Manu October 30, 2012, 05:52:47

Chicken or the egg question here. Does RT suck besuace it is underfunded or is it underfunded besuace it sucks?I think about this WAY too often. The necessities are there, you can use RT to get to most Dr. appointments, most schools, and most major employment areas. However, the people who need those routes, the disabled, students, and government employees, all get deeply discounted passes. I don’t know how their funding works, but my guess would be that the individual ticket buyers rates are so high becuase those services are not paid for by the current structure. Can’t say I have the solution to that, but raising ticket prices sure isn’t it. Imagine you are not an RT commuter, you are someone who can walk or bike or carpool to work, but you are not a vehicle owner so you need public transit for other activities. You are easily spending the most out of your own pocket for the service you get, yet you get shafted the most on ease of use. So you minimize or eliminate your use of it. They make less money, they decrease the frequency or existance of lines. We’re going nowhere but down here.This weekend switch to every 30 min instead of every 15 is in theory a money saver, but how many people are going to find another way to do that trip now? The initial cost savings may prove true, but it is another step in the wrong direction for the idea of RT. Public transit is simply not well regarded or supported in the collective mind of Sacramento. I don’t know that RT will survive. I’m not sure it should.