Diary of a Bus Rider

Before I left on my bus trip with Metroplitan Tulsa Transit Authority general manager Bill Cartwright this morning, TDT reader and blogger Ron Hudson made the brilliant suggestion that I make a video of the experience.

Ta-da! See? I'm not completely technologically inept. Just partially. Moderately. Okay, significantly. Just try not to get seasick watching that video.

Some quick thoughts:

• The downtown station on Denver Avenue is a beautiful, lively place.
• The buses are very, very clean, much contrary to what I'd heard.
• It's not hard at all to catch an MTTA bus. They're on-schedule, even if at some stops they don't come but once per hour.
• Bus riders make up a diverse group of Tulsans, from the mother and her small child out to do some shopping to the woman on her way downtown for work to the guy who rode his bike to his stop and loaded it up to the front of the bus in order to get to class.
• MTTA has a number of perennial obstacles to tackle - lack of funding, low service, our Midwestern love of the automobile and the stigma of public transportation, to name a few - as gasoline prices are set to climb through the summer months and ridership promises to continue increase. It's already up about 9 percent from this time last year.

I'll write more about what I learned on my ride this morning in some shape or form, so be on the lookout here and as you flip through the pages of Urban Tulsa Weekly looking for free karaoke nights (my favorite is at Joe Momma's Pizza in the Blue Dome District in downtown Tulsa - gotta love that big stage).