More than a year after bus system redesign, New Orleans riders still waiting for new street markers
20th May 2024 · 0 Comments
By Bobbi-Jeanne Misick
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — If you’re looking for the closest bus stop in New Orleans, don’t count on a marker on the street to help you find your way. Along many of the city’s bus routes, all you’re likely to see are bare metal poles suggesting that some municipal authority intends to convey some kind of information about something – maybe transit. Sometimes, even the poles are missing.
More than a year and a half after the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority overhauled its bus routes and schedules – and removed its old bus stop signs – virtually none of the 2,000-plus bus stops in New Orleans have new, permanent signage.
In interviews with Verite News, RTA executives said delays in getting new signs stemmed from issues with a since-canceled printing contract with a company that was unable to deliver on schedule. Fixing the problem is a top priority, they said, and the agency is working as quickly as it can to add signs to bus stops. A new printing contract could be awarded in the next few months.
The lack of signage has added to rider frustrations that came to a head last summer when frequent breakdowns of aging buses caused long and unpredictable wait times in record-high temperatures. Transit advocates say poor wayfinding is disrespectful to riders who rely on the bus to get around and discourages new people from taking the bus.
“You can’t have a transit system that has no wayfinding,” said Courtney Jackson, executive director of transit advocacy non-profit Ride New Orleans.
At an RTA community meeting in March of this year, Holy Cross resident Nancy Ortiz described to RTA board members and CEO Lona Edwards Hankins what the bus stops along St. Claude Avenue in the Lower 9th Ward look like: “Twisted pieces of metal.”
“It’s an injustice to the people that live there,” Ortiz said.
Contract problems led to delay
After years of planning, the RTA in September 2022 launched a major bus network redesign called New Links to mixed customer reviews. The revamp was supposed to improve riders’ access to jobs, health care providers and other essential destinations, create faster commutes and reduce wait times between transfers. While some bus routes were discontinued, others were renamed and reconfigured.
When it launched New Links, RTA removed old bus signs and replaced them with plastic, temporary signs ziptied to existing infrastructure. Since then, many of those temporary signs have come down due to weather or vandalism, leaving nothing to show bus riders where they’re supposed to wait.
In an interview last week, RTA Chief Planning and Capital Projects Officer Dwight Norton said continuing to replace the temporary signs has become cost prohibitive.
Asked why the RTA has yet to install permanent signs, Norton said there was a problem with the printing contract the agency awarded ahead of the New Links launch.
Norton said the agency issued a bid solicitation for printers in July 2022 and ultimately awarded the contract to South Dakota-based Newman Signs in August, one month before New Links went live.
While getting permanent signs printed and installed by the New Links launch date was a stretch given the short timeframe, agency executives didn’t expect it to take this long.
“This is definitely one of the ones on our list of things that we definitely would like to have done better,” Norton said.
According to Norton, Newman specializes in standardized traffic signs, such as stop signs and one-way street signs. What the RTA needed were highly customized signs showing specific bus stop locations, numbers of buses that stop at that location and schedules. By May 2023, Newman told the RTA that it could not fulfill the order, Norton said. RTA canceled the contract in July 2023.
“They really weren’t equipped to handle mass customization,” Norton said.
A spokesperson for Newman Signs said the company’s policy is not to talk to the press, but confirmed that an agreement with RTA did exist and said that it ended due to “changes to the proposed scope of work.”
An RTA spokesperson did not respond to questions about changes to the contract’s scope of services. Verite News requested relevant communications between the company and the RTA, as well as bidding records, a copy of the contract and records of any change orders. The agency did not provide the records by publication time.
‘They might lose some people’
Mary Buchanan, research manager at the Transit Center, a New York-based transit advocacy group, said it’s not uncommon for agencies to miss some details when implementing a new system, but poor or non-existent signage can alienate existing and potential bus riders.
“From the transit agency side, it’s a big undertaking, but from the riders’ side, it’s already a little confusing. It’s a new network, it’s a new service,” Buchanan said. “I’m sure the intention from the agency was to make service better for riders and hopefully to bring more riders into the system … but if they’re not providing that crucial orientation, then they might lose some people.”
In an interview Tuesday, May 14, Jackson, of Ride New Orleans, said the lack of signage – along with other issues with public transit – makes the system feel inequitable.
“It feels as if because this is an only option for a lot of people – and you reflect on who those people are, what they look like, their economic background, why they use it – it feels not great that they cannot get some of the basic things that [are] required of a transit agency, meaning signage,” Jackson said.
Ride recently conducted its own assessment of the more than 2,000 bus stops in New Orleans. Policy Director Sam Buckley said assessors found that hundreds of bus stop locations were located between 50 and 100 feet from where GPS applications like Google Maps or RTA’s own Le Pass indicated, adding to riders’ confusion.
“It’s really important to have good web data that’s like, ‘This is where the stop is,’” Buckley said. “But if you don’t have signs, and you don’t have accurate stop locations in Google Maps, it’s really difficult for riders to be able to find stops.”
The Ride team shared an email from a rider who could not find her bus stop.
“How do you tell if a stop that was a stop is still a stop or not?” she wrote. “I am unsure if the stop at Elysian and Gentilly in front of the gas station is still a stop? It has no sign but it has been a stop and the app says it is a stop.”
Buckley said Ride did not conduct bus signage inventory given that there are no new permanent signs for any of the bus stops in New Orleans. A report from Ride is forthcoming.
In a presentation to RTA board members on Thursday (May 9) Norton said staff tweaked the design of the signs to ensure they were more standardized, in anticipation of a new bid going out.
In March a new invitation for bids was issued calling for a two-phase printing process. In the first phase, the printer will produce semi-permanent vinyl decals that can be pasted over previous signs and installed by the agency’s road maintenance crew. In the second phase, the printer will produce permanent metal signs to be installed by a contracted installation team, Norton said.
In that Thursday meeting, RTA CEO Lona Hankins said staff are currently evaluating bids. Norton told Verite a contract could be awarded by this summer. He said once the contract is awarded and the vinyl decals are printed, it will take the road crew three to four months to install them.
That timeline means signs could be installed by late this year, when the RTA is expected to put 21 new hybrid electric-diesel buses on the road. In the meantime, RTA customers could be facing another brutally hot summer, standing at bus stops with no clear signage showing where they should wait for their buses, many of which are at the end of their lifespans. Almost half of the buses in the RTA’s active fleet were purchased between 2008 and 2012, and the average lifespan of a bus is 12 years.
Norton said he shares in bus riders’ frustrations with the system as it is currently operating, but that service and amenities are being improved or created. It just takes time for a public entity like the RTA to implement changes, he said.
“If you are able to pull back and look at the system, you can see the dedication and the commitment to providing not just a dignified rider experience, but an outstanding rider experience for every single person,” Norton said. “And it’s just, it’s a challenge to do it in a timeframe that people can feel when they’re out there day to day.
This article originally published in the May 20, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
