The Bend Area Transit system has been running for a few days now, and I thought I’d do a bit of a round-up and see how things are shaking out. My post from earlier this month has garnered a fair number of comments, with some valid criticisms:

• Southeast Bend is completely unrepresented
• Route 11 (the Northwest Crossing/westside route) only runs limited hours
• Buses don’t run at night

I’m pretty sure most of these issues will be resolved once a lot of the kinks and bugs are worked out of the system. Plus, remember they only have six buses, I believe it is; they might be a bit stretched thin right now as it is.

Their website is much improved, too, with PDFs of the full system map and the route maps/schedules for each route. These are scalable high-res quality PDFs, which is nice.

BAT in the news: OregonLive, KTVZ. Nearly 1000 people rode that first day (and it’s free this first week, through the 3rd). That seems pretty good to me; hopefully that kind of number will hold up when they start charging fares.

Personally, I’m still really glad to see the buses driving around town, and even seeing the bus stops with signs is cool. The nearest bus stop to my house is about a mile away, and I’ve been figuring it would take me about 20 minutes to walk to it. That’s actually not a huge deal, but I’ve been thinking about when winter comes; that becomes a whole different walk. So we’ll see.