Some of the action immediately following Red White & Boom 2009:
Broad & High - Downtown, Columbus
Related Posts:
- Water X-ing
- Riding a Scooter in Columbus just got Easier
- Jazz and Rib Fest 2009 - Location TBD
- Columbuser.com Has Returned
- Bloggers denied entrance to media paradise
Looks busy, kind of like Chicago every weekday at 5:00 PM.
I’d be interested to hear if people had any positive or negative COTA experiences. RW&B seems like the one day a year that people who normally don’t ride transit will try out COTA. If the experience goes well, is it enough to get people to try it again for non-special events?
Heh. Yeah, I doubt that the central business district in Chicago (the “Loop” right?) is too awfully busy on a Friday night at 11pm.
Broad & High is fairly busy on weekdays at 5pm as everyone scrambles to get home. I think if we make it harder to get out of downtown we’ll be able to trap everyone there. 
As for COTA, we had a fine time with it. Caught a 16 from our house to Fourth & Spring (which wouldn’t normally be a long walk, but we didn’t feel like carrying the kiddo the whole way) for dinner, walked around the rest of the time, and then caught a #16 back home at 10:45pm. There were a bunch of kids on the bus headed all the way out to Easton with it, so they were a little annoying to ride with as they were loud silly teenagers, but otherwise it was alright on our bus.
Still… I imagine anyone who rode it last night probably thought that it was too crowded and still pretty slow (at least navigating through the traffic out of the core of Downtown). Of course, it’s not always like that, but I don’t know if it was enough to leave anyone with a desire to start riding again. But who knows.
I once took COTA to RW&B. I rode an express from the Crosswoods that took the freeway, which was great. But on the way home, they didn’t have that route available, so I was stuck on a #2 ALL THE WAY up High Street. That took about an hour instead of the 15-20 minutes it took on the way down, so that was a little frustrating. I’m not sure if that system has changed or not.
I’ve taken the #2 to the fireworks from campus as well, which was fine except that it’s hard to board a bus because they’re so crowded.