Monday, February 19, 2007

hooray for the link!

AATA's beloved, purple, younger sibling to regular bus service, the Link, is catching on with downtown residents and visitors. AATA announces that the Link set record-high ridership in January, as well as breaking the single-day record in December.

The freeze-bomb that dropped on the city in the middle of January certainly helped boost ridership, but the trend seems to be sticking as February shows four days of +1,900 ridership. The Link is finally getting the love it deserves. Considering that it is free, frequent, and easy to spot, one wonders how it took so long for Ann Arbor to catch on.

According to Chris White at AATA,

"The Link provided five times as many rides last month as it did in January, 2004, the first year of operation. These figures are quite impressive, since the service was fine tuned more than a year ago and now runs fewer hours, but carries many more riders."
Hopefully, a continuing increase in ridership will encourage AATA to expand Link service into the evenings.

1 comment:

Edward Vielmetti said...

I'm starting to master the A to D ride on the link - if you sprint from D (Federal Building) you can transfer to Blake to your favorite route. That's saved me a couple of times. I wonder if they'd call in a transfer and hold the bus?