Those hearings are at 11:30AM and at 5PM at the Carvel Building in downtown Wilmington. The current DART plan remove all of the bus stops at Rodney Square and then scatter them around on King, French, Shipley, Ninth and 12th streets. Which makes it very difficult for people to transfer between lines and provides a real disincentive for people to use the buses.
Wilmington badly needs a functioning public transportation system. There are few (and none that I’m acquainted with) transit systems that don’t work pretty hard at providing central spots where multiple lines come together (sometimes with subway or rail connections) so that riders can easily transfer to multiple other lines, which maximizes the reach of the entire system. If you want to help deal with the parking issues downtown, you have to make it easier for people to leave their cars at home. Scattering these stops and making it harder to access other lines is pretty counterintuitive. The NJ provides some additional info, including some of the fairly useless posturing by local pols.
I wish someone would make DART show their homework on this:
Safety concerns have driven the proposed realignment, according to the Delaware Transit Corporation. Buses often stack three to four deep at Rodney Square, making it difficult for riders to safely find and board their buses, state officials have said.
While the bus congestion around Rodney Square can be remarkable, from where I sit (in my car or walking), the safety issue is the competition of buses and cars in a small space at peak times of the day. You don’t resolve that by scattering those buses to other congested areas downtown. And there doesn’t seem to be anything about this realignment that makes the experience easier for the *riders* of the system. If DART and the city want to free up Rodney Square, they should prepare a plan for a genuine transit hub — one that is easily reachable by both bus riders AND the buses. it just isn’t worth half doing his thing, because you’ll be back fixing it pretty routinely.
So if you care about this issue, go to these hearings and speak your mind. One of the questions I would ask would be if the transit buses are an issue now, what do you plan to do when all of the school buses that will convening on the adjacent MBNA building twice a day or so once the powers that be put all of their charter schools in there.