Gameday Slideshow

Hey guys,

Here’s a late post…

 

This is my first video project for online media 315 post.  The day of intramural soccer championship at downtown ASU.  A voice over version will be up soon.

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Transportation: Brought to you by the Solar System

 

Welcome back to my carless adventures.  This week, with a little help from a friend of mine, I made an excellent discovery in the universe of public transportation.  I found myself needing to take a trip to Mill Avenue which is just off of campus.  I live just off of campus myself, on the opposite side.  I weighed my options on getting to Mill:

1. Walk: Mill isn’t necessarily out of reasonable walking distance from my apartment, but with the weather warming up this time of year I had to decide against it.
2. Bike: Biking is a strong possibility, it would maybe be a 20 minute ride or so.
3. Lightrail: There are lightrail stops right by my apartment and right on Mill as well.

As strong of a dislike I have for the lightrail, it seemed like an easy decision given my lazy mindset.  As I complained about the lightrail experience ahead of me, a friend of mine politely told me that I was being an idiot and that I needed to take the Orbit bus.

I wasn’t completely unaware of the Orbit bus’ existence.  I have seen them driving around Tempe before, I’ve just never taken them anywhere or really knew where they came and went from.  I decided to look into these buses and educate myself about them.  Here’s some of the info I found out:

 

• Orbit buses are free to ride.  Their purpose in essentially to serve residential areas by connecting them to all sorts of places (campus, shopping centers etc.)
• The thing that sets Orbit apart from normal city run buses is the route system they use.  They are broken into 5 different bus routes: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter.  Each route connects downtown Tempe to different places in the surrounding areas.
• Orbit will pick you up on any residential street.  You simply need to wave the bus down and they will pull over and pick you up.  If you need to be dropped off somewhere other than a designated drop zone, there is a wire by the windows you pull to signal to the driver to pull over.

 

It turns out that one of the Orbit bus routes drives right past my apartment building.  My trip to Mill suddenly became easy as stepping out the front door.  Overall, Orbit seems to be a solid bus system.  Very convenient especially for college students and buses don’t tend to be overly dirty like some other systems around…..lightrail.

I’m sure I’ll be planning to take the Orbit more often now. If you’re interested in riding check out the website below for hours of operation, maps, and schedules.  If you’ve taken the Orbit before, it may be useful to check the maps out anyway as they apparently changed up some routes recently.

 

Orbit Website

 

Enjoy

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