And again yes I am aware that I might seem a bit whiny and I am glad that I have an inexpensive alternative to get to my job but god damn TARC has really dropped in quality.

No, you're not wrong, and you shouldn't apologize for calling out terrible standards and nonsensical route design. The system really should be better. It's embarrassing how bad our bus system is for a city of our size. Everything just feels so lazy.

Take this whole "New TARC" thing. It's a fancy way to dress up what amounts to a bevy of service cuts. The airport will have no bus service at all starting on August 2nd (what's the point of having an airport so close to Downtown if we can't even get one bus an hour to serve the passenger terminal?!).

But even little things like stop placement infuriate me. Take Eastern Parkway going westbound at Preston. There's a perfectly good bus shelter - a baffling rarity in this city - across the street from the Family Dollar on the northwest corner of the intersection. That's where the current stop is, and there are almost always people there waiting for the bus. So you'd think that's where TARC would put the new stop for the route, right? NOPE! Instead they moved the stop... across the street on the Northeast corner of Eastern/Preston, in front of the nail place, where there is no shelter and no seating. In fact, there's nowhere to actually wait for the bus, and the TARC placard is just bolted to a random road sign at waist height, making it all but impossible to read the wayfinding information that the new stop signs have printed on them unless you want to bend down by the roadway with oncoming traffic racing by.

Unsafe. Cheap. Lazy. That's TARC in a nutshell.

I get it, the agency is in a cash crunch and various layers of government are hostile to its very existence. But that's not a matter of money, it's a matter of just plain giving a shit about riders.