Healthy Living
Jim Cameron Jim Cameron 8-2-16

How Train Conductors, Bus Drivers Cope with COVID-19 Threat: Cameron on Transportation

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“In my 30 years in the transit business I never thought I’d be asking people NOT to take the bus,” says Doug Holcomb, CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit, the operator of 57 buses carrying 5 million passengers a year. But not this year. Like most transit agencies, GBT is asking people to stay home and to ride their buses only if it is essential. So ridership on those buses has dropped 65%. On Metro-North the ridership is down 90 to 95%.

Opinion
Jim Cameron Jim Cameron 8-2-16

Buses Remove Traffic, Get People, Often of Modest Means, to Work — What’s Not to Like?

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Why is there so much scorn for those who ride the bus? Forty-one million trips are taken on 12,000 public buses each year in Connecticut in communities across the state (not counting school buses). Yet, those riders are regarded as losers, not by the transit operators, but by those who drive by car. When Southington was recently considering restoring bus service for the first time since 1969, one resident wrote a letter to the local paper declaring “Towns that have bus service are towns that frankly have a lesser quality of people.”

Really? “Lesser quality” — how?

Opinion
Jim Cameron Jim Cameron 8-2-16

Buses Popular with College Students and Not Just for the Poor: Cameron on Transportation

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It might not be the most glamorous means of mass transit, but Connecticut’s 12,000-plus local and commuter buses form a vital link in our transportation network. “We’re not just a service for the needy few,” said Greater Bridgeport Transit’s CEO Doug Holcomb, the feisty young leader of one of the state’s largest and most successful bus systems.

In other words, single-occupancy car drivers’ perceptions notwithstanding, it’s not just poor folks and the car-less who rely on the bus. According to Holcomb, 90 percent of GBT’s ridership is either going to school or work. Like rail commuters, some bus passengers own cars, but prefer to take the bus for various reasons. Each of GBT’s 40-foot buses average 30 passengers an hour, an impressive number when you consider it includes rush hour and lower-ridership times.