I save a lot of money by not having a car. I don’t have to make payments, pay insurance, registration, gas, any of that. My bike works well for me, and is a lot cheaper.
But I have had nothing but negative experiences thus far with Metro in Cincinnati.
First, I have been job hunting for 5 months. I have been offered numerous jobs – but when they hear that I will be using the bus, they actually take back their offer or decline to hire me because I don’t have my own transportation. When asked why, a lot of people, especially employers, don’t trust the bus system. It isn’t reliable, hard to use, long route times, etc.
Tomorrow I will be using the bus to go approximately 3 miles. From Walnut Hills to Hyde Park. The “bus trip planner” on the Go-Metro webpage offered 4 routes, 3 of which required transfers. For 3 miles. The trip planner kicks back with “unknown location” if you type out the words “street”, “lane”, etc., and that took me ages to figure out. And when you add in that the links on the sidebar don’t work on certain pages, it’s hard to manage. The font is small and hard to read, and the bus stops they list on the webage don’t use the same name or are not labeled on the actual bus route map. It took two of us, somewhat educated adults, to even figure out that it was route 11 that I needed, but we still haven’t determined where the actual stops are for certain.
So tomorrow I will go to (what I think is the location of) the bus stop close to here, hope a number 11 bus shows up within a half and hour, and hope that I get to Hyde Park. And then I will reverse that for the way home. I really feel that I am using some fly-by-night taxi service instead of a multi-million dollar aspect of Cincinnati that thousands have used. This town dumps a ton of money into the Metro system, but it’s not even easily accessible for people to figure out what route they need to use or where it picks up at.
An eloquent, nicely-written rant? No. But I hope that sooner or later this changes, because I am seriously tired of trying to use their circa-1997 style webpage and just “hoping for the best” in order to get myself to work on time.
Saving in Cincinnati 