March 13, 20134 Comments on Big expansion for Santa Cruz Highway 17 bus service
In response to standing-room only crowds on the popular Highway 17 commuter bus service between Santa Cruz and San Jose, the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District (“METRO”) announced a significant expansion with 11 new weekday runs and an additional run on the weekends.
February 27, 20133 Comments on Missed Connections
I began seeing frantic tweets and Facebook posts about the shootings in Santa Cruz yesterday afternoon shortly after officers shot suspect Jeremy Goulet dead on Doyle Street, behind the Whole Foods Market.
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February 20, 2013Leave a Comment
El Camino Real (ECR) through Santa Clara County is a six lane divided arterial for much of its length. With 40,000 to 60,000 vehicles per day travelling across most intersections from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto, this road operates at a traffic Level of Service (LOS) D or E.
LOS D describes a road where traffic doesn’t flow freely, but isn’t completely stop and go either. LOS E is a road operating at capacity. Traffic still moves, but everybody is constrained by the surrounding traffic. The next and final step is LOS F, which is permanent gridlock, and where ECR is headed if capacity is not improved.
The knee jerk reaction is to add more lanes, either on ECR itself or on parallel freeways and expressways such as Highway 101 or Central Expressway. (more…)
February 14, 2013Leave a Comment
Public transportation between Santa Cruz and Monterey, California
I was surprised to see this Monterey Salinas Transit (MST) bus in downtown Santa Cruz last night.
I asked around and discovered there’s a brand new MST 78 route that began about two weeks ago, providing twice daily service between Santa Cruz and Monterey, California. According to MST, this is the first time public bus service has operated directly between Santa Cruz and Monterey.
January 31, 2013Leave a Comment
Verkehrs und Tarifverbund Stuttgart (VVS) — the regional public transportation cooperative for Stuttgart, Germany and neighboring regions — are piloting a program encouraging the use of folding bikes with area buses and trains to alleviate bicycle parking congestion in front of train stations and the crowding of train cars with non-folding bicycles. Working with the local bicycle advocacy association, the program will make Tern folding bikes available for transit users at a discounted price.
January 24, 20132 Comments on NextBus acquired
The transit geeks who read Cyclelicious know about NextBus, right? They provide GPS tracking and real time arrival information for 104 transit systems in the United States and Canada. You select the transit agency and the route you’re interested in and view real time arrivals via a web page and smart phone friendly web page. NextBus can also send real time arrival info via SMS text messages. Viewing the real time map is fun, kind of like watching the streetcars move while playing SimCity.
There’s no need to download an app, but the NextBus open API allows anybody to access their real time data and create their own app. This enterprising college student even managed to get a transit agency to pay him to create an app for something that anybody can already use for free!
NextBus, based in Emeryville, CA, today announced their acquisition by Cubic Transportation Systems of San Diego. Cubic is “the leading provider of integrated revenue management systems and services for the mass transit industry.” I don’t really know what that means, but given their existing fascination with the word “Next”, the NextBus acquistion seems like a perfect fit for them. Cubic’s “NextCity Vision” — an evolution of their “existing Nextfare and Nextaccount platforms” — “enable transport operators to regulate demand by setting fees and fares across all modes of transport within a region.”
Besides this nexus of Nextism, Cubic says they will “leverage Cubic’s global presence and customer base” to “extend the company’s portfolio of information-based solutions for its transit industry customers and positions NextBus to accelerate its growth.”
Cubic is everywhere — they make things like ticket vending machines and fare card readers that go on buses, along with a lot of the computer technology used by transit agencies. Hopefully, this means NextBus will be available from more transit agencies. Cubic is worldwide so perhaps we’ll begin to see NextBus outside of North America, too.
H/T to the owner of this website for this news.