More Excellence from COTPA

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The Central Transportation and Parking Authority (MetroTransit) has been hit with a wave of complaitns regarding its downtown trolley service – one of the nine original Metropolitan Area Projects.

Tourists say the service is unreliable. Downtown residents say the routes are designed to discourage their use by locals. Office workers say the rides are too far apart to be used at lunch time.

So you’d think COTPA would be trying to upgrade its performance, right?

So, here’s their latest accomplishment: they covered up their route maps in Bricktown with a decal encouraging folks to call 235-ride for information about the orange line – a route designed to serve not downtown or Bricktown, but rather the I-40/Meridian hotel corridor.

This notice also assumes every visitor has a cell phone handy or knows where to find a pay phone.

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Comments

COPTA and the City of OKC regarding the mass transit issue are a joke at best. They have become completely incompetent to the issues that are important to the citizens regarding mass transit. I agree Steve, this sign assumes every potential rider has a cell phone handy or wants to go to a payphone and pay to call them. What a joke! When is the city going to step up and deal with this serious issue. Mick we’re not a “Major League City” until we deal with the lack of a mass transit system. I’m a downtown resident, worker and property owner and the fact that I can’t get from one side of downtown to another period, is a joke. I and thousands of others moved down here for the lifestyle and we can’t put a few thousand dollars a year into re-routing the bus routes or adding new trolleys? Heck, how much did we give COPTA again for the boats to nowhere on the Oklahoma River?

Oh, snap!

If getting an NBA team means that we are a “big league city” then we are a “big league city”. This doesn’t actually mean that we are. We are the only people that are calling us this. No one else is. We are closer to being the little town trying to be big. We have a problem here thinking that every tiny thing that we do is making us that much larger and reconizable. Just getting an NBA team doesn’t make Oklahoma look when they talk about us on CNN. Maybe we should work on fixing the crime and crap in OKC before we try to polish the turd…….

This has been a problem for years. I cannot understand why our leaders do not get this. You go to any medium to large size city in the United States and you can get around fairly regularly by bus. Our city is deliberately doing the minimum required to get the government off our backs by having a very minimal mass transit system. They have put together a system that is inconvenient at best purposely so no one will ride it. Then they use the low ridership as an excuse to not invest in it. I have lived in Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, and visited San Antonio just last week. All of these places had regular as in 15 minutes maximum wait for a bus on every major artery in the metro area. We parked our car and rode the bus all over town last week in San Antonio and it was wonderful. This should be a minimum for our city as well.

We cannot even get a bus ride to Tinker AFB and there are more than 20,000 people that work there. That is inexcusable and done on purpose. I live on the South East side and I would have to walk two and a half miles to catch a bus that runs three times a day. It is no wonder that people do not ride it and the leaders of this city are very calculating in their decisions and this is not an accident. They will tell you that it would cost $40 million dollars to do this but they neglect to tell you that Bass Pro Shop got half that amount and how many people use them?

Good job Steve for pointing this out. It should be on every news outlet in the metro on a regular basis.

Paul

While I’ve never had a problem parking downtown or in Bricktown, I’ve had plenty of trouble with the reliability of the trolley system. Those stickers look atrocious. Also, I’ve called that number before and can attest the information line is no more reliable than the actual sign.

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