New Year, New Purpose

Happy 2019!!!




Two weeks into the new year and I have decided to reactivate this dormant blog with a new purpose: Relating views and experiences of a transit advocate turned transit professional. 

For those who don't know, for the past 20+ years, I have been advocating for better transportation in Baltimore, joining multiple civic and advocacy groups, and maintaining a presence on social media sites like Facebook. In that same twenty-year period, I have also been photographing my journeys and capturing what transit in Baltimore looks like from differing perspectives. 

In March of last year, I was hired on to work at MTA as a Service Analyst in a contractor position. For years, I received bits and pieces from employees I carved friendships with about just how the Office of Service Development or OSD works. Now, it was my time to get the full experience. 

Since that day, I have begun to understand how OSD works, its limitations, and how decisions made affect thousands of people daily. As an advocate learning how to be a transit professional, it sometimes hasn't been easy to understand and accept the challenges to getting service scheduled and ultimately out on the street. 

From this post forward, this blog will do its best to explain what goes into scheduling service, how outside factors like traffic lights, enforcement, bus bunching, and other day to day activities can and will throw that schedule off, and ways transit can improve in Baltimore post BaltimoreLink.

I look forward to engaging with riders and advocates and together making transit great again in Baltimore. 


      

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 16, 2019 at 2:08 PM

    Hi there, I am transit employee but not in the United States still with scheduling knowledge besides the fact that I love transit planning and buses. It`s very interesting to read your posts and yes it is challenging and most of the times there are interests at stake that kind of go in the opposite direction of public transit and make it harder for us to conduct a respectable operation...

    ReplyDelete

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