Well as I predicted they merged it with another line, and this will result in the failure of the concept.
And Tufsu, replying to your previous post, no I don't think the employees working at St. Vincents and the medical offices are going to be bus customers, if you look at what doctors and nurses make most all of those folks will have cars. Which means they won't be riding the bus, since nobody whose time is worth anything can afford to deal with JTA. Their crappy and unreliable 'service' is nothing but a last resort for people who cannot afford any other option. It isn't a real public transit system in the traditional sense at all.
Back in the real world, nobody is going to wait an hour in the rain and heat with no shelters, to get on a bus that for no legitimate reason is running an additional hour or two late beyond its absurdly long scheduled headways, and then have to pay for the privilege of dealing with JTA's famously rude/nasty drivers, only to wind up missing whatever meeting they were going to anyway. People are forced to spend 2, 3, 4+ hours just trying to go a whopping 10 miles on JTA. It's ludicrous, and all of this has the exact effect you would expect: Nobody uses JTA who doesn't have to, and the rest of us feel terrible for everyone who has to deal with that nightmare.
You'd think they couldn't screw this concept up, right? It's so simple. Take some drunks from Riverside to Downtown and back, and vice versa, stimulating commerce and development in the process. It's a win-win. What idiot decided that integrating it with a regular bus line with 10 different stops nowhere near the dining/entertainment venues that it was originally supposed to serve, and then curtailing service during the hours when it would actually be used, was an improvement?
The reality:
JTA, in all of its incompetent glory, feels threatened by fixed rail transit. Why? Couldn't tell you. It probably relates back to the fact that the same asinine idiots who originally designed this mess of a system are still running JTA, and they'll go down with the ship before they admit they built it wrong. That's my guess. Or maybe the giant Skyway boondoggle scared them off the entire concept? Can hardly blame them there, what a disaster that thing is.
But whatever the reason for it, they are clearly quite committed to undermining the development of rail-based public transit. When JAX-St. Aug commuter rail became a real possibility, JTA tried to usurp both the demand and the federal funding for it by announcing "B(R)T" on the US-1 corridor. And I put the "R" in parentheses because nothing about JTA is "Rapid".
When the concept of a Riverside-Downtown streetcar line started gaining critical mass, JTA, which as a matter of practice completely ignores the needs of its ridership, suddenly responded by announcing the Riverside Trolley. But as usual, this is an obvious ploy aimed at killing the discussion of a streetcar, not any effort to serve any actual useful purpose. JTA first designed an intentionally flawed route in an area without demand for the type of service JTA provides. And as if that wasn't already bad enough, the final execution wound up being just taking an existing bus route and re-naming it "Riverside Trolley" and doubling the fares. Nice.
Unfortunately, if history repeats itself, JTA will use the inevitable result as evidence that there is no demand for rail. And that is untrue, and seriously messed up. The Riverside Trolley is already FUBAR before it ever picks up its first rider. But the real problem is JTA's consistent undermining of any efforts to create rail-based transit. Each time they usurp a rail concept and ruin it with crappy buses and incompetent execution, they actually get the benefit of turning around and saying to COJ and the feds "see we told you it wouldn't work."
The whole situation is ridiculous.
