Pick one up
KU on Wheels and the Lawrence Transit Service unveiled their new Guide to Ride, a 44-page booklet that outlines routes and schedules for the coming year. The booklets are available at City Hall, the Lawrence Public Library, Lawrence grocery stores and elsewhere.
Transit officials are looking forward to improving service, attracting more customers and more closely matching supply with demand when it comes to getting riders from here to there and back.
All without spending any additional money for operations.
“Working with the city transit staff has been a great experience, and — with every meeting — we find better ways to make the systems more efficient and usable for the whole community,” said Donna Hultine, director of KU Parking & Transit, which operates the KU on Wheels transit system that serves Kansas University. “We’re going to have more service that fits the need … so we’ll not have empty buses going to certain areas, unless they’re needed. And there will be more appropriate-sized vehicles responding.”
This week, the two systems — KU on Wheels and the Lawrence Transit Service, better known as the T — unveiled their Guide to Ride, a 44-page booklet that outlines routes and schedules for the coming year. The booklets are available at City Hall, the Lawrence Public Library, city grocery stores and elsewhere.
Several system changes will take effect Aug. 2. Among the biggest will be along the T’s Route 3, which runs from Lawrence Memorial Hospital north and west to employment areas along North Iowa Street and Lakeview Road, as well as into residential areas generally bounded by Trail Road to the south, the Kansas Turnpike to the north and Monterey Way to the west.
The route will operate with its familiar fixed-route service — buses following a specific route, at specific intervals — from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. Outside those peak periods, riders can call to arrange to be picked up at a specific address, then get dropped off anywhere within the service area or at the T’s main transfer hub, at Ninth and Massachusetts streets downtown.
Some other routes are being merged, split or rerouted, and in some areas buses will run more frequently, or possibly less.
“We’ve started matching our service to what the ridership is,” said Robert Nugent, the city’s transit administrator.
For details, pick up a Guide to Ride or visit lawrencetransit.org.
Comments
SettingTheRecordStraight 2 years, 10 months ago
"...riders can call to arrange to be picked up at a specific address, then get dropped off..."
How would you feel if you owned one of Lawrence's four taxi companies? Do we really want such direct and unnecessary government competition with the private sector?
"...so we’ll not have empty buses going to certain areas..."
Yet for over 10 years the city has employed dozens of 30-passenger buses that were completely unnecessary given the emp-T's miniscule ridership. End the subsidy now.
matchbox81 2 years, 10 months ago
I'm not sure that the midday route 3 will compete that much with taxi companies. Taxi's will pick you up from whereever in town, and drop you off whereever you need to go in town. The midday route 3 will just pick you up inside a limited service area, and drop you off either inside that limited service area, or in downtown. You would have to transfer to a regular bus route to get to anywhere else in town.
Besides, the fact that there's still 4 taxi companies in town after the T has been running for 10 years means that those taxi companies must be doing all right...
niaby 2 years, 10 months ago
Great work!
jafs 2 years, 10 months ago
Well, after living in a variety of places in Lawrence and being unable to use the bus due to the routes/schedules, we finally moved to an area that allowed my wife to be able to ride it to work.
Until they made these changes.
Not an improvement for us.
oneeye_wilbur 2 years, 10 months ago
As long as Hultine continues to support each and every KU bus onto the campus the KU system is about as flawed as can be. There is no reason to bring every KU bus onto the campus. KU simply needs to have at most four buses that circulate on the campus and all others coming from other pickup points drop off students at 19thand Naismith, 15th and Iowa and 11th and Mississippi. If they, the students cannot haul their butts up the hlll a block or two then something is wrong and they need the Para Transit bus. Hultine has made such a mess of the KU parking department, this won't be any better.
just_another_bozo_on_this_bus 2 years, 10 months ago
"It just warms my heart to see the para bus drop someone off at the bar."
You must hang out at the bar quite a lot.
oneeye_wilbur 2 years, 10 months ago
I wonder if Ms. Hultine rides the KU bus to work?
matchbox81 2 years, 10 months ago
Someone needs to take a chill pill. Saying that 4 buses could handle all the circulation on campus is like saying I-70 only needs two lanes. You can't dump students from two or more buses at the edge of campus, and expect them to be able to all climb into one bus. The time alone that it would take for all of the students to get off of one (or two) bus(es), and get onto a second bus, would hold up the entire system. Especially when you consider that most of the students are all going to the same stretch of Jayhawk Boulevard.
oneeye_wilbur 2 years, 10 months ago
matchbox is assuming that all students need to ride a bus. EVer hear of walking? Have you seen the fat butts on most of the women and of course not many of the students would get far walking in flip flops. It's pathetic to see a student waiting for a bus at 11th and Indiana , so lazy they can't walk. Try the four buses and see how it works. Students get on a bus at Watson and ride it to the Student Union. They are lazy, fat and spoiled.
