Is it their clothes? Maybe they had the effrontery to look at your women? How dare they. Certainly not because they made the mistake of being brown in our fair city—we are far too progressive and above the rest of our mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging society to think that!

How nice of the city to put up posters around town of that young man, he looks like a nice boy. Maybe I’ll hire him to babysit. That’s the kind of guy I want on MY bus.

I wasn’t able to turn up anything definitive in a quick search of Chronicle archives, but from memory I think for Blake Transit Center in downtown Ann Arbor AATA contracts with Ann Arbor police department for a dedicated officer. AATA also pays for security guard at the Ypsi Transit Center. There’s also security video at the transit centers and on the buses.

I’m skeptical of the county-wide plan. I’d rather see the money and effort go toward making the system we have more usable. For me, AATA with its slow buses, missed connections, and infrequent service makes a nice backup plan for when my bicycle won’t work for some reason (bad weather usually) but I would not depend on it to get me to work on time every day.

Like the standard parking report, the comparison for May 2011 against May 2010 using that metric also showed an increase in demand: 33.22% in May 2010 compared to 34.94% in May 2011.

But there is almost no public support for it besides people who already ride the bus. The AnnArbor.com polls (not the comments) are consistent on the negativity of the public for a plan that is projected to cost almost half a billion dollars.

So regardless of the plans, the project itself will crash and burn at the polls.

What AATA tracks (among various other measures) is “passengers per service hour.” The budgeted target is 31.8 and year-to-date it stands at 32.4. Here’s a link to performance data through May this year, plotted against the previous year. [.pdf of AATA operational performance through May]

Robert, I think the kind of statistic you want to see, translated to “passengers per service hour,” would be this: What is the maximum achievable passengers per service hour? Knowing that would allow you to divide the currently achieved “passengers per service hour” into the maximum achievable number and then have some kind of “efficiency” metric.

I’ve sent a query to the AATA’s manger of service development on getting that maximum.

Transportation planning is not my field, nor have I developed great expertise during the time I’ve covered the AATA. As a percentage of maximum capacity, however, my guess is that even a heavily-used system won’t show a huge efficiency measured the way you’re suggesting. Running a successful fixed-route service is partly a matter of regularity and consistency and reliability, meeting passengers expectations that the bus is going to be there, whether anybody’s there to ride it or not.

My guess is that it’ll be difficult to get a handle on that maximum. Here’s why. Imagine Scenario A where every bus is full all the time –because the bus is full when the start point of the route and those passengers stay on the bus until they reach the route terminus (nobody gets on or off). Now imagine Scenario B where every bus is full all the time, because the bus is full when it leaves and at every stop, everyone gets off the bus and the bus fills again with people waiting there. Both are “maximum” scenarios, but they’ll give you way different numbers for the “passengers per service hour” statistic. But those two scenarios would give the same number for the “passenger miles” statistic — which might be exactly why that’s the one you want. But measuring that statistic would be challenging. The AATA certainly tracks where people get on the bus, but does not track where they get off –- I’m not sure how they’d do that, even if they wanted to.

Ultimately, though, if your concern is about whether the AATA is being efficient with its money, the most direct measure of that is a statistic that former AATA board member Ted Annis championed — dollar cost per service hour. It’s budgeted for $107.51 this year. If you look at the .pdf you’ll see that they’ve met that goal every month year to date. The debate that Annis pushed was where to set the budgeted amount. Otherwise put, where should that target be, based on comparisons to peer transit systems? Here’s some previous Chronicle coverage [link] that documents his recommendations that the following targets be met: 1. $95/bus service hour by year-end 2010 2. $85/bus service hour by June 2011 3. $75/bus service hour by year-end 2011

They have also been engaged in efficiency and cost-effectiveness exercises for some years now (the nagging of former board member Ted Annis was very pointed).

As far as the Blake Transit Center expansion goes, it will still be needed since much or most traffic will still be in and to Ann Arbor (the center of the universe, yes?). Federal dollars come from real people and help to serve real people in Ann Arbor. Bus travel is essential for many people who can’t drive and for the rest of us it provides an escape from navigating congested streets and finding a place to park. Every person who travels downtown by bus frees up a parking space in a structure we don’t have to build. Blake is where the system knits together.

But as I stated in my recent blog post [link] and earlier ones, I’m concerned about the survival of our city bus service as these expansions occur.