valeka's Blog

     I attended the informal Hartline hearings to find out about the proposed changes for the 28X bus that travels from just outside Plant City to downtown Tampa.  What I learned was such a shock!  First of all, Hartline is not in Plant City.  If you've ever wondered why you can't catch a Hartline bus from Plant City to Tampa, it's because Plant City voted (before I became a rider) not to be included as a part of Hartline. 

     What this means is that Hartline has had to work around Plant City's insistance that they can provide their own services by getting close, but not INTO Plant City.  That type of short-sighted thinking boggles the mind!  How crowded do our roads have to be before the city fathers realize that we all have to work together to move people from one point to another?

    The proposed service is not perfect as one of the new locations doesn't have any type of shelter so it's going to be a very wet wait in rainy weather.  But given the restrictions on the bus service by people who seem to have forgotten that we lost out on an olympic bid because we don't have a good mass transit system, it's going to be okay.

     Oh, and if you have never visited the downtown Hartline transit center, you may want to stop in there and see just how crowded and busy it is during the week.  If you provide the busses, Hillsborough County, the riders will come.