Sorry Bus Stops Round 1: Cincinnati vs. Ann Arbor
We’ve got more terrible bus stops coming your way today, as we kick off the second matchup in this year’s Sorry Bus Stops competition.
Sixteen finalists have been selected from a field of more than 50, and for the next few weeks, it’s going to be wall-to-wall sorry bus stops here at Streetsblog as we pair off two every day.
Voting is still open for yesterday’s matchup, which paired Houston and Nashville.
Meanwhile, today our contenders come from the Midwest, which can certainly hold its own when it comes to sorry public spaces. Which one of these bus stops is more deserving of shame? Vote below.
Cincinnati
This stop, on a highway embankment on the west side of Daly Road and Pinehollow Drive in Cincinnati, was submitted for national shame by an anonymous reader who writes:
There is no way to get to it, nowhere to stand unless you want to hop the barrier and stand in the grass. To top it off, the nearest streetlight is on the other side of the street and 130 ft away, so if you were to wait for the bus there at night it would be very unsafe.
This stop serves SORTA routes 15x and 16, she says.
Dreadful and unsafe waiting spaces for bus riders — just another cost of urban highways.
Ann Arbor
This stop, on Washtenaw Avenue in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is not far from Eastern Michigan University. It was submitted by an anonymous source, who noted that being forced to stand at a bus stop this sorry is indeed a very good way to sell cars (available across the street).
This is a state road, as you can see in the above image. Michigan DOT clearly had higher priorities than giving anyone outside a car a safe place to walk or stand. It is served by Ann Arbor’s transit system TheRide.
Cincinnati is over-performing. At least one could pop-a-squat on the guardrail once you get there.
Get where?
Note the lack of crosswalk for the stop on Washtenaw– new midblock crossings are part of the ReImagine Washtenaw plan, but MDOT doesn’t tend to respect local plans when re-doing state roads. Instead, they have removed existing crosswalks on this same corridor on the west side of town. Those old crosswalks weren’t up to modern ADA standards, you see, so they didn’t even count as crosswalks. Removing them makes it more dangerous for people walk to school, parks, stores, or the Salvation Army center. But an MDOT representative told me that if there isn’t a crosswalk there, no one can blame MDOT for any deaths that occur when people cross anyway.
The Cincinnati stop looks terrible, but take into account that the Ypsilanti stop is on the single most-traveled route The Ride serves– over 1.2 million rides a year between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor.
This is one of many sorry, sorry bus stops in Cincinnati. SORTA loves placing their signs on utility poles next to a road with no sidewalk. ADA compliance be damned!