Tech and city transit

[the1wags]

I don't know if Denver's RTD had anything to do with making it, but I downloaded an ap for my Droid that will tell you every bus and rail stop in the Denver metro. Search by GPS location, alphabetical, or by map. Stop times, routes, etc. |expletive| awesome. MAT needs to be imploded and start all over with a bond issue.

[StreetsOfOmaha]

Yes. It's like MAT becomes more irrelevant and useless with every passing second.

[Seth]

It's shocking to me how badly MAT sucks, even for an American bus system. In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois where I went to school (a metro of not much more than 100,000), the bus system is light years ahead of MAT. Like Denver, they have GPS tracking on all the buses and easy web and mobile apps (even text message service) to track bus routes and arrival times. The routes cover most of the urbanized area, and ran 15-minute intervals for most of the routes through the downtown and campus areas. Oh, and the service into downtown ran to bar closing time. When university was in session, several routes ran 24 hours. What a concept!

They're website is also attractive and functional (http://www.cumtd.com/), unlike MAT's, which looks like something I used to create in MS Word.

Coming here, I expected to be able to take the bus to and from downtown and Old Market at night to go out to eat or to a bar, but with a lot of the routes ending at 6pm and the rest shutting down by 11pm, it's useless.

[StreetsOfOmaha]

I sometimes wonder if the board-members at MAT think to themselves what a failure everything they do is as they walk into work in the morning.

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the bus system in and around Albany is. They have frequent service all day and into the late night (1-2 AM), and they even have a system of rural feeder buses that bring people into the city from the outlying small towns.

I will be specializing in urban transportation, and hope to be able to come back to Omaha someday and help right all the wrongs.