Nice to see Gord Henderson's column in today's Star suggesting that the city might be putting some effort into improving Transit Windsor. God knows it could use the help -- the system we have today is so grossly inadequate that I still have a bad attitude about it, more than ten years after getting my own set of wheels. He even makes his own version of the same thing I've been saying for a while, that you can't be a grownup in Windsor and ride the bus.

What's wrong with Transit Windsor? Here's a short list:

- The system is ridiculously underfunded and doesn't have enough buses to provide reasonable coverage.

- Because there aren't enough buses rolling to provide shorter and more efficient routes, the routes that exist are extended to excessive lengths, contorted and convoluted to hit as many streets and neighbourhoods as possible. (Have you ever ridden the Central 3 end to end? You get to see a lot of the city, believe me.)

- Scheduling is a bad joke. Excessive wait times don't happen because buses run behind, but because they run ahead of schedule. Think about it: Suppose you live on a bus route that runs twice an hour, and it's scheduled to reach the stop nearest your home at twenty after. So you get there five minutes ahead of time, only to see your scheduled bus receding into the distance as you arrive, dooming you to at least a half-hour wait. This is particularly bad on Sundays when many of the routes that are operating only go once an hour.

Now, Windsor isn't likely to get a bus system comparable to Ottawa's, with its dedicated bus-only roads (TransitWays) and lavish funding, anytime soon. But how long do we have to limp along with the embarrassing system we have, that no one uses because it sucks, and sucks not because no one uses it but because the city thinks no one would use it if it were any good?