I change my mind, 5% of it

http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2010/03/22/story4.html?b=1269230400%5E3052891

Intro:
As many of my fellow classmates know I use the bus system. It was a conscious choice that not many people do. I did it for the environment and my wallet. I remind you of this fact so I can tell you that from my own personal experience I disagree with some of the conclusions that I have learned over this past semester, not just this class. I now go back to the article that I summarize in class a week or so ago and the question that I brought out for the class. That question was “how can you get more people to ride the buses?” As some of you may remember, I stated that it was a trick question because the market was not going to grow any larger, percentage wise. I now have changed my mind, about 5% and not much more. This leads to reason that I picked this article. I will state that reason at the very end. That means that if you don’t read my summary of this article, you’ll at least have to scroll down if you’re curious enough to learn why.

The article summary:
Now that the Stimulus funding has finally been disbursed this article is a list of how public transportation system agencies in the bay area are now spending their stimulus funding. Some agencies are increasing their fleet while others are retooling their fleet. This article states that Kimmins Contracting Corp. won a 4.9 million dollars contract to extend the Tampa’s streetcar system. what I learned in this article is that most of Florida’s major transit agencies belong to the Florida Public Transit Association, a nonprofit consortium. The article protrades this association main function is to buy heavy duty transit buses in bulk in order to get the lowest price possible.

I choice this article for only one reason:
The reason I choice this article is when read on how one of the ways the Recovery Act funding is being used. That is the how to bring the bus schedules to handheld devices. The article doesn’t state how the system is going to be implemented but if it has a real-time GPS, Global Position System, information online fort the riding public this new system would address one of the major reasons people do not use the public bus system, the wait time. Throughout the semester we have all seen the top 10 list of why people do not used the public transit system. The “wait time” is in the top 3 in the list. This new information system that makes available to the public the bus schedule with a GPS it just might increase the ridership market size by . . . 5%.