On today's episode of CATS will do ANYTHING but run good bus service in North Meck: Branded cookies.

Up here in North Meck, we've been the pilot program for Micro transit for a year now. For those who don't know, micro transit is a shared ride service using small vehicles instead of buses. You order it from an app and share a minivan with others in a door-to-door service. Its essentially a publicly subsided version of Uber Pool. It's a shit show. Microtransit replaced our buses completely last Summer after launching in February. Those buses ran only once per hour, 2 routes (3 bus numbers though) from 9am to 7pm. This lined up with nothing, not work schedules, school schedules, or even the commuter bus schedule. So, of course, almost no one rode it, because it met almost no one's needs. They tried nothing to fix it, and that didn't work, so now they're doing Micro. When micro launched, I got multiple mailed flyers, saw ads on sports bar TVs, and got numerous email blasts. Never got any of that for the buses, and in fact, whenever I talked to people about the buses up here, the most common reaction was "We have buses?" So how is this micro service a shit show? Let's look at my trip today as an example: I live near Gilead Rd and work near Catawba Ave. That's about a 12 minute drive. Naturally, to get to work at 2, I need to book my trip at 12. So at 12:05, I book my trip and am told I'll have a 22 minute wait until my pickup. Then, a few minutes later, my assigned driver changes, and my new pickup is estimated to be 20 minutes. Then, at 12 minutes, it stops counting down and sits there at 12 for about 8 minutes. I'm then finally picked up at 12:44. The driver then picks up another rider, then another, drops off that 3rd rider first, picks up another 3rd passenger, drops off the 2nd passenger, then drops off the 3rd pass