Starting today, August 3rd 2020, FAX Route 28 has been modified to no longer server Fresno State. Instead the line will now continue along Dakota and end at Peach Avenue. And no, the website has not been updated to reflect this.
This change to Route 28 was proposed earlier this year, along with changes to many other bus lines. However, the other proposed changes won’t happen until 2021. Unfortunately, this is a big loss to those taking the bus to Fresno State. While Route 9 will continue to serve Shaw Avenue, there will simply be half as many buses going to the campus.
The schedule itself is mostly the same. IE, the southbound buses hit the MTC at x:10, x:30, and x:50. However, the overall route is shorter, so the buses will start their trip 9 minutes later. To that end, I don’t understand why they couldn’t have made the route longer to use the same amount of time, such as going up Peach to Ashlan. The schedule can be found in the big booklet, which has a nice new cover photo featuring one of the new bus stops.
Why the move? It was important to quickly provide FAX service to this new location because of this:
County of Fresno to centralize its Department of Social Services to centralize its operations. Currently, the County of Fresno DSS operates in 26 different buildings at five different locations throughout the county. The new plan to operate out of this location will see 2,300 staff members work in the business park throughout the day.
Clovis Roundup
The County of Fresno DSS is expecting to service 1,500 clients per day at the new centralized location.
So yeah, getting transit there ASAP is critical. But also, maybe they should have built all this somewhere that already had transit? Somewhere like….the mostly empty 2-story Manchester Mall, adjacent to the Manchester Transit Center?
Speaking of….
ROUTES 28, 41, 45: Regular bus service for these three routes will return to MTC on Monday, August 3rd. Note: The MTC customer service building on Blackstone will not reopen at this time. Please continue to visit the temporary FAX MTC office inside the Manchester Mall.
FAX
That’s right folks, the saga of the Manchester Transit Center is finally over. It’s open. Let the record show that it took the City of Fresno from January 9, 2017 until August 3, 2020, to redo a bus stop. I’m pretty sure in that time China built an entirely new subway system somewhere.
The Maple Avenue Class IV bike lane (Shaw to Gettysburg) is on the council agenda for approval on Thursday Aug 2o.
The project also includes changes to the Shaw/Maple traffic light to add a pedestrian scramble phase.
http://fresno.legistar.com/ViewReport.ashx?M=R&N=Master&GID=392&ID=4614762&GUID=894F96C5-0E5C-48F9-A06E-7DB4AFA3DA95&Extra=WithText&Title=Legislation+Details+(With+Text)
Thank you for covering this. The 28 from Shaw and Cedar was the bus I used for just about everything because there are so many destinations along its route (Fresno State, Fashion Fair, Manchester, Fresno High, FCC, Tower, Downtown, and the Westside) so the change has been a pretty big inconvenience. I also noticed that a ton of Fresno City students would use this bus to get to all the apartments on Shaw and in the El Dorado Park neighborhood—maybe even more than Fresno State students. I think FAX caught a break in a sense by in-person courses being cancelled, but I suspect they’ll hear more complaints when students return and discover that their bus is gone.
A while ago FAX held a drawing to award some gift cards to people who submitted survey responses, and they wrote little profiles in their newsletter about the people who won. One of the winners mentioned that one of her regular buses is the 28 to get to Fashion Fair. It’s telling that even a rider picked at random is going to be negatively affected by the route change. I trust that FAX has better ridership data than my anecdotes about always seeing full buses, but it sure feels like they underestimated just popular the 28 North of Dakota was.
I agree, when students come back, there will be a lot of “WTF HAPPENED” going on
Can we see some photos of the new Manchester hub??
I have some photos here, it was finished years ago, so it looks the same
https://stopandmove.com/2020/02/its-taken-fresno-over-3-years-to-rebuild-a-bus-stop.html/
Sorry for the unrelated comment but I just wanted to note that I was able to confirm today that the City of Fresno’s traffic engineering division now officially opposes marked crosswalks as a policy position, citing a desire to increase pedestrian uneasiness: https://iframe.publicstuff.com/#?client_id=806&request_id=9319357
Maybe that’s old news: it’s certainly long felt like our streets were being designed to make people uneasy about using them outside of a car. I’ve just never heard them admit it before.
No mention of the safety virtues of driver uneasiness, naturally.