Limited Bus Operating Hours in Ventura County, California

The chain is only strong if it is its weakest link and public transportation terms that means connections. That would mean a traveler traveling to an obscure location would have to figure out say a local daily ride. The city of Thousand Oaks has four bus routes serving their community. With them they provide exemplary service if you happen to be traveling on Monday through Friday between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. That means there is no service two days a week. If you happen to have business in Thousand Oaks whether you live there or not, you have to work around those limitations. If you are going to Camarillo, you would have to figure out your daily ride system. I have been working on this project for several months. I still have not seen a bus. As the sun slowly sets, businesses remain open but all over Ventura county the bus lines are shutting down. If you want to go any where after dark, forget about it. How are you going to get people to ride the bus system when being left stranded is a real possibility? Parked buses do not move people. Their current customers are the people who are the ones most likely to have the rotten jobs but do not start and stop during regular business hours. So, turning off the bus system at 7:00 o’clock at night does not serve them. No one will serve you if you happen to choose to go out of your house after 7:00 o’clock at night but it does help the administrator. They get to go home at night in their car. If you are going to operate any form of serious public utility, you have to think on a 24-hour day clock. Can you imagine if the electricity or the telephone system cut off for six hours a day? Can you imagine what an uproar we would have? This is America. That does not mean you have to have your best service 24 hours a day. In the television business, the network put what they think is their best programming on in prime time but even at 3:00 o’clock in the morning there is something on. It may not make them a lot of money but they are providing full service. In neighboring Los Angeles county they call it owl service, a skeleton network that allows it riders the opportunity to find their way home. The biggest challenge that we have here with us is not putting in more service running more frequent service and we are looking at connecting Santa Florida by bus. It is bringing in any more frequent service. That is a simple thing to do. It is looking and anticipating what is our population going to need in the future which is why I am telling you the biggest challenge that we have had is that there is going to be greater demand for paratransit services as the population of this county ages and we know it. Housing is expensive. People are staying here longer. That is the biggest challenge in transit because under the federal laws, if you are running a six-truck system you have to run a complementary paratransit system. So if you expand the public bus system and you run them. That would mean you run it more frequently because that does not matter because it is within the hours but if you were running the public bus 24 hours a day, you would also have to run the paratransit system 24 hours a day. The expense involving that is very high. So again… Then that is the law? Federal law, it is called the America’s visibility that. Those are significant issues that all of the bus operators and transit operators state. From a government speaker’s perspective, it sure sounds like they are doing a pretty good job. So why does my head hurt? I just wanted a system that could help move people around.