alex davis

^typical mouthpiece of the Farebox Recovery Industrial Complex™

This is so cool.

The J Line goes HARD.

You haven't witnessed its full power until you blast past 6 miles of crawling traffic without even slowing.

🚗🚕🚓🚗🚛🛻🏎️🚗🛻🚛
🚌=-

I suspect that we would agree on a lot! And I'd love to meet with her one day if she's willing, which I've offered to do.

Stephanie Wiggins and I can agree on one thing:

There is a lot of misinformation out there about fare enforcement on LA Metro.

Came here to say that.

Oh perfect. Glad it's on your radar. Thank you.

@mayorjoi.bsky.social, sorry if you're already on top of this. But when you get a chance, do you think you could deputize someone to look into why SEPTA's "upgraded" signaling system made the D1 15 minutes slower? And maybe see if there's any way to fix it? You are THE perfect person to tackle this.

You wouldn't think dwell time would be a significant drag on the Sunset Limited's schedule, but it is! At Tucson, they checked everyone's ticket on by one in a giant line. At Maricopa, the train had to make 4 separate stops at the short platform. Both took nearly half an hour.

The Boxyard

MSA Annex

Mercado San Augustín

Something I love about Tucson is these privately owned, outdoor, yuppie millennial food court areas always featuring string lights. When it cools down at night, they're really busy.

"Erm, that's just a corporate gimmick."

This corporate gimmick builds walkable cities! That's a thumbs up from me.

It's still a fair point because some of the Obama streetcars were built without a major ridership generator like a university and, well, we know how those turned out.

Does it? Like, compared to what? MBTA buses average 41 and their light rail averages 58. 66 is quite high, especially for a sunbelt city.

www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.do...

Yeah, it seems like it might be really tough to keep up the facade. But SunTran is just boldly telling riders to download the SunTran app by typing in "transit app".

The back of the SunTran ride guide entices travelers to download Transit App by calling it the SunTran app.

In Tucson, I've been really impressed with how many people were using @transit.app. Welp, mystery solved! Turns out SunTran isn't just officially endorsing Transit App. They're literally promoting it as the "SunTran App", lol. (With permission, I assume.)

www.suntran.com/sun-tran-app/

It's Arizona and wages are lower. Torrance, as of the 2024 NTD report is at $208.

www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.do...

SunTran Downtown Ronstadt Center

SunTran Downtown Ronstadt Center

SunTran streetcar at MSA Annex

Streetcar on Broadway

It's freeeeeeeee.

After suspending fare in the pandemic, the city of Tucson has just kept extending the free fare each year. It's controversial and SunTran still has the fareboxes in case they ever want to go back.

The streetcar operating cost per revenue hour is $206 compared to $124 for SunTran buses. So if we replaced this thing with buses, we could go to every 8 minutes instead of 12.

That SHOULD increase ridership, logically. But due to bus stigma, this would probably fail and I hate that.

The Tucson Streetcar is functionally identical to a bus and exists in a very car-dependent city (sorry).

Yet it gets 66 pax/revenue hr. Wild success.

The key question is whether this is more thanks to the frequent service or the useless metal rods reassuring non-transit people it's legit to ride.

What would you set the fee at?

many analysts are saying

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is a big day for SB 79 in Los Angeles!

You can make a big difference by giving comment at the PLUM committee hearing, 2pm at City Hall

Here’s what's being decided:

Approximate epicness of US transit once we get rid of Buy America provisions:

Bus

This is the vibe.

I think my favorite might be

"Not a lot of people know about [thing almost everyone has heard about]."

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

#9 NCTD:
Normalize Camo & "Therapy" Dogs

Oh, how convenient. The board meeting is next week!

3:00p Thu Feb 26 2026
wwww.septa.org/about/meetin...

A Bad Case for Free Buses The New York Times whiffs on defending Zohran Mamdani’s pet program.

If anyone wants a well researched, one page takedown of NYT's "Something Surprising..." free buses op-ed, this one really hit the mark.

www.city-journal.org/article/free...