An Unfriendly Welcome

Every now and then I take the Rail Runner up to Santa Fe for a little sightseeing, and each time I do I always marvel at how good their bus system, Santa Fe Trails, is for a city of its size.

The main thing that strikes me about it is that, unlike ABQ Ride, Santa Fe Trails can get me just about anywhere I want to go in the city it serves. This is probably thanks to the fact that most of Santa Fe's major destinations (tourist and commuter wise) are fairly centrally located, and even those few that aren't (Museum Hill, the hospital, the malls, the community college) are still served by a decent bus route.

Another thing is that the system is relatively easy to understand. It's not just that the system itself is smaller, it's also that Santa Fe Trails produces a booklet with maps and schedules of all the routes in its system, which is readily available all over the city. Here in Albuquerque, a transit advocacy group I work with at UNM created a "How to Ride the Bus" guide for ABQ Ride because many people found the bus system here too bewildering to start using. Up in Santa Fe, they were way ahead of us.

There also seems to be more thought put into the structure of the routes. As discussed over on this fantastic blog, it is important for transit lines to "anchor" to major destinations, and it's even better if it anchors on both ends so as to make the most of the investment you're putting in to run those vehicles. If you look at the overall Santa Fe Trails map, you'll see that almost every single one of its routes (the exception being Route 24) anchor to a major destination on both ends.

In trying to figure out why Santa Fe seems to get it (at least more than ABQ), I've started to think that the cultural difference between these two cities plays a role. Santa Fe is, afterall, the main tourist destination of the state. Having worked at a museum here in town, I can tell you that many international visitors don't expect requiring a car to travel around a major city.

Santa Fe also has extremely expensive real estate, and thus doesn't have nearly as large a population of "transit-dependent" (a term which, though very flawed, unfortunately still plays a big role in transportation politics) as Albuquerque does. This is when I realized that Santa Fe has built a system that appeals more to visitors and commuters coming in from outside town than to local residents. It would explain why the system has taken so many steps to help people understand the system, and why I as an outsider marvels at it. While I'm sure there are many residents who can use the system and find it very useful, there are vast residential areas of Santa Fe that have no routes and I'm guessing the average resident has little use for the system.

Still, I think ABQ Ride could take some major pointers from Santa Fe Trails about how to create a bus system that is more useful to visitors. Firstly, make the system easier to understand. The only printed materials ABQ Ride provides are individual route schedules, and those are remarkably hard to find. Get some flashier, more useful printed stuff out there, and be a whole lot more aggressive about getting it out there. And improve the stuff you already have, like that meager destinations page (seriously, who in their right mind would recommend the #36?!?).

When ABQ Ride has finished that, then it should expand the service to benefit visitors. The airport is currently a huge flaw in the system - on Sunday, there is no way to get to the airport as the #50 doesn't run, and the #350 doesn't run on Saturdays or Sundays, even though the Rail Runner now does. Many major attractions in Albuquerque are lacking decent service (the zoo, the Hispanic Cultural Center, and the stadiums come to mind here) and some have no service whatsoever (read: the tramway). Additionally, many hotels lack service, particularly those along the freeway (which unfortunately represents the majority of hotels in Albuquerque).

To its credit, ABQ Ride has recently been doing a lot of work improving the service it already provides, such as buying nice new buses and installing a whole lot of bus stop shelters. But we have a long way to go before we have a system I can recommend to a visitor without feeling guilty.