and amortization. I wonder how much of a cost sink this is for RTA. That having been said, most RTA routes are subsidized; the eight Circulator routes as a group are a better use of taxpayer money than the whole Watefront Line rapid extension. In any case, the Circulators seem to do as well or better than the Waterfront Line as a feeder for transfer traffic, which could have an indirect positive effect on ridership on the conventional lines.
The Circulator routes are a little hard to find on the street, because the RTA signs at standard stops don't mention the Circulator routes, and it's hard to know where the routes actually go unless you have the timetable in hand. Longtime west siders, for example, already know that "Lorain Avenue is the 22, Clark is the 23, Detroit is the 26" because those routes have been in existence longer than RTA itself. You can figure them out just by standing on Public Square for ten minutes and reading destination signs on the buses.
It's much harder to guess at "Detroit to Lorain along 25th, Abbey to 11th to Professor to 7th to Jefferson to 14th to Clark..." by looking at a van that lacks a route sign and takes a weaving path through the neighborhood. I'm sure that many people who would otherwise benefit from the Circulators still have no idea what they're for or where they go.
Additionally, the Circulators are easy to mistake for Community Responsive Transit vans, whose services are by appointment and available only to people with disabilities. I'm sure that many able-bodied people pass up Circulators because of this confusion.
The RTA website is almost completely inaccessible if you don't have graphics and Javascript enabled, which leaves out a lot of people with disabilities and those whose Internet access is on affordable text-based terminals. What were they thinking? Who do they think their customers are?
Overall, despite some questions of cost and information on these buses, I found the Community Circulator run through Tremont to be a practical solution for some obvious neighborhood needs.
If services are to be tax-subsidized, this is the way it should be done. Following Norm Krumholz's theory of "equity planning," we should be allocating money to expand options for the poor, not always trying to make the city more fun or profitable for the well-off who already have plenty of other choices. Two cheers.
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