South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

Sioux Falls Transit

Paratransit Public Works Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Transit Transportation

Is the new public transit system working?

l3wis 2Comments

I couldn’t tell you personally, because I haven’t used the on-demand because I don’t like them data mining. But I have heard positives and negatives on the issue. Dakota Food Truck News did a story about the system, and I was surprised the GM didn’t kill the story because of the negativity towards the city. I wonder how many nasty calls they got from Poops’ ‘TEAM’ about this;

Brockman has used Sioux Area Metro and locally has not had any issues. He said that he has not been able to get a response from Via on the concerns he has and hopes things can be adjusted.

“It really sounds good in theory,” Brockman said.

Another option with SAM on Demand is the ability to reserve a ride ahead of time.

Brockman said that it’s a great idea, but he said that he has not been able to use that feature and that it needs to be 24 hours in advance, which is not convenient with him.

I actually find it baffling that the largest city in the state has one of the worst public transit systems in the nation. It would be different if this was sunny California where you can easily ride a bike or even walk everywhere, but with our extreme weather changes a good public transit system is important.

While I haven’t rode the public transit system in Sioux Falls, I was a daily rider in High School. In the late 80’s I lived in a suburb of Seattle, I moved to another adjacent town, so my school changed, but I didn’t want to go to that school, so my former school had open enrollment, the problem was I couldn’t take the school bus anymore so I would get a ride in the morning from my dad and take the CT (Community Transit) home. It was faster then the school bus and I was home within a half hour. I also ride public transit when I travel because other cities make it very easy to use. I told someone once, “You would literally have to be brain dead if you couldn’t figure out San Fran’s transit system.”

While On-Demand is nice, they really need to have fixed routes and they need to run from 5 AM to 10 PM, 7 days a week! The current hours are;

Monday to Friday: 6:00am to 9:15pm
Saturday: 8:00am to 6:00pm

I think it is strange that you have all these White Christian Nationalists in this town that don’t provide bus service on a Sunday so folks can attend a church service, or even a BBQ at a friend’s place.

Has any of my readers tried the new service?

This is what happens when you build a transit system around cars instead of moving people. There are streets in this town if I ride my bike on them, it would be a death wish.

Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Airport Sioux Falls Transit Transportation

Transit On Demand is available at the airport

l3wis 1Comments

I stand corrected! I had a long post written last night about how On Demand doesn’t appear to go to the airport, but it does;

The airport, for example, wasn’t an option. I was instead prompted to take a bus and then a 50-minute walk.

As it was explained to me by a reporter, the app just gives you options and the first option was to take a fixed route or walk.

Uh, okay.

But my bigger concern is the data mining;

Via has its own app that you have to download, and there are quite a few steps to get it all set up,

While data can make the service much better, your personal information like credit card and tracking info should be scrubbed every 24-48 hours. I want to use the service, but not sure I can trust a 3rd party contractor partnering up with another 3rd party software provider (and who knows what other financial services they are partnering with?)

All this Bloomberg Institute of data mining is getting old.

Paratransit SF City Council Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Transit Transportation

UPDATE: St. Cloud, MN bails on their On Demand Transit system (H/T-GFG)

l3wis 3Comments

UPDATE: A South DaCola foot soldier sent me this information about a story he read in the St. Cloud local paper;

One of the highlights I picked up in a quick scan – the original fixed route service which was replaced had a ridership of 5 riders per hour.  At the conclusion of the trial period (in late Dec 2019?), ridership for the On Demand version was 1/2 of the previous – 2.5 riders per hour.

Nonetheless, at that time, they continued the trial period in order to see if a different period of the calendar would yield different results.

Didn’t read/scan beyond that, but would surmise that they continued the trial, COVID-19 emerged (which wasn’t kind to public transportation of any type) and they finally decided, post COVID-19, that the On Demand model wasn’t working.

St. Cloud’s ON Demand system has been a pilot since 2019 (similar to Sioux Falls) and they decided to end it;

A temporary bus service in Sartell is coming to an end and a fixed route will replace the shared-ride service.

Metro Bus is sunsetting the ConneX on-demand service and resuming Fixed Route 32 starting on Sunday.

The pilot project was started in 2019 and extended several times before the decision was made to go back to the fixed route system for Sartell.

I tried to find some articles why they decided to ‘sunset’ the program but couldn’t really find anything (links are welcome in the comment section). My educated guess is that On Demand Transit doesn’t work well, isn’t efficient and leaves a lot of riders out of the equation.

The Sioux Falls City Council really needs to strap in and take a very active role in fixing our transit system in Sioux Falls. First call I would make as a councilor is to a city official with St. Cloud.

Paratransit Patrick Starr Rich Merkouris SF City Council Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Transit

Sioux Falls City Councilor Merkouris suggests free transit rides

l3wis 6Comments

As I have discussed in the past many cities throughout the US provide FREE public transit. Kansas City introduced it in 2019 to boost the working poor and has found great success. I guess Chapel Hill, NC has been doing it for 20 years.

During the city council meeting last night they approved a resolution;

Item #36, A RESOLUTION APPROVING THE 2022 SIOUX FALLS TRANSIT DEVELOPMENT PLAN.

During discussion before the vote, Rich Merkouris suggested FREE fare for our public transit system. He acknowledged it would be a heavy lift to get the public on board but when we are only collecting $500K a year in fares and spending $7 million a year on the program, what’s the point? Just think with the money we are spending on the 6th Street Bunker Bridge and the DSU research facility we could have had 40 years of FREE fares. Councilor Starr and Merkouris both suggested that the frequency and usage of the transit system needs to improve and experimenting with different approaches, like FREE fares, may get us better results. There was a suggestion that city officials have been sitting on their hands for the past 20 years when it comes to transit. I would disagree. They are not sitting on their hands they are using them to spread their butt cheeks so their heads can easily be placed.

To be honest with you, I think our current public transit system is beyond fixable. I would much rather see the city dismantle the whole system and bring in a new contractor.

Paratransit SF City Council Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Transit Transportation

Is the City of Sioux Falls using public transit to REDLINE Sioux Falls?

l3wis 3Comments

If you watch the presentation and look at the map above you will see there is a plan to move bus routes out of the ‘lily-white’ neighborhoods permanently, especially North Harrisburg (SE Sioux Falls).

Is this a backdoor way of making sure likely riders of public transit would not have options in affordable or accessible housing in these neighborhoods?

Public transit has been used in the past to redline neighborhoods.

The city council took the opportunity to NOT talk about this obvious glaring problem but to take up most of the Q & A time to complain about batteries for electric buses, because, you know, climate change is a hoax.

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