Explain then why every bus that comes onto the campus has to go to GSP and Corbin? It is now wonder those girls are fat. The campus is no bigger now than it was in 1964, with the exception of the buildings on west campus which are served by Park and Ride.
KU should have a bus system called Park and Sit because that is what is going on. Parking their rears on a seat and then sitting.
Those buses are so slow anyway, I don't know why anyone would even catch one unless they are going off the campus. Walk for tomorrow you may be so fat, you cannot. Flip flops are going to be the cause of the new ailment taking the place of "carpal tunnel"
Scoliosis is going to be the illness of the generation wearing flip flops. They serve no purpose, none whatsover. They use to be used to keep people from getting athletes foot rash. Now they are just what they are flip flops for lazy, fat people.
none2 2 years, 10 months ago
I'm not on campus during the day, so I really cannot say what happens. All I know is that when I was in KU most students on campus walked, biked, or used a moped. I always thought of KU on wheels for the off campus kids. Are bicycles no longer popular on campus?
lllwll 2 years, 10 months ago
This is just jack of the trade off. Take a trip on the T. Two hrs to get to East Lawrence. You liberals voted for it.
KU is laughing that the city dummies voted for this.
ToriFreak13 2 years, 10 months ago
How much money is spent on updating maps every time they change?
ToriFreak13 2 years, 10 months ago
ps. As well wasted on previously printed maps that are void?
artichokeheart 2 years, 10 months ago
Where to begin... Ok why do we need a 44 page book to understand the transit? Other major cities run bus systems and rail systems without 44 page books. What is this peak out formation then whatever between? Just set the darned routes to run every hour to every hour 1/2, anyone can work around that rotation. If you must have frequency for peak hours run a shuttle between downtown & campus every 20 minutes in the early and latter part of day. Finally fire whom ever keeps coming up with these expensive plans.
none2 2 years, 10 months ago
What is really stupid is that they don't even let you download a PDF version of this mega guide. So much for being environmentally friendly.
inatux 2 years, 10 months ago
This is incorrect. I download the T map when it gets updated throughout the year. You can find the most recent one (which will soon be oudated) here, at http://lawrenceks.org/city_maps.
none2 2 years, 10 months ago
Why would I want to download an almost obsolete map? The topic is the NEW 44 page mega guide. To quote their website:
"New Guide to Ride available
The new Guide to Ride is now available, which includes route and schedule information for both city and university bus routes. Guides are available on buses, at City Hall, grocery stores, and at KU Parking & Transit. To get help planning a route or for more information, call (785) 864-4644."
That means you can already get the NEW guide at these locations. So why isn't also available to download? It isn't that difficult to modify a website, and they had to have the PDF in the first place to send it to a professional printer.
1029 2 years, 10 months ago
Sounds like it's time for our do-nothing city commission to to build a monorail.
crimsonlaugh 2 years, 10 months ago
Route 14 - Yes, please!
gilly 2 years, 10 months ago
The new routes and schedules are an improvement over the routes originally proposed in January. We'll see how well they work after the initial adjustment this August. But this is only a start. Most of the routes won't run frequently enough to make using the buses more advantageous than taking a car for most Lawrence residents.
If the city is serious about having a working transit system, then it will look for opportunities to upgrade buses (not just the ones on the KU service lines), increase frequency so that no one has to wait more than 15 minutes for a city bus, and expand hours into nighttime and on Sundays. Only then will it have a transit system that can work well enough to reduce the pollution and the toll that heavy automobile traffic takes on the roads.
Or succeeding city governments can do what most of the last several have done: starve the transit system in the hopes of killing it.
none2 2 years, 10 months ago
Oh so now we know the problem the empTy -- it has a voracious appetite for tax payers' money.
It is the evil city governments that have starved this poor little puppy. We need to buy new buses, more buses, bigger buses. We need more bus buildings, more drivers, more mechanics, more brochures, larger brochures, more operators, more, more, more...
Lets keep keep throwing money at it. Never mind anything else that the city is responsible for. Never mind that taxes at all levels are going up. This should be the top priority as people will die without the empTy.
oneeye_wilbur 2 years, 10 months ago
the bus stop stands are kinda like parking meters, not information available. No maps availlable, parking meters don't have the hours posted of when the meters are to be fed.
The bus experiment continues. And that is all it is. The KU buses are just too big physically, if that is the correct word. They are nothing but fuel guzzlers and empTy most of the time as well.
Fat is in. That's why people ride the bus on campus. Plus how could one possibly walk the campus in flip flops and being hung over from the night before doesn't help either.
sunflour 2 years, 10 months ago
oneeye_wilbur, you have no idea what you're talking about. Every parking meter that I've ever used on campus has the times posted inside it -- just like the meters downtown, you have to look at the back side.
As for the buses, while they might not be terribly full when they loop around to GSP from and back to the Union, they are definitely filling up as they cross campus -- how else would KU have reached 2.3 million rides in just 10 months this past year? (Call KU on Wheels for that info!)
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