When life gives you a thwarted penny-tax transit referendum, make your bus system more modern by abandoning the obsolete hub-and-spoke model.
Or so the saying goes.
On Thursday morning, the St. Petersburg City Council endorsed modifications to the way Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority buses operate downtown, which they touted at a press conference on the steps of City Hall minutes later. The move, which officials said was decades in the making, comes just over a year after voters rejected a sales tax proposal that would have funded a dramatic enhancement and overhaul of the county's bus system.
While it's no light rail, supporters said, having buses take advantage of the city's grid layout will offer riders more direct routes to their destinations, and will thus save them travel time.
“I think it's time to have a better system," said Councilman Wengay Newton. "A lot of people complain about it. They've got to go all the way and come downtown just to be able to get the bus they need to go to the point they were trying to get to in the first place. And it probably takes them an hour, hour-and-a-half out of their commute.”
The new system should be online on Feb. 14.
It would clear downtown's William's Park, the current bus hub, of multiple bus shelters and the smog and heavy traffic that accompany them.
“It will dramatically change the look of the park, not being surrounded by these shelters," said St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman. "It will change the number of people that are sitting waiting to catch connections, that have just been hanging out in the park."
Williams Park is something of a hub for the city's homeless and a haven for criminals. Critics say they are concerned that breaking up the bus traffic will serve to discourage the homeless from using the park. But St. Pete Councilwoman Darden Rice said having a grid in place would help break up the criminal element at the park, given that someone up to no good, in theory, would no longer be able to linger at the park under the guise of waiting for a bus, which could actually make the homeless safer.
“We're very concerned about the welfare and the dignity of our homeless population,” Rice said earlier as the council discussed the issue. “What's happened is that because these buses ring around the perimeter of the park, it's created an environmental situation where it just hasn't been safe for riders or the homeless population at Williams Park. The police don't know who's there legitimately to wait on a bus and who's there to exploit that situation.”
Rice has said there's also the benefit of cleaner air from not having buses generating exhaust in the same place.
There's also concern that people who use buses to get to work won't be able to get where they need to go under the new system, which officials tried to allay by stressing that the system would be more efficient.
After all, they said, it's only downtown that will really be affected.
“Every street from Second Avenue South to up here Fifth Avenue North will have a different route on it as they come into the downtown," said PSTA CEO Brad Miller. And then every north-south street from First Street to about Fifth Street will have north-south routes on it. That will create a criss-cross grid of routes so that you'll be able to access any place by public transportation for the first time in downtown St. Petersburg.”
St. Pete may actually be behind the times, given that other areas ditched the hub-and-spoke model years ago.
“This is a part of a significant trend of most urban areas that are switching from a hub-and-spoke system to a high-frequency grid system that provides better service and connectivity for our transit riders, and this is a part of our long-term community bus plan, which we know from the Greenlight Pinellas Process was one of the most supported and popular parts of what PSTA is working on,” Rice said.
“This is a change, no doubt, that we'll have to get out. I thought that because folks are so accustomed to making the transfer they have to make for their job or whatever at Williams Park, we need to get this information out to them on an almost individual basis,” Miller said.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2015.