The New Orleans and Jefferson Parish public transit systems have rebounded since Hurricane Katrina, but regular riders have plenty of suggestions on how to make them better. Story and photos by Megan Braden-Perry
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Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > july 17 > 2012
nn Warren waits at the makeshift bus stop on Canal and Marais streets, her cheeks growing rosy in the heat, her clover-green shirt turning pine-green with sweat. Warren, 52, used to catch the St. Bernard-Paris Avenue or St. Bernard-St. Anthony bus outside Walgreens at the corner of Basin Street and Tulane Avenue, but her bus is one of 15 — nearly half the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) fleet — that have been rerouted to a makeshift bus stop on Canal Street while the streetcar line is expanded on Loyola Avenue, a project expected to last the rest of the year. Warren doesn’t drive and uses public transportation for everything: grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions, going to church and riding to work. Her only problem with the RTA is a lack of transparency. “When they rerouted all of this from across from the [New Orleans] Main Library to over this way, that was an inconvenience,” Warren says. “Now I’m hearing from bus drivers that they’re going to make this a permanent stop instead of putting it back like it used to be.” The RTA, which underwent a severe contraction following Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, is finally growing again — or at least coming into the 21st century. Like the population of New Orleans itself, the bus system is smaller than it was before the 2005 disaster. Patrice Bell Mercadel, director of communications and marketing for the RTA, was unable to provide Gambit with pre-Katrina route information, but according to an Aug. 24, 2005 archive of the RTA’s route listings page, the agency had 89 routes prior to Katrina. Now there are only 34. Some of the 2005 routes were express, rapid or school-specific, others merged and a few ran in areas that no longer have the population to warrant a bus line. Mercadel is proud of how the agency restored service after the floods and now is working to make public transportation in New Orleans comparable to reliable systems in other cities. “In the last few years we have seen everything happen from the launch of new buses to us launching the new website that is really user-friendly, consumer-dedicated and … providing tools to New Orleans,” Mercadel says. Those tools include a trip planner on the RTA website, a realtime bus-arrival beta test, automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capability on the system’s Rideline (248-3900), and a partnership with
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