Waiting for the bus gets longer this June, along with more transit cuts

The cuts will keep on coming. This June, OCTA will reduce bus frequencies and service times (bus lines may end service earlier or begin later). The major service reduction comes to line 60; full trips will go only as far as 7th/Channel at the Long Beach Memorial V.A. Hospital, forcing riders to transfer. This also makes 24-hour travel impossible between Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Orange County as Long Beach Transit offers no 24-hour service. So much for my plan to rely on OCTA while I'm doing my hospital rotations.

Although OCTA enjoyed double-digit increases in bus ridership last year, ridership plunged 7% in January and 14% in February, according to OCTA staff. They're attributing this to the rising unemployment rate in California and lowered gas prices.

Some other tidbits on June's service reduction:

• No more service to the Orange County Fair.
• ACCESS paratransit will also be cut back.
• An ambiguous remark about students possibly paying for their u-pass, because of how successful the u-pass is in UC Irvine. (That's news to me.)

I found out about this information from a customer service roundtable last night. Despite the doom-and-gloom report, I had a wonderful time interacting with OCTA's staff and was surprised to learn so much from them. I'll post more about what I've learned about their rapid bus and some of their marketing initiatives later.

For now, here's a chart of their proposed cuts.