Monday morning I needed to get from my house to my car at Japtrix. In a car this journey takes about an hour but that’s a long way to bum a ride, and by now I must be wearing out my welcome with everyone I know that has been generous enough to give me a ride over the past few months, so I decided to brave South Florida’s mass transit.
Google took me to the South Florida Regional Transit Planner, which claims to be able to plan a route across the multitude of public transit systems serving the megaopolis of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. Unfortunately my route was too complex for it to calculate all at once, but I did figure out that it would take two Broward County busses to reach the closest Tri-Rail station, where I would catch a train and ride it to the northernmost end that Tri-Rail travels in Palm Beach County. From there I could catch one of two busses that would put me within a half-mile walk of Japtrix, but I decided that a cab ride would be more convenient.
My journey took about 3:15 from the time that the first bus picked me up to when the taxi dropped me off, and excluding the cab fare it still cost about as much as the gas that a “30MPG highway” car would have consumed driving there. I’m not sure how that compares to what a similar trip would cost on mass transit in other areas but I think it is pretty pathetic and I’m not surprised that there weren’t very many other passengers on any leg of my trip.
The trip planner says I could get from home to work in 2:30 with two Broward busses, Tri-Rail, and one Miami-Dade bus, assuming that none were more than about 2 minutes late getting me to the connections. Think I’ll be sticking with the car, thank you very much…
