New Sun Metro bus route has some riders feeling left out
A new Sun Metro bus route is giving riders a quick trip from the east side to west side but the route nearly passes the northeast without any stops and some Sun Metro users are feeling left out.
The Sun Metro bus transit system has seven transfer centers and nearly 70 routes that get riders to and from their destination.
Twelve of those routes are express routes.
Recently Sun Metro started Route 90, an express park-n-ride route.
“We wanted to create a express route that went from west to east. There’s a demand that’s been coming from east to west and west to east,” said Lloyd Williams, assistant director of operations for Sun Metro.
He tells ABC-7 the route travels from the westside transfer center to the eastside transfer center. But in a rare move they decided the route would be better if the bus crossed Transmountain Drive.
“We had it cross the mountain because of all the construction projects that are about to occur and are occurring on the I -10 corridor,” Williams said.
The route comes from the westside down the mountain into the northeast.
The bus gets to US-54 and then heads east and this is where some have an issue.
A viewer wrote:
“It bothered me a lot to see that the new Sun Metro Route 90 does not have any stops in the northeast. It just runs from Cielo Vista, to Helen of Troy to Remcon transit, back and forth.”
She added, “Many people live in the northeast and work in the westside, they have to take four buses, which takes them almost three hours to arrive.”
Williams tells ABC-7 the purpose of an Express Route is to have as minimal stops as possible.
“We do expect it to grow as people find out more about it. It does get from the west to the east and the east to the west fairly quickly,” Williams said.
The route was never meant to travel through the northeast but Williams says if they see a demand a new route is possible.
“At the end of the day we are here for the people and we want to make sure we bring the best service. Especially with the North Park project we want to make sure that area has full support so we’ll definitely explore it in the next few months. We’re going to be looking at data and ridership numbers closely and we could add the northeast component to it.,” Williams said.
