Bus Blog Erie: August 2022

Monday, August 8, 2022

A city and county schedules from 2004.

A city and county schedule from 2004.

The city schedule had city routes in one schedule and the county schedule had all the county routes together.

You will notice that the city schedule used red ink. For a few years they would change the ink color when the schedule had changed, so that passengers would know to pick up a new one and discard the old. Schedules were mainly distributed through the racks behind the driver. Riders would see the change of color and know to pick up a new schedule.

EMTA Bus schedule from 1986

Here is an EMTA bus schedule from 1986.

Hope you can read it, I had a problem scanning the images.

Click on each image to enlarge.

For as far back as I can remember, EMTA had put all the city routes together in a foldable 20x24 thing. Then in 2005/2006, when they overhauled the routes, they gave each route a separate schedule, and took some of the route details off. The Executive Director at the time said this is how they do it in big cities, which he seemed to think was a good thing.

Anyway, regardless, this is how they were doing it in 1986, and I thought it was interesting.

A couple things worth noting.

The fares shown are in 1986 dollars obviously. According to a dollar converter I used, the 75 cents fare people were paying back then is equal to $2.03 on the day I compared it (8/8/2022). So if that's correct, it means the fare really hasn't actually gone up.

Also, it looks like there were more trips back then. But then, our population has gone down and we've lost some workplaces.

I noticed that an ad says "Compliments of Mellon Bank." So I guess they paid for the printing in exchange for the ad.

I made a point of captioning each one "SCHEDULE FROM 1986" just to avoid possible confusion.