1. UTA Utah Transit Authority Kia Matthews

2. Introduction Utah Transit Authority is a provider of public transportation throughout the Wasatch Front of Utah, including the metropolitan areas of Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, Park City, and Tooele

3. How UTA is Connected to SLCC As for any college, transportation is always a key factor. Not everyone has their own car to drive to school everyday, or enough money for gas to be driving to school everyday. Many students depend on public transportation—such as UTA– to get to the places they need to be.

4. Issue Throughout learning and talking to peers about UTA, there was one common issue that kept popping up, the issue was that UTA isn’t on top of keeping to their scheduled times. As you can imagine, that’s a major deal for the thousands of people depending on UTA everyday to get to school, work, and other important places where being late isn’t acceptable.

5. Thesis I’ve asked several people ranging from regular public transportation users to once a year users and even looked at reviews wrote on UTA. Their were several different opinions and several different experiences. The most common thing I heard, definitely from the people who regularly use UTA (mainly the bus and trax), is that throughout the years the routes have been taking a lot longer and although they are all scheduled to be at their stops at specific times, they are all too often several minutes late.

6. What UTA Says On the UTA website there is a place where you can type in where you’re at and where you want to be and it will tell you how long it will take to get there and how to get there (where to transfer, where to catch the bus, how long you have to wait, etc) According to the website getting to the capital from the SLCC Miller campus at 5:30pm you will have to take 2 transfers, which is about a 5 minute wait in between, which will total about 53 minutes start to finish. From the capital to SLCC Miller campus it’s the same thing but instead one hour and nine minutes.

7. Reality While asking people their thoughts on UTA a girl in my class named Kayla was a regular user of UTA. I asked her how long it usually took her to get to work and she said, “ I catch the bus right by the Miller campus everyday which takes me to the trax and from there I go to the capital. I’ve been taking the trax for about 3 years…because my car was just taking up too much gas and it only seemed logical for me to take the trax. UTA has always been kind of unpredictable with their times, but I’ve noticed in the past year or so, a trip that used to only take me maybe an hour, turned into anywhere from 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours. Coming back is always the worst, the bus in particular is probably late 3 out of the 5 times I take it.”

8. Reviews 2/5 stars “I have been riding Frontrunner for about 3 weeks now (approximately 15 round trips). In that time they have been over 15 minutes late arriving to my destination in the morning no less than 4 times. Since there is no earlier train southbound from my departure point, I cannot give myself any time cushion. I don't understand how they can expect any regular commuters to be able to keep their jobs when they are late to work 4 times in 3 weeks.” -TH 1/5 stars “Whereas UTA express buses used to get me downtown in less than an hour, the same trip now takes 1.5-2 hours due to multiple connections, slowness of the train, and issues being on time. After trying to make this work for several weeks, I finally got tired of having the equivalent of a part-time job riding "Slowrunner" each day and found a carpool buddy. Now, I am back down to less than an hour commute each way. The shuttle buses connecting my city to Frontrunner (which used to be packed when they were express buses) now run almost empty each day. What a waste!” –David N.

9. Conclusion So as you can probably tell being on time and taking the amount of time UTA says it will take to get somewhere is an issue with the company. Because many people do depend on UTA to get them from place to place on an everyday basis, you would think scheduling and being on time would be UTA’s top priority. Obviously it’s not, and unfortunately it’s showing. Although there are several really good things about UTA, the fact that it’s not getting it’s user to the places they need to be in the time it says it will, is a huge problem they really need to work on. Lucky for them, they are the only source of public transportation in Salt Lake City, so they probably won’t run out of business, but their lack of effectiveness on correct time management will catch up to them sooner or later.

10. Work Cited Page http://www.rideuta.com/ http://gis.utah.gov/data/sgid-transportation/transit/ http://www.yelp.com/biz/utah-transit-authority-salt-lake-city http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Transit_Authority