I ordered a couple of day passes in order to use the bus to get to Clearwater Beach. I had found out it would be around an hour ride around the time I had written that first aforementioned post. But after I got everything set up in it’s little row and just needed to confirm time and places to be in order to catch the bus to and from the Beach?

The origin has no stops within the distance we consider. Please contact the information center.

It’s not a browser thing, it’s not a technical thing… It’s a failure of public service thing.

UPDATE: it woudl appear Route 63 — the Neilsen bus route that I was going to take as a first step to the beach, has been canceled. Though I can’t find official word that it has been.

Perfect weather and perfect to go out and do stuff in, right?

So I got the urge to get out and about the Bay area during this past week and – just to humor myself, I checked PSTA‘s web site in order to see if there was a bus route I coudl take to get elsewhere in the Tampa Bay metro area. And herein lies the mockery of mass transit options in Tampa Bay or poor use of tools that have been newly employed on local web sites.

So earlier in the week I wanted to go across county lines to downtown Tampa and meet up with a friend to hang out. Cynically, I already knew the chances of me finding anything were slim to none (means to get into the other county) or impossibly out-of-my-way… But I decided to humor myself and just go to the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority’s website and see what I could find…

What jumped out right away on PSTA.net (besides horrid flash animation that serves absolutely no purpose, and stupid cartoon characters that seem to marginalize and mock riders and workers alike without really realizing it) was the list of 100x-300x buses. These three buses are all express buses between counties to serve the commuter set. I knew this before hand but I figured I would check out there schedules. Serendipity maybe and just hit paydirt without even trying and such…?

Yeah, right.

The 200x line is closest to where I live in North Pinellas – following that way-out-of-my-way motif of leaving from a softball field area at Drew Street and McMullen Booth intersection called the Eddie C. Moore Complex. I know the place and have passed it many times before while bumming rides off other people…

The Moore complex itself would amount to being a 15 to 20 minute bus trip… If I could find the damn thing in the PSTA trip planner to begin with. yup, the new automation that PSTA has implemented to make it easier to follow schedules and take advantage of them doesn’t even recognize the Eddie C. Moore complex park-and-ride.

That was a moot point anyway. Even if I could make it to said park-and-ride lot, the 200x route boasts a total of just five round trips all day — three in the early morning, two in the afternoon.

I realize it’s for commuters specifically but good god damn, this is a joke.

There is no other cross-bay option that I am aware of via public transit. While you can get to the Hillsborough County Line via Route 93 on PSTA, HART (Hillsborough Area Regional transit) doesn’t make it very clear where there map starts and ends.

So in that regard, anyone wanting to cross the county line is in a bind unless they drive on their own – which i don’t.

So that faded out of my memory and instead, while relaxing today I thought it would be cool to take the bus to Clearwater Beach — hey! it’s in county and shouldn’t take much extra time and effort to get there… So lets try the ole’ route map and give it a whirl huh…?

I flubbed around with that most of the afternoon and I found out that “Clearwater Beach” is not listed as a landmark. “Pier 60″ is not listed as a landmark. I kept trying combinations to find a route to Clearwater beach and kept being told that you couldn’t find that there is no bus.

Of course, that’s not the truth. the problem is the route map just doesn’t accurately define things.

I went back to the rout map tonight and found some interesting things — for example both Pinellas and Hillsborough county addresses and intersections are placed within the route finder. Of course you can’t get there from here but that’s already been touched on. What was also discovered is that every single PSTA bus stop is marked off on the map with a little widget. you just ahve to zoom in close enough to see things.

After discovering that, trying to plan my trip was a snap — just drag the map over to the exact location you want to venture to and presto… It’ll take an hour and 13 minutes to get from my neck of the woods to Clearwater Beach. That ain’t so bad. The reverse trip ain’t so bad either. Just less than an hour (barrign traffic incidents in both directions).

Just thinking about this sorta peeves me. It’s such a minor detail, usability. I don’t know if people at PSTA are truly aware that they are using jargon in trip planning in some instances — no one is looking for Stop #201 Mandalay Blvd. They’re looking for Clearwater Beach.

Of course there is also the problem of commute time that makes PSTA a hassle more than a help… 2 and a half hours or more from Palm Harbor to St. Petersburg, 3 hours from St. Petersburg to Tampa International Airport, etc.

Something’s gotta be done about this mess — because the impossiblity of getting there form here is why the roads are congested and people shun the bus.

At any rate, I vented about Ferry travel the other day — not just on der Stonegauge but through Bayciti.net’s comments — and suffice it to say I think that he idea is sound. And I expect no one in government to even think about the idea.

….so Im taking the idea to government.

I’ve printed out copies of a letter to the Clearwater City Council and the Mayor just to send out feelers over the idea of Ferry transit between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach. I plan on ammending the letter and then printing out copies and sending it along to HARTLine, PSTA, The Hillsborough and Pinellas MPO’s, and other government officials…. ALl because I’m tired of having ideas and having them sitting in my head or in a blog….

To be continued.

I started thinking about the ferry idea after focusing on the Memorial Causeway Bridge snafu on Tuesday — the fact Clearwater Beach has no ferry service between the mainland and the beach, which only promotes more driving and does not give an alternative when the Bridge goes out (as it has from time to time for a very long time)

I started thinking how Clearwater is not only wasting it’s great asset — the water — but it’s also not providing an alternative to those trying to get to the beach. You either have to cross the bridge by foot or by car. That creates a big problem when the Memorial used to get stuck in place — messing with the traffic pattern of all of downtown. Yes the new bridge wille alleviate that problem, but that’s still not solving the problem of only one means of getting to Clearwater beach.

And then I thought about the traffic pattern to the rest of the Bay area and that we depend on the bridges to get everywhere between counties, and that there is no real great bus systems on either side of the bay (HARTline sucks, PSTA sucks — all with thanks to the Bay area’s suburban layout).

What do you have to do to get Ferry Service in Tampa Bay? Forget just between the mainland and Beach destinations — how about between Pinellas and Downtown Tampa? How many people could actually RELAX on their commute instead of having to get stressed out because of traffic?

Rail is still something I am very keen on but Ferry service should be simple and easy…. Something not too tough to promote, and an asset to the community.

I paid $160 bucks or close to it for 2 pieces of a WiFi Network — A Router and a Network Adapter — from Linksys. Not bad seeing I could have paid much much more but still a ton of cash at the time.

So I set up the router and then I go down to my father’s computer — mind you this is a few months ago — and I hook up the Network adapter and…

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkus. Didley Squat. Etc. (thank you Juliane Moore, your Slang Dictionary reading character Electra inspires my alternative words for nothing)

The thing wouldn’t connect to the Internet / the Wi Fi Network. The signal strength could be anywhere from 60-100 percent and nothing was going on. It frustrated the hell out of me to try, try, try, try and have every possible re-configuration amount to shit. Nothing worked. In fact, sometimes when it seemed like it was working – the computer would lock up and you would have to reboot.

I disconnected the router, disconnected the network adapter and wrapped them up and filed them away for a month or two… Which leads me to yesterday and today.

Yesterday my father is talking about going to Verizon DSL service. Now, my father isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer to go along with his other things that piss me off. He talks about Verizon offering a deal to connect ALL of your computers to DSL Internet access for “one low monthly fee” — his exact words, I swear….

I go to Verizon’s site and no where do they offer to hook each individual computer up to DSL Internet Access for one low fee. They offer Fee access the first month, 29.95 for the next two months and 34.99 each following month.

Per – Computer – Connection.

I tell my father this and he doesn’t believe me – he believes the radio ad he heard in his car. I get pissed off and prove him wrong, and show him that not only does Verizon want to get you to use their Internet access but to wire your computers all to the Internet, you have to invest in their own home networking offer as well as the DSL connection.

Ronnie got pissy at this and I got pissed off as well.

So today with my ample spare time I vow to solve this bullshit of the anti-networking WiFi network. I hook up the router again and configure it. I then hook up the network adapter to his computer. Nothing. I am running upstairs and downstairs for 2 hours trying to get this thing to work. Nada…

And then? What happens? I decide to change one frigging’ setting — installing one extra thing that Linksys’ software didn’t automatically install.

POOF — I connect to the Internet on my fathers computer, using my own broadband connection upstairs..

So my Sunday has been eventful. My weekend has been eventful for that matter. I’ll post further about this soon enough but for right now — i will just :woot and end this story

(Side positive note – at least it’s not a problem I am facing that is coming down on the rest of my family…. For a change :tongue )

No, this problem is affecting Andy directly. My younger brother who lives on his own with his girlfriend and her two kids. And even with this problem, it’s not Andy himself who is inflicted with the problem – he’s just the one who has to carry part of the blunt weight of this problem on his shoulders.

You see, Andy’s girlfriend’s son, Austin, has a bit of a problem right now… Something inside isn’t right and I don’t mean some type of disease like I have – but emotionally and possibly mentally not right. He has always pissed me off a bit for not understanding me and the fact I can’t understand him, he’s always come off a little hyper as well and I figured like “that”, you know?

But, and I am not fully aware of what is going on so believe me when I say this can be very inaccurate… Austin is having “rages” of sorts. He’s four years old and, instead of temper tantrums, he is going into fits of kicking, screaming, biting, clawing and such and then when it’s over he has no memory of what happened. Someone suggested the kid might be bi-polar at four-years-old?

And I experienced some of his oddities last time he was over here that sorta pissed me off at the time. He woke me up as I was taking a nap — staring at me and just making me notice him… He also went into hiding in my brother’s empty bedroom… Hiding behind the door. I noticed he was there and I started asking him why he was there. No response. No, he just started shutting the door and I wanted to know what was up. The kids (Austin and his sister, Elizabeth) aren’t supposed to be upstairs when they aren’t with someone… I asked, he pushed the door closed. I pushed back and he pushed harder. Now, the only problem with this is I am the gimpy one right now — still rehabbing and such…

I ended up getting pissed off and just shouting, “Fine kid! Fine!” I was already upset with how I had been “treated” that night and wanted no part of finding out what was going on with Austin….

But now I feel real bad if he is really… unstable? Not just for Austin himself (being one that knows the troubles of growing up afflicted) but for Andy and his GF. It’s a load of weight for him to carry on his shoulders at 23 and I certainly wou8ldn’t want to be in that situation…

I pray that he can get through it and come out on top.