First Day

The first day at my new gig was pret­ty much as I expect­ed, lots of meet­ing peo­ple and paper­work, but I did get to start out on some mock-up designs for one of our clients. The only bad thing that hap­pened was the RTA. I’d had luck in the past with it, but that was only tak­ing a Rapid route to the Air­port. Try­ing to fig­ure out bus sched­ules is an exer­cise in futil­i­ty. They real­ly need a ful­ly redesigned site. And bus sched­ules in the emp­ty slots in every bus. And a trip plan­ner that isn’t worth­less. You can’t put in your home address and des­ti­na­tion and get the best route, you have to put in the clos­est bus stop to your source and des­ti­na­tion, which, if you don’t know where one is, makes the fea­ture noth­ing more than a bug. Even once you fig­ure out which stop is clos­est, it might tell you that you have to walk a half mile to a dif­fer­ent stop and will give an esti­mat­ed trip time of 5 min­utes over four miles and includ­ing walk time between trans­fers. And all stops for a bus aren’t list­ed on the sched­ules. Also, the bus­es don’t run on Euclid because of the con­struc­tion, but the updat­ed routes aren’t post­ed.

The RTA pro­vides NO easy way to plan and use their sys­tem. I’m still going to work it out for my own self, because I’m not going to pay $95/mo to park down­town. I just wish I did­n’t need a slide rule and sex­tant and zodi­ac chart to fig­ure out which bus to take.

10 thoughts on “First Day”

  1. Wow. Your first day went exact­ly as mine did!

    Seri­ous­ly, we need to get togeth­er and fig­ure out this RTA thing. I’ve been work­ing for days, even with prac­tice runs, and still had to spring for a cab to get to work on time today. Tonight I’ve already logged two hours on their use­less web­site.

    And huz­zah to actu­al­ly hav­ing route maps on the bus­es! What a nov­el idea…

  2. Don’t know where you work down­town, but the 81 runs on time and is reli­able (as opposed to the cir­cu­la­tor). When I worked on Ontario and Prospect, I caught the bus at 7:17am and was at work at 7:25am. It runs on 14th to Stark­weath­er, turns right at the park (prob­a­bly stark­weath­er and 10th is where you’d carch it) and then up Jef­fer­son, left on Pro­fes­sor, up Fair­field to 14th, then on the high­way. Down­town it makes a loop from Ontario to Lake­side to 9th and back on the high­way. Any­way — it’s much quick­er and eas­i­er than tak­ing the rapid from Tremont.

  3. the 81 and the 23 go right to pub­lic square. a sex­tant and a zodi­ac chart.….….….….lol

  4. The 81 does­n’t run on time any­more. It was 40 min­utes late today and the girl wait­ing at the stop said that tar­di­ness is a reg­u­lar occur­rence now. Thank­ful­ly she helped me out, and now I know to take the E Line Trol­ley to Pub­lic Square to pick up the 23 or 81.

  6. hi adam! i guess you’ve worked out the best plan, but if you ever need bus/rapid sched­ules, they’ve got i think all of the routes in a rack at the tow­er city rapid sta­tion.

  8. Man, bike it! Unless the roads are snowed over (which, admit­ted­ly, hap­pens quite a bit ;), it’s an easy ride into down­town and will negate any RTA stress.

  10. awe­some 🙂 I got a new set of wheels the oth­er day. Expect pics in my blog. rides like air.

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