30 Days of Plight. Stephen Dare goes JTA every day.

[brainstormer]

I live downtown and I love it, although I will admit, things are pretty quiet after 6pm.  We need some billboards along Union, State and 95 that read "You could have been home 10 minutes ago.  Live Downtown."  Background pictures could include a mom greeting her kids by the door, a man on his couch with a beer, a couple playing with their dog, etc.

[Doctor_K]

Brilliant, brainstormer!  Some focused advertising never hurt anything.  One of the many things that could eventully boost residency in the Core:  "Advertise"

Couldn't tell you the last time I saw anything at all promoting for Berkman, San Marco, or the Twins (Strand + Peninsula).

Anyhoo - as for the Topic at hand:  It's very interesting to see the powers-that-be at JTA react so ... resolutely.  It's refreshing, and I hope this is the start of a long trend for transportation in the city.

Thanks for your public service, Mr. Dare. 

[jacksonvilleconfidential]

I live downtown and I love it, although I will admit, things are pretty quiet after 6pm.  We need some billboards along Union, State and 95 that read "You could have been home 10 minutes ago.  Live Downtown."  Background pictures could include a mom greeting her kids by the door, a man on his couch with a beer, a couple playing with their dog, etc.

A bum taking a dump in front of a restaurant.....I kid, I kid. I love Downtown.

[stephendare]

writing the updates presently.

it isnt pretty

[stephendare]

Clairvoyancy.

I have come to the private conclusion, after much field research and 24 actual days of riding the mass transit system, that successful JTA transit commuters have one thing in common.

Clairvoyance.

In fact, at this point I believe it to be possible that the very idea that the transit system is actually meant to provide transit to the city of Jacksonville is a meaningless joke, but rather a clever ruse.

I privately suspect that it is actually some repellant and alien breeding program, designed to create a subspecies of human which is capable of pure psychic detection and powers of clairvoyance.

Think about it.

Create a system so self contained with so many unspoken rules and customs as to quality for being a subculture all on it's own.   Things like not allowing even the appearance of food, drink, or adult language on a bus--but not telling anyone until AFTER they have attempted to board.  Or the proper way to identify routes and bus stops with no markers whatsoever.   Consider the fact that there are proper ways to stand at attention  for passing busses so that they know when to actually stop for you.----  As opposed to not stopping because you are waiting for a different bus, or are actually simply sitting at the bus stop because the alternative is either death by heat exhaustion or because you have unofficially homesteaded the location and turned the bench/stop into your private living room, a living room which would find the needless stopping of a bus an unwelcome intrusion, or have simply decided to forego the responsibilities and obvious drawbacks of a lease in the pursuit of a budding practice in either prostitution or the drug trades.

Add to that a multi layered system of color coding meant to convey information of all sorts to passengers and the public at large, but without any method of divining the meanings of the color code itself.  For example, the color codes of the bus stop bays at central station that convey which side of town is the origin and or destination of the departing bus.

Now I know: Orange for Northside and Green for the Beaches and or Arlington.  Yellow for the westside, and Blue for the Southside. 

Where is this explained to the public?  NOWHERE.  Not in any Jta controlled site is this color scheme explained.  Certainly not at the Central Station itself, where such information is of paramount utility.   Not on the website, not on the bus schedules, and not on the racks of bus schedules.

It is information which one must be orally initiated into.  It is one of the mysteries of the JTA.

Or the color coding that goes along with the shirts of the various JTA customer support staff at the central station.   Some of them are wearing red, some of them are wearing gold.   What does this mean?   The shirts and hats merely announce the enigmatic "JTA".   Red could mean 'supervisor' and gold could mean 'maintenance engineer' or they might be competing branches of the JTA intelligence service.  One cannot fathom this mystery at a glance, and one is simply left to wonder what, if anything it all means.

Finally, there is the matter of the wild oscillations of the schedules of each individual route.

In order to know the route and schedule of any particular bus line, one must study and memorize.   

Study and Memorize.

Then study and memorize some more.

The Bar exam for Federal Law is less detailed and elusive.

Getting acquainted with the vagaries  of a single bus route.  BH1, say.  (which is the Beach Bus) is an exercize in fluxus.

First the schedule of BHI changes three times a week.  There is the 'weekday' schedule, the 'saturday' schedule, and the 'sunday' schedule.   The times and frequency of departures and arrivals are so different that they qualify as having originated from wholly oppositional philosophies and schools of thought.

Then, the schedule of BHI is subject to be completely overhauled every three months, making any time or effort put into memorizing the three schedules of the previous three months an exercise in useless futility.

Third, the routes themselves are subject to change.   To hell with what times it might be coming (or even more importantly, NOT coming).  If you are on a route that goes through residential areas, the actual road map it follows is subject to change every three months or so.

So lets think about that.

49 basic routes.  Each of them has three schedules per week.  thats 147 functionally different schedules.  They are subject to change every three months, or 4 times within a year, or a potential 571 different schedules to remember throughout the course of a year.   Never mind the number of runs on each of the schedule.  Even if they were tied to a regular and comprehensible pattern of issue.   Like every hour on the hour or every fifteen minutes, which some routes do, but most do not.  This is literally ludicrous.

No properly prioritized person who is not employed by JTA can possibly hold within their head this many possibilities.

Finally there is the matter of the bus stops and benches and the heiroglyphic sticks which stand in front of them, allegedly signifying which bus routes stop there.

As I can testify, there are an enormous number of apparent stops and benches throughout the southbank (and I have now seen them in southpoint and baymeadows) which are in no way affiliated with the JTA, but instead belong to mammoth corporations who have abandoned all faith that our bus service can respond to the relatively predictable needs of their employees.

Provided that one is not improperly sitting at one of these insidious decoys, and is instead sitting on the rightful property of the JTA.   Not only can the regular person not ascertain the intended bus routes and destinations of the buses that stop there, there is no intuitive naming code from which to derive a commonsense assumption.  L-9.   What information does that alpha numeric convey.

What does an unconsecrated initiate into the mysteries of mass transit absorb from the soviet era nomenclature.  L-9.   Why not simply call it "rosebud" or 'eskimo' and have done with it?

So think about it.  From the unexplained color coding of the bus bays to the uniforms of the mysterious JTA customer service representatives to a number of schedule differences on routes so numerous as to be positively hindu in permutations, to decoy stations and JTA stops unmarked by any explanation of routes and schedules other than the utterly inscrutable "L-9" or "P-4" heiroglyph sticks, to a provenly unusable trip planning software to the fact that all human voices at JTA stop abruptly at 7, who could possibly navigate through this cyclopean exercise in bafflement and mystery except a gifted clairvoyant?

This rider---nay.   This City.  Nay.  The assembled peoples of The Earth who might one day find themselves the pawn of the puppetmasters at the Transit Authority are crying out with one mighty voice for a translation key to unlock these mysteries.  A Rosetta Stone, if you will that will open wide the doors of understanding.

"Throw us a frickin Bone!"   cry out all those nameless voices.

But they can scarcely guess the reason for the whole deceptive machinery, I suspect.   Its like the Bene Gesserit from Dune.  We are waiting for the New Man. (or Woman, maybe both) Someone who can accurately pull knowledge of the future and unseen places from the unseen ether of the multidimensional cosmos itself.

Someone with powers of psychic detection so accute that they can accurately guess which of a potential 574 routes is going to be running on time at that particular parsec of time and will complete the intended journey without incident.

After generations of forcing our local population to depend on this gorgeous ambitious attempt at altering the future of the species, there can be no other outcome than that a sub species of Jacksonville Clairvoyants will emerge to rule the world.  If not the universe.

If not, then evolution was all wrong, and I cede the floor to creationists of every stripe and conviction.

[gatorback]

Most people ride one bus at set times making them less clarivoyant then you might expect.  But I agree with L-9, R-5.  I think SS5 and SS9 are bad enough.  Flav-o-flav 7 would be more amusing.

[Lunican]

The Metro Jacksonville article "Solve the JTA Cryptogram" which was publish over a year ago, pretty much sums up what you have found: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/483/

[stephendare]

The Metro Jacksonville article "Solve the JTA Cryptogram" which was publish over a year ago, pretty much sums up what you have found: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/483/

thats part of it, Lunican, but there are so many levels of secret coding that merely the cryptograms dont even comprise the half of it.

At every level where the JTA might have legitimately communicated with the public, they have failed to do so, adding multiple layers of mystery.

It seems like the problem would be pretty easy to solve.

[stephendare]

Does anyone know the underlying purpose of the bus system?

Meaning for who and what purpose it was laid out originally, and whether or not it adequately achieves those goals.

[stephendare]

another observation based essay before I return to the nitpicky daily recounts.

Public Transit as social control, inadvertently or purposefully.

I find it maddening that the bus service serves the social agenda of persons unknown inasmuch as it is designed to limit the night time activities and access to travel to whole parts of town, and is basically a reinforcement (and perhaps one of the reasons) to the deathtrance inducing boredom of Sundays in Jacksonville (for the non church going crowd)

If you don't want a whole group of people moving around at night, say poor or african american people, simply dont make it possible to use the mass transit system for any purpose after nightfall.

In all of the Northside, there are no buses that run after 10pm on the 'weekday' schedule.  On the weekends, nothing after 8pm.  On Sunday one is hard pressed to find anything after 6.

The only late night buses---meaning that you can ride them until 1:30 am, are the ones which connect NAS to the Beaches, allowing the Navy guys to go from the westside, get their drink on at the Beaches and make it back to the base.   This incidentally allows people at the Beaches access to the Regency Mall area until night as well, which explains the number of beaches suburban kids that use the buses as their work transit to and from the Mall.

The only other late night corridor (if Midnight can reasonably considered 'late') is the "B-7" line, which connects evening shift corporate workers in baymeadows along the southside to downtown.

But functionally, it is ridiculous that the city opinion that people from the northside have no business with access to the rest of the city after dark prevents the residents of Springfield from being able to cross to San Marco for a decent dinner and maybe a show at the San Marco Theater.

Similarly, no Riverside person can come to Springfield after 8.

I think its time to reassess what the hell people use public transit for.

[gatorback]

How about a a few 'Night Owl' aka Drunk Busses that depart Rosa Parks at 11:40, 12:40AM, 1:40 AM to the the Park And Rides at the beach, the south side, Regency, West Side, etc. 

[jacksonvilleconfidential]

Thats an awesome idea, keep the drunks off the streets.

[stephendare]

Thats an awesome idea, keep the drunks off the streets.

this is a basic, responsible function of mass transit across the country.

[gatorback]

Thats an awesome idea, keep the drunks off the streets.

this is a basic, responsible function of mass transit across the country.

Imagine that.  A mass transit system in Jacksonville that actually serves a purpose.  What a novel idea.  Lol.
 
I think people in all sorts of industries, hospitality, service, etc, could all a night bus to get them to and from work after hours with the added benefit mentioned above.

[stephendare]

Any clues as to what the system was originally designed to do?