![]() It is July, a month when Connecticut Department of Transportation’s numbers show ridership is about average for the year.Īccording to the DOT, CTFrastrak had an average of 17,352 weekday passenger trips in July of 2018. My tally is not scientific, of course, but rather anectdotal for the purposes of this story. Not many rode the whole route from New Britain to Hartford or vice versa. Riders got on and off at various stops and I kept track of the number of riders on my computer. The buses weren’t empty, but they weren’t full either. For most of the day, he is my guide to the Fastrak world.Īt two points during the course of my day, I was the only person on the bus, but in general I had some company. He’s been a bus driver for 32 years and been driving CTFastrak since the beginning. “There’s always someone on the bus,” says CTFastrak driver Mario Donate. This is not Mario’s first trip with a reporter - he hosted a Hartford Courant reporter during his night shift for CT Transit in the 90’s. Empty Buses?ĬTFastrak driver Mario Donate. At one of the stops, a man is asleep on bus stop bench. Not just to Hartford, but to West Farms Mall and UConn Health Center. I purchased a one-day pass for $3 and began riding CTFastrack’s 101 line back and forth from New Britain to Hartford, the original line, for the next 12 hours.Īt this early hour, there is no one there, but the buses are running. My original plan was to ride the bus for the entirety of its 20-hour schedule, but my boss limited me to a 12-hour day (something about OSHA). I want to find out if there is any truth to those claims. Politicians and pundits either praise the bus line or deride it as unused – empty buses running back and forth twenty hours a day. It offers a direct route from New Britain to downtown Hartford – it has also been an albatross around the neck of the Malloy administration. Malloy signed off on the project in 2011, and it was completed in 2015. While planning for the dedicated bus route from New Britain to Hartford began in the early 2000’s, Gov. The CTFrastrak bus line is often brought up in the context of Connecticut’s transportation spending. Dannel Malloy will present the state Bond Commission with a $10 million bond to study tolls on Connecticut’s highways because the State Transportation Fund is running low. I can’t help but notice the train tracks I cross to reach the terminal which travel alongside the much–maligned CTFastrak route for most of the trip into Hartford. There’s unfinished road construction just outside the terminal in an effort to make access to the bus line a little friendlier. New Britain CTFastrak terminal at 5:00 A.M.
